Smart Pension invests GBP 330 million in Octopus Energy clean-tech funds
UK workplace pension provider Smart Pension has announced an initial GBP 330 million ($440 million) strategic investment in Octopus Energy Generation. The renewables arm of Octopus Energy invests in solar, wind and energy storage projects, as well as clean energy technologies such as heat pumps.
Global electricity demand to rise in 2026 as renewables lead, says IEA
Global electricity demand is set to rise more than 3% per year through 2026, driven by growth in Asia and greater use across industry, data centers, and transport, with renewables, gas, and nuclear meeting most of the increase, says the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Bhutan commissions first utility-scale solar plant
The Sephu solar project currently has a capacity of 17.38 MW following completion of phase one of project works. Another 5 MW is expected to come online later this year.
Peak Energy launches first US grid-scale sodium-ion storage system
Peak Energy’s passively cooled sodium-ion system, part of a shared pilot with utilities and independent power producers (IPPs), targets a 20% lifetime cost drop and a 33% cut in degradation over 20 years.
Big Solar Co-op raises over GBP 1 million for UK coal mine project
Solar bond offered through impact investing platform provides community energy cooperative with funds to construct 3.5 MW project in Whiteborough, England. Big Solar Co-op plans to use European manufactured and second-life panels. The co-op expects to commission the project before the end of 2025.
A better understanding of UV degradation
Performance loss from ultraviolet (UV) light has become a concern for new PV cells, though earlier lab tests may have overstated the issue. Paul Gebhardt, photovoltaic module reliability scientist at Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE), outlines a mechanism that may have distorted earlier results.
Latvia switches on 94 MW of solar
Ignitis Renewables has started commercial operations at the 94 MW Vārme solar farm in western Latvia. The project is one of the country’s largest PV installations to date.
PV module fault diagnosis uses convolutional neural network
Researchers in China have created a dataset of various PV faults and normalized it to accommodate different array sizes and typologies. After testing the new approach in combination with the 1D-CNN machine learning technique under different conditions, they found an accuracy of more than 99%.
Power Roll tests perovskite solar panels outdoors
Power Roll, a UK developer of perovskite solar technology, has begun outdoor testing of its 600 mm x 400 mm flexible modules.
Cooling PV inverters with skived fin heat sink
Researchers in Turkey tested a novel heat sink design to cool insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) arrays in solar inverters. They found that it reduced module temperatures by more than 6 C in lab experiments.
