Europe

The Austrian government had devoted €50 million to the scheme for last year. These funds will enable the deployment of 15,957 PV systems.

Italian start-up Italvolt wants to build a €4 billion EV battery manufacturing facility in Italy. The site for the project is currently being identified, and the factory’s initial capacity should reach 45 GWh.

According to Spain’s renewable energy association, APPA Renovables, of the solar capacity deployed last year, 623 MW was for distributed generation PV and 2,633 MW came from utility scale solar plants.

A British-Chinese research group has created a new framework to assess the performance and efficiency limits of photovoltaic-thermal solar panels. They say that the improvement of spectral-splitting (SS) filters in the devices will be the key to their future commercial success.

The European Union agency responsible for providing finance to small and medium-sized businesses will have 64% more funds to disperse after the EIB, European Commission and its other shareholders voted to raise its share capitalization.

MiaSolé and Solliance have achieved record performance by optimizing the bandgap and the efficiency of both the rigid semi-transparent perovskite top cell and the flexible CIGS bottom cell.

A total of 30 major companies from across Europe are laying the foundations to create HyDeal Ambition, a value chain promising to provide 100% green hydrogen for €1.5/kg by 2030, matching the current price of fossil-fuel produced ‘grey’ hydrogen.

UK-based company Power Roll has picked up £5.8 million in investment over the past six months and plans to begin pilot production this year. The company has developed a unique flexible thin-film technology, which promises to combine both solar generation and storage.

Spanish companies Repsol and Ibil have launched the first charging station for electric vehicles with energy storage. The system reuses batteries from electric buses.

Abengoa Innovación has completed the construction of the pilot plant for the Grasshopper project, which is in the commissioning and start-up phase in Seville. The plant will be then transferred to its final location – the Netherlands.