Finland

The latest edition of the accountant’s renewables attractiveness index has placed the nation in top spot for photovoltaics, helping it to fourth spot for overall clean energy investment. Mexico has been hammered by the government’s attitude to clean power and France has also slipped, four places.

A U.S.-Finnish research team has developed an after-market method to adapt commercially available flexible thin-film solar panels for applications in floating PV projects. The special panel design can be applied to three types of floating materials, including neoprene, mincell, and polyethylene.

A number of partners are involved in a project which aims to bring down the energy consumption and carbon emissions of a beer company site using smart algorithms.

Often dependent on fuel imports from the mainland and frequently powered by fossil fuels, islands have taken center stage at an online forum which builds on a political process kicked-off by Croatia’s presidency of the European Council.

A report by Finnish company Wärtsilä has estimated the potential impact if every dollar committed to a non-renewables energy sector recovery was instead funneled to clean power.

Analysts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance have quantified the influence of markets around the world. The ranking supplies a snapshot of 25 countries and also offers a five-year outlook.

Researchers have sounded the alarm. If no serious efforts are made on second-life battery use, recycling and vehicle-to-grid applications, decarbonization efforts may hit the buffers a lot sooner than expected.

A study from the Lappeenranta University of Technology states a deeper complementarity between solar and wind generation may favor renewables deployment reducing the need for stronger developments in storage technology. Combining solar with wind more widely could also reduce the need for ramping and improve the reliability of energy supply, say the researchers.

Inverter manufacturer Fimer provided its PVS980-58 central inverter solution for the project, which will derive 35% of its energy from solar PV.

Finnish company ICS has developed a foil which it claims can significantly increase the yield of solar panels, when applied to the edges of a PV module. Germany’s Fraunhofer ISE has confirmed that the increase in performance for conventional solar modules with the solar film is ranging from 5% to 10%.