Finland

The solar park will occupy 500ha of abandoned peatland in southern Finland. The project’s levelized cost of energy is estimated at less than €0.04/kWh.

A call for grant proposals has been promised this month, with the bloc’s executive yesterday firing the gun on a separate exercise related to cross-border EU energy infrastructure projects.

Plus, as the European Commission prepares to present its ‘Fit for 55’ climate change package tomorrow, European companies are continuing to develop hydrogen plans, including Shell in Norway and Siemens in Germany.

Although self-consumption of solar power is the optimal economic approach, the expense of household batteries at present outweighs the increased ability they offer to use electricity generated on the roof. Whether aggregated ‘virtual batteries’ offer better returns is an open question, due to lack of electricity company transparency.

According to a new study from LUT University, domestic water heating costs may be reduced by combining rooftop PV with geothermal heat pumps. Scientists developed a control method to minimize these costs by taking advantage of cheap spot market electricity and maximized PV power generation, as well as considering heat demand, PV generation forecasts, and heat pump efficiency.

A Chinese-Finnish research team has identified composite membranes as the best future option for non-aqueous redox flow batteries.

Scientists investigating the aging mechanisms affecting today’s lithium-ion batteries observed that the loss of lithium over time is one of the main causes of performance loss. With this in mind, they developed and tested a “relithiation” process that promises to eliminate much of the cost and complexity from recycling battery components and materials.

Two recent studies have separately shown that many scenarios assessing global decarbonization pathways are still predicting too-low future PV capacity and too-high LCOEs for the solar technology. The researchers analyzed scenarios provided by scientific researchers, government bodies and non-governmental organizations, including the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the European Commission, the Indian government, the International Energy Agency (IEA), and the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), among others.

Finnish scientists have developed a four-junction solar cell based on III-V semiconductor materials that is said to be able to achieve a wide spectral coverage. The cell was monolithically grown on gallium arsenide by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE).

Companies from a dozen EU member states will commit the public funds in a bid to come up with novel battery chemistries and production methods as well as recycling and circular economy innovation.