Estonia

The EU’s third cross-border solar tender is offering a share of €54.9 million ($63.8 million) to solar-plus-storage projects in selected Bulgarian districts and ground-mounted solar projects in Finland, with funding provided by Luxembourg. The deadline for applications is September 1.

Estonia’s cumulative solar capacity reached around 1,430 MW by the end of last year. Year-on-year installations slowed as the country’s solar market begins to saturate, with future growth expected to be driven by supplementing solar parks with batteries.

Estonia has delivered its largest heat storage facility, begun construction on its largest solar-plus-storage hybrid project, and is preparing to break ground on an 800 MWh battery park in Valga County, set to become the largest in the Baltics.

The 100 MW/200 MWh battery energy storage project in Kiisa began operation on Feb. 3 as scheduled – just two weeks after a testing fault at the facility caused the most significant disturbance to the regional power grid since Estonia’s desynchronization from the Russian electricity system.

During testing at Estonia’s 100 MW Kiisa battery park, both EstLink 1 and EstLink 2 tripped, triggering the most severe disturbance to the regional power grid since desynchronization from the Russian electricity system. As a result, nearly 1 GW of capacity was lost within seconds. The park’s owner has since publicly pointed to the battery manufacturer.

The EU Innovation Fund has awarded €2.9 billion ($3.4 billion) to 61 projects, including eight advancing hydrogen technologies across aviation, shipping, and heavy transport.

Institute of Science Tokyo researchers proposed a battery with magnesium hydride (MgH2) as the anode and hydrogen (H2) gas as the cathode. Meanwhile, researchers at Chung-Ang University proposed chloride-resistant ruthenium (Ru)-based nanocatalysts for direct electrolysis and hydrogen production from seawater.

The Estonian home and commercial storage systems come in low- and high-voltage models. The high-voltage option can scale to ten modules, for 100.8 kWh, and a six-module, low-voltage version to 45 kWh.

Eesti Energia and Emsys VPP have prequalified the 75 MW Sopi solar park to deliver 30 MW to the Baltic region’s automatic frequency market and 45 MW to its manual frequency market.

Sungrow Hydrogen has started production at China’s largest dual-tech green hydrogen project combining PEM and alkaline electrolyzers, while HNO International has partnered with Zhuhai Topower to pilot its modular hydrogen platform in China.