Europe

Shell, with a portfolio of more than 1 GW in Spain, will team up with Green Tie Capital, which has developed more than 3 GW of ground-mounted PV projects.

Developers in Greece will bid to secure annual payments for large-scale storage facilities that must be operational before 2026.

At the beginning of June 2021, during a meeting with Spanish businesspeople organized by the Portuguese-Spanish Chamber of Commerce, the Portuguese Prime Minster António Costa urged his neighbors to work on jointly exploiting the potential of plentiful lithium reserves found on the Iberian Peninsula. As Luis Ini reports from Madrid, his words reflect an increasingly evident reality: the need to achieve autonomy in the field of energy, especially in energy storage.

BMW Group said it is targeting the premium segment with its iX5 Hydrogen car, Topsoe revealed that it will invest $267 million to build the world’s largest SOEC electrolyzer plant in Denmark, and Bosch announced plans to invest $200 million in US fuel cell production.

Construction of the 100 MW Sputnik solar plant in Russia’s Volgograd oblast has been suspended and possibly canceled, due to Western sanctions imposed in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to sources.  

Portugal’s cumulative PV capacity hit 2.19 GW in June, outpacing the growth of other energy sources.

Hungary’s latest renewables auction involved just 12 successful projects, with contracts for around 864 GWh of power.

Axpo said its new 2.2 MW system is the largest alpine solar plant in Switzerland. It is expected to supply around 3.3 million kWh of electricity per year, with an above-average electricity yield in the winter months.

Scientists compared hydrogen storage techniques and found that physical methods are closer to commercial feasibility, while materials-based techniques have strong potential.

Scientists in Germany have improved the efficiency of an industrial TOPCon solar cell from 23.8% to 24.1% by using laser-enhanced contact optimization as a post-firing treatment.