Eastern Europe

Matt Harper, chief commercial officer of newly-merged British-Canadian vanadium redox flow battery business Invinity Energy Systems has spoken to pv magazine about the VS3-022 Battery Unit it is marketing for grid scale solar-plus-storage projects and why it may be a better bet than lithium-ion.

As a focus of research at leading institutes the world over, new developments in the perovskite field come thick and fast almost every week. From x-ray observations on a nanoscale to financing and plans for mass production, pv magazine is bringing together some of the most exciting developments of recent weeks.

The Polish solar industry is reportedly planning an offensive to claim a bigger slice of the domestic PV market. The idea was apparently floated by the head of a private renewable energy body.

Over the past few months, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented global economic and social crisis all over the globe. Ukraine is no exception. The pandemic has significantly affected all aspects of life, including the country’s domestic energy sector.

Russian researchers have improved the efficiency of a thin-fim GaAs‐based solar cell by 0.9% by applying single‐walled carbon nanotubes as the topmost layer. The cell also showed a slight increase in the short circuit current density, from 16.9 to 17.9 mA/cm2.

Hungarian tech company Platio has developed solar pavement for outdoor applications in urban environments, homes, office buildings, shopping malls, and public infrastructure projects. The pavement consists of solar tiles that may cost between €50 and €80, depending on the size and characteristics of projects.

Despite Covid-19 hampering development, construction and financing Polish energy giant Tauron will start constructing a 5 MW solar project on a former coal-fired power station site.

Solar project owners responded to an appeal to donate a portion of their solar incentive payments to the public health authorities as another multinational body emphasized the importance of coronavirus fiscal stimulus packages having environmentally-friendly conditions attached.

An ESA-backed hackathon raised the idea of turning end-of-life PV modules into hand sanitizers. The team that won the hackathon is now working to rapidly roll out the solution at scale to contain the Covid-19 spread.

The losers in a world which no longer runs on fossil fuels are obvious but the dividend from shrugging off hydrocarbon dependency will be spread around most of the world so it is the nations which are winning the cleantech manufacturing and intellectual property race which appear best positioned for the future.