Germany

Analysis by energy advisory service Montel finds Germany, France and the Netherlands all saw record levels of renewables curtailment last year, with the build out of solar in each market contributing to midday generation peaks and consequential price cannibalization.

Repsol and Sunfire are advancing 200 MW of renewable hydrogen projects in Spain, while new collaborations and funding across Europe and India aim to accelerate electrolyzer development and hydrogen infrastructure.

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE) is developing the world’s first medium-voltage PV plants in Germany to cut material use, reduce costs, and simplify grid integration. They will test 1,500 V and 3 kV string configurations to create cost-effective, voltage-resistant components for large-scale solar.

Germany has launched a market-based mechanism for procuring instantaneous reserve, allowing inverter-based assets and battery energy storage systems (BESS) to participate for the first time, creating new revenue opportunities while raising questions over long-term profitability and regulatory risk.

The European Commission is advancing market matching for renewable and low-carbon hydrogen by inviting European offtakers to signal supply interest under the Hydrogen Mechanism, while Germany’s electrolysis rollout continues to lag official targets despite new EU-backed funding schemes.

Ikea is expanding its energy offerings in Germany with a dynamic electricity tariff in partnership with Svea Solar, changing every 15 minutes based on day-ahead market prices and available even to customers without its PV systems, storage solutions, or heat pumps.

With silver prices rising, more large solar manufacturers are expected to switch to copper for cell metallization. Radovan Kopecek of ISC Konstanz tells pv magazine that he expects the entire industry to follow. Ning Song of the University of New South Wales says a small efficiency tradeoff may be acceptable if the cost savings are significant and do not introduce new reliability risks.

Researchers from KAUST, TU Delft, and LMU Munich have improved the performance of monolithic perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells by modifying the physical structure at the front of the bottom heterojunction solar cell.

Rising silver prices are pushing PV manufacturers toward copper-based metallization, with DK Electronic Materials targeting 2026 for large-scale deployment of high-copper paste solutions, while Fraunhofer ISE warns efficiency trade-offs remain unacceptable.

A research group from the European Commission Joint Research Centre has developed a new PV climatic classification, the first to address annual yield and performance ratio. Their work resulted in 10 globally applicable clusters. “It challenges the assumption that many more classes are needed to capture PV-relevant climate,” the researchers said.