Europe

Rystad Energy says China appears set to smash its national hydrogen targets, solidifying its lead in the global electrolyzer market, while European Union and Japan have agreed to cooperate on hydrogen research.

FutureVoltaics says it has developed pre-assembled, reflector-based vertical rooftop PV systems. The systems feature 175 W heterojunction bifacial solar modules and special reflectors on both sides.

Mondragon Assembly says it is supplying Greece’s first manufacturing line for agrivoltaics. The production line has a capacity of 150 MW, with plans to upgrade to 300 MW, and is tailored for semi-transparent solar modules.

This week, Women in Solar Europe (WiSEu) gives voice to Giorgia Epicoco, Senior EU Affairs Manager | Sustainability Lead at Huawei. She believes that the renewable energy sector is now poised to welcome a growing number of talented female professionals in technical, sales, marketing, operations, logistics, and public affairs roles. “However, reaching top-level positions isn’t feasible for everyone, and this is where skills development becomes crucial,” she warned.

New testing conducted at France’s oldest PV system have shown that its solar modules can still provide performance values in line with what the manufacturers promised.

Swedish developer Alight plans to build a 90 MW solar park in southwestern Finland. The company says the announcement is a big step toward developing 1.5 GW of PV projects in the country by the end of this year.

The result was confirmed by Germany’s Institute for Solar Energy Research Hamelin (ISFH). The cell also achieved an open-circuit voltage of 709.5 mV, a short circuit density of 11,355 mA, and a fill factor of 82.04%.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, reports that, thanks to warm temperatures and relatively sunny skies, Finland and Sweden had irradiance up to 30%, which unusually resulted in higher total irradiance than the more southerly UK and France. On the other side of the Baltic Sea, Poland, the Baltic States, and neighbouring countries also experienced irradiance up to 30% above the long-term average.

Austrian researchers performed tests on thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO) encapsulant as an alternative to conventional ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) copolymer and polyolefin elastomers (POE) to assess its use in glass-glass modules. They report that all of the TPO specimens outperformed EVA and POE, especially TPO-3.5 encasulants.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) has created a solar atlas to identify rooftop PV potential in Germany. This new open-access online platform uses aerial photographs and geodata processed with machine-learning methods to determine solar energy potential for the country’s entire building stock of around 20 million units.