Europe

An international team of scientists fabricated perovskite solar cells which retained almost all of their initial 21% efficiency after 1,000 hours under continuous operation at their maximum power point. The researchers credit this performance to their discovery of an additive that served to ‘block’ ions that cause device degradation, and also hope their work will contribute to an improved understanding of the relationship between efficiency and stability in perovskite PV.

Swedish energy company Vattenfall is planning to build a 150 MW electric boiler near Amsterdam under the Netherlands’ SDE+ program for large scale renewables. The facility is planned to operate when a lot of electricity from wind and sun is available and to supply hot water to households in the city and its surrounding areas.

Private sector fossil fuel spending on exploration is drying up just as modest rises in clean energy investments are being observed. With stock market investors increasingly embracing renewables, the IEA has observed positive signals in its latest energy investment report, but warned we are still doing far too little to keep global heating at bay.

Rijkswaterstaat – the water management agency of the Netherlands – has revealed that developers are working on four large-scale PV projects along the A7 highway. They are being built under the Regional Energy Strategy Noord-Holland Noord program.

The 500 kW floating array was built with floating membranes supplied by Norwegian specialist Ocean Sun. The project is expected to continue its second implementation phase during the second half of 2021, when three more 500 kW floating units will be installed.

The proposed technique is based on radiative cooling and consists of a glass coating made with a two-dimensional subwavelength nanostructured grating, which is imprinted in soda-lime glass and has enhanced mid-infrared emissivity, and a micro-structured grating. The temperature decrease provided by the nano-micro-grating coating was found to be approximately up to 5.8 degrees Celsius.

The RES+ program will be open to installations of up to 1 MW and also solar power projects exceeding 1 MW in size. Selected developers may secure a rebate covering up to 50% of a project’s cost.

About three-quarters of German solar installers offered residential storage systems last year, according to EUPD Research. Such products have become cheaper, but many people are still discouraged by the high price of storage.

France’s Solar Cloth has announced that Renault Trucks has listed it as a supplier for its factories.

Construction on the facility is expected to be finalized in April 2022. The electricity generated by the plant will be bought by Swedish polymer-based products provider Nolato Group.