Europe

Solitek has revealed plans to build a new manufacturing facility in Benevento, Italy.

Midsummer and researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), say that their new tandem PV cell is suitable for the company’s Duo production equipment, which makes 56 mm x 156 mm CIGS cells on a flexible stainless steel substrate.

Iberdrola is using a springer spaniel in a solar park to smell electrical problems that could lead to power cuts. It is also using a robotic dog to detect and analyze faults in substations.

The search for ever higher conversion efficiency has driven solar researchers to focus on back-contact cell approaches, and efforts to devise more cost-effective manufacturing are bringing technologies such as interdigitated back contact (IBC) solar into the mainstream, as Mark Hutchins reports.

The European Commission says it will set up the new European Hydrogen Bank by the end of this year, with additional plans to hand out 10-year contracts in a new hydrogen auction. Linde Engineering, meanwhile, is teaming up with several other companies to test solid oxide electrolyzer cells (SOEC) and ammonia cracking technology.

Energy Systems Catapult has released interim data from air-source heat pump field monitoring in the United Kingdom between November 2020 and August 2022. Figures show that heat pumps are three times more efficient than gas boilers and that their median coefficient of performance (COP) on cold days is 2.44, compared to 2.80 year round.

After 800 Sungrow batteries were impacted by an outage, the Chinese manufacturer informed its local German partners about the solution to the problem. However, it remains unclear how quickly the affected battery management systems can be replaced.

Finnish technology company Intelligent Control Systems has conceived a light redirecting film that purportedly reduces energy losses in the edge area of heterojunction solar cells. It claims the film may increase the power conversion efficiency of a heterojunction module by up to 0.75%.

Germany’s AEG is selling two versions of its new high-voltage residential batteries, with nominal capacities of 10 kWh and 15 kWh. They come with a 10-year warranty and reportedly have a lifecycle of more than 6,000 cycles.