Eastern Europe

Albanian utility KESH has built a 5.1 MW ground-mounted solar park at its hydropower plant in Vau i Dejës. The company will operate the PV facility in combination with hydropower production.

Polish utility PGE Energia Odnawialna has secured permits to build 200 MW of solar capacity in its home market. It soon plans to start building a 100 MW solar park in southeastern Poland’s Subcarpathia province.

The two projects are both located in eastern North Macedonia and are expected to require an overall investment of €116 million.

The 5.5%-efficient cell was fabricated through a low-temperature, two-step manufacturing process that is compatible with existing window glass manufacturing technology. Cells made with 70nm antimony trisulfide films achieved the best fill factor of around 57%, while the highest power conversion efficiencies were achieved with films ranging from 70 to 100nm.

Photon Energy has deployed its first merchant PV project in Hungary. The company said the €1 million plant may be the first in a series selling power to the spot market. In an interview with pv magazine, Hungarian renewable energy specialist, Ferenc Kis, stated that these projects may become more frequent in the future, due to new coordinated grid connection capacity allocation.

The Czech authorities have extended, to February, the deadline to submit PV projects of up to 1 MW for the rebate scheme for small sized, ground mounted photovoltaics. According to Jan Krčmář, chairman of the Czech Solar Association, the lower than expected interest in the program may also be down to higher PV component prices.

With a new system for floating photovoltaic power plants, engineers from Germany want to make the application cheaper, higher-yielding, and safer. The result is somewhat reminiscent of a pufferfish, which also gave the system its name.

The solar array will cover around 30% of the electricity needs of a Leroy Merlin hypermarket in Volzhsky, in Russia’s Volgograd region.

The solar-powered electronic shelf labels are intended for use in retail stores. Users are enabled to change prices centrally and synchronously across all retail stores within a chain.

The Eastern European country is expected to reach 10 GW of solar capacity by the end of 2022, according to the Polish research institute Instytut Energetyki Odnawialnej. This projected growth should materialize despite a strong contraction in the distributed generation segment.