Solar-plus-food in ethanol fields could fully power the United States
The conversion of the 40 million acres of ethanol corn farms in the United States into solar-plus-food facilities could generate 1.5 times the nation’s electricity needs, while also powering a 100% electrified passenger vehicle fleet.
Solar desalination via floating PV in Spain
The Agua+S project under development in the Spanish region of Andalucia is aimed at combining a desalination plant, a pumping station network, and an onshore, floating photovoltaic plant in a single project design. According to its developers this is the first time that these three facilities have been combined together in a fully reproducible design that could be replicated in any river basin that has a reservoir and is close to the coast, to produce fresh water for both irrigation and human consumption.
France’s tender for utility scale solar concludes with final average price of $0.06499/kWh
The procurement exercise’s final average price is 7% higher than that of the previous tender of the same kind. Around 704.9MW of PV capacity was allocated by the French authorities.
Sonnedix acquires Polish solar developer Sun Power Energy
The Polish company has a PV project pipeline of over 1GW.
Huawei, Meinergy plan 1GW/500MWh solar-storage project in Ghana
Huawei and Meinergy plan to build a facility that could end up being Africa’s largest solar-plus-storage project. Huawei will supply its storage tech for the installation.
KKR may acquire Albioma
The US private equity giant is interested in the French renewable energy producer as part of its expansion strategy in the renewable energy sector.
Fully autonomous robot for solar O&M
OnSight Technology has developed a tele-operated vehicle to clean solar arrays. It is equipped with a radiometric thermal imaging camera and an optical zoom camera backed by artificial intelligence. It has a range of 12 hours and a speed of 1.6 km per hour.
Thermally integrated PV-electrolyzer with 9.1% solar-to-hydrogen efficiency
A Swedish research group has developed a device combining CIGS thin-film solar modules and an alkaline electrolyzer based on a trimetallic cathodic catalyst made of nickel, molybdenum, and vanadium (NiMoV) and an anode made of nickel oxide (NiO). The electrolyzer achieved an average solar-to-hydrogen (STH) efficiency of 8.5% for stable operations during 100 hours.
Japan allocates 268.7MW in eleventh solar auction, lowest bid comes in at $0.078/kWh
The procurement exercise was open to PV projects exceeding 250kW in size and had a ceiling price of ¥10.25/kWh ($0.089).
Canadian Solar claims to be king of Italian solar
The Chinese-Canadian company has secured the signature of Swiss energy business Axpo as offtaker for around 109GWh of solar electricity over a decade, with the clean power to be produced at Canadian Solar projects in Lazio and Sicily.
