Europe

The EU has been pouring money into European battery manufacturing and recycling projects but has, as yet, been unable to address the critical question of raw materials, according to analyst WoodMac.

Italian manufacturer Solarday has launched a glass-glass building-integrated monocrystalline PERC panel available in red, green, gold and grey color. Its power conversion efficiency is 17.98% and its temperature coefficient is -0.39% per degree Celsius.

The 52 kW containerized solution is being developed by German start-up Solarbakery. The bakery’s production process was adapted in such a way that the majority of electricity consumption is already incurred during the day and is only baked briefly in the dark before dawn.

The German clean power company and Huhtamaki have signed a 10-year deal that will ensure the construction of two solar farms in southern Spain with an aggregate generation capacity of around 135 MWp.

In the Belgian macro-region of Flanders, residential PV system owners that decided to install smart meters and abandon net metering are currently seeing their injection tariffs being paid at €0.11, up from just €0.03 in January. This gain adds to the high value of the kilowatt-hours they self-consume and it is helping them halve the payback time of their installations.

The 25MW/48MWh battery will be the country’s largest energy storage system to date. The project is touted as the first large-scale battery project based on lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry in Europe.

Swedish business Evolar is working on a bolt-on piece of production equipment which would upgrade the cell lines of conventional manufacturers with a perovskite lift in performance.

Developed by German researchers, the 20.9%-efficient device was built with an architecture avoiding the use of the ionic dopants or metal oxide nanoparticles that are commonly used to contact the cell, as these can be subject to secondary reactions at higher temperatures.

Advances in solar power and other clean energy technologies have failed to keep up with demand for electricity as economies rebound from the Covid crisis and China and India’s fossil fuel appetite will ensure the world stays well short of what is needed for a net zero 2050 for at least the next three years.

Albanian utility KESH has built a 5.1 MW ground-mounted solar park at its hydropower plant in Vau i Dejës. The company will operate the PV facility in combination with hydropower production.