Technology

A government ministry reportedly announced 16 operational solar plants with a total capacity of 780 MW have been connected, along with three more projects that are expected to bring another 150 MW of capacity online this month.

The back-contact solar cell is said to have a conversion efficiency of around 7%. According to researchers, the cell design includes the removal of expensive transparent conductive oxides.

The Chinese monocrystalline panel maker said its 72-cell bifacial product has reached an ouput of more than 450 W on the front side. The result was confirmed by Germany’s TÜV-SÜD.

Though PV will remain in the shadow of wind and hydropower in the north of Europe, an ambitious solar deployment scenario in Sweden could lift the market into the gigawatt club through to 2040.

Karnataka state has been forced to apply the brakes to new solar with its power distribution companies having fulfilled their renewable purchase obligations for the next two years. Projects driven by federal agencies will continue, however.

Analyst Globaldata says falling system prices, and the need for more resilient grids and favorable policies, continue to fire the energy storage industry around the globe and the Asia-Pacific region is likely to remain the biggest market.

The energy transition does not only change electricity generation, but ideally also how we consume. Electricity markets in Europe, however, must deal with legacy regulations that fail to incentivize ideal consumption patterns to reduce curtailment and make the best possible use of the renewable energy assets we have. The result is towering bills for ancillary services, that could easily be avoided with a few regulatory tweaks and virtual power plants.

A reduction in solar park charges was not enough to attract developers in the same numbers that flocked to a separate, 500 MW exercise two months earlier. The Raghanesda Solar Park continues to be a headache after a previous procurement was cancelled because the tariffs were deemed too costly.

The power line, under development by Italian transmission company Terna and Tunisian gas and electricity group STEG since 2003, was originally conceived to export power generated in Tunisia to Italy but is now based on an electricity exchange in the opposite direction.

In the latest of a series of interviews about the geopolitics of renewable energy, Indra Overland, head of the Center for Energy Research at the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, explains how storage could change the global energy landscape by eliminating entrenched strategic dependencies. The impact of storage, he says, will be stronger in regions dependent on fossil fuels.