Technology and R&D

German project developer Svevind Energy and Kazakh Invest wants to build a 45 GW green hydrogen complex in Kazakhstan. Norwegian companies Equinor, Aker Group and Saga Pure announced separate plans to further develop their green hydrogen solution.

France’s Revolt Energy Green has developed a flexible solar+storage solution for one-off events, construction sites, and different kinds of off-grid applications. It has also developed a mobile hydrogen solution.

The device has a maximum power output of 6 kW and a storage capacity of 8.2 kWh. The product comes with IP65 protection and its operation is guaranteed for 10,000 cycles.

A floating PV array coupled to flow batteries is planned to power the operations of a new road under construction to connect two highways in the Netherlands. The project is aimed, in particular, at powering ventilation, lighting, and other installations of a tunnel.

The German research institute said the gallium arsenide cell has achieved the highest efficiency to date for the conversion of light into electricity.

Underwater gravity energy storage has been proposed as an ideal solution for weekly energy storage, by an international group of scientists. The novel technology is considered an alternative to pumped-hydro storage for coasts and islands without mountains that are located close to deep waters, and may also be interesting for PV if used to store green hydrogen.

U.S. thin-film manufacturer First Solar and Bill Gates-owned Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) are among the investors in the new company, which is called CubicPV and is expected to develop multi-junction perovskite solar cells with efficiencies of around 30%.

According to a new study from a German-Swedish research group, conventional incentives such as renewable portfolio standards, feed-in tariffs or feed-in premium payments may likely lead to a price cannibalisation scenario for wind and solar. CO2 pricing, instead, is considered an efficient tool to maintain their market value high enough to ensure new investments. However, a total system cost approach, rather than an LCOE perspective, is needed to understand the strong dependence of market value on policy choice.

Moreover, Landsvirkjun, the National Power Company of Iceland, and the Port of Rotterdam have completed a pre-feasability study about exporting green hydrogen from Iceland to Rotterdam and the Swedish Energy Agency has allocated €30 million to Project Air, an industrial concept to produce methanol from a large variety of recovered end-of-life streams and hydrogen from electrolysis.

Scientists in Switzerland demonstrated a new type of nanoscale doping for perovskite solar cells. By both improving stability and reducing the chance of the cells leaking any toxic lead into the environment, the discovery addresses two of the largest remaining challenges to the development of the promising class of cell materials.