Sustainability

The European Investment Bank and Greece this week signed a first-of-its-kind agreement to jointly manage €5 billion of investment concerned with the EU member state’s post-Covid recovery plan. The strategy has a key focus on green energy.

More than 7% of the U.K.’s solar generation capacity is now unsubsidized, according to trade body Solar Energy UK, with the nation reaching more than 14 GW of photovoltaic projects during the first three months of the year.

Instead of splurging €11 billion of EU cash on uneconomic new generation capacity, the Italian authorities–and electricity bill payers–would be better served investing in a mix of current clean power technologies which would include almost 17 GW more solar capacity.

West Africa hogged more than twice as much investment as the east in a year which saw stock market backing plunge an ‘alarming’ 46%, leaving donor grant funding and debt to pick up the slack during a Covid-hit year, according to off-grid industry body GOGLA.

Private sector businesses will be offered concessional loans to install solar and other climate change related equipment.

Rising volumes of photovoltaic project capacity are increasing the incidence of negative price periods for electricity–and changing the times of day when they occur.

With Cape Town-based solar crowdfunder The Sun Exchange having generated $1.4 million for a 510 kW solar-plus-storage facility for Zimbabwean food company Nhimbe Fresh, pv magazine has spoken to the heads of both businesses–Sun Exchange CEO and founder Abraham Cambridge and Nhimbe executive chairman Edwin Moyo–about the fundraising exercise. First up is The Sun Exchange founder…

Lithium-ion battery products will be sold by the group’s storage and autoglass business to its solar glass operation–for use in solar project development–and its float glass manufacturing unit.

Something is brewing in the financial world. “Sustainable finance” and the growth of ESG funds have been taking the market by storm in recent years. Since most major PV projects end up needing investors from the capital market, it is only a matter of time before they will have to adapt. The beginning of March 2021 saw a milestone reached in this process.

The latest set of clean energy statistics compiled by the International Renewable Energy Agency signal a changing of the guard when it comes to clean power, with legacy hydropower facilities overtaken by new intermittent renewables.