Europe

Green hydrogen production capacity continued to grow last year, driven largely by new investments, GlobalData says in a newly published report. Deutsche Bahn, meanwhile, has revealed plans to expand its hydrogen bus fleet in Germany.

Australian grid operator Transgrid has partnered with German machinery manufacturer Zeck for the use of its innovative steel separation tech. Zeck’s machine can process electricity transmission lines into a recycle-ready state onsite. Previously, Transgrid sent old transmission lines offshore for this process at a much higher cost.

The isolation of Portugal’s electrical grid is hindering the growth of renewables, according to GlobalData’s latest report. Storage will play a pivotal role if the country hopes to achieve its solar and renewable installation goals, it says.

Solar module prices continued to fall in January, and there is no end in sight. The main drivers impacting prices are lower shipping rates from China and the further recovery of the euro-US dollar exchange rate. Martin Schachinger, of pvXchange, expects other effects, such as slowly falling energy costs or polysilicon and wafer prices – which are in freefall – to further strengthen the trend in the coming months.

Croatia’s Viktor Lenac Shipyard aims to replace electric boilers and a water-to-water heat pump with a seawater heat pump, in order to provide heat and cooling for buildings. The pilot project is backed by EU funding and has launched a tender to support the construction of the seawater heat pump.

Scientists in Belgium have designed a solar-powered electrolyzer that uses standard-sized, large area shingled silicon PV for water splitting. The system is reportedly able to achieve solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of 10% at electrolyzer current densities of approximately 60 mA cm−2.

A new three-year pilot project will assess the efficiency of vehicle-integrated PV and verify it with on-the-road monitoring and testing. The goal is to predict the charging infrastructure needed for electric vehicles with PV modules.

Aggreko, a UK-based mobile power and cooling solutions supplier, has released a new line of 30 kVA and 60 kVA battery storage modules. The fully integrated systems are developed for commercial and industrial energy storage applications.

Nina Hojnik, the director of the Slovenian Photovoltaic Association, speaks to pv magazine about new provisions for large-scale solar in Slovenia. She discusses several regulatory obstacles to developing agrivoltaics, as well as plans to phase out net metering for rooftop PV.

The United Kingdom hit 14.3 GW of cumulative solar capacity by the end of last year, according to provisional government data. New solar capacity grew by 4% year on year, with the rooftop PV market accounting for most of the new installations.