Germany

Aurora Energy Research says it has recorded a sharp increase in green hydrogen projects, with 90% of them in early phases of development, while E.ON says that Germany’s hydrogen ramp-up is stuck due to an investment backlog.

The German parliament has approved “Solarpaket 1,” a policy package that includes higher feed-in tariffs for commercial and industrial (C&I) solar projects and new measures related to the size of eligible installations in large-scale solar auctions.

German and Swedish researchers calculated the supply of materials to produce perovskite tandem PV at a multi-terawatt-scale, flagging the difficult supply of gold, indium and cesium, well as a need to streamline production of certain materials used for hole-transport layers. “In essence, we might be able to go post-fossil fuels, but we can’t go post-minerals,” the research’s corresponding author, Lukas Wagner, told pv magazine.

The new products are intended for applications in commercial and industrial PV projects. The devices feature an efficiency rating of up to 98.1% and a European efficiency of up to 97.8%.

Denmark will procure at least 6 GW of offshore wind power capacity to potentially produce hydrogen, while Orlen says it will use a European Commission grant to build 16 hydrogen refueling stations in Poland.

Germany-based Sinn Power plans to build a 1.8 MW floating PV system with vertically deployed solar modules. Construction is expected to start this summer.

German researchers are studying using an overhead solar PV system, designed to be removable and reusable, as a sunshade for young fir trees. The pilot, located at a quartz sand excavation site, will be monitored to compare growth and water consumption with an adjacent unshaded tree plot.

Greece has grand plans for an interconnector network that runs from the Middle East through to the heart of Europe. pv magazine examines the latest developments on the road to a Mediterranean super grid and what it might mean for the regions involved.

Linde says its White Martins unit will build a second electrolyzer to produce green hydrogen in Brazil, while Sunfire has launched a front-end engineering and design study (FEED) for a new 500 MW hydrogen project.

UV Energy has developed a PV system that can be used in parking lots and on other surfaces. It claims that the arrays can be deployed within time frames of three to six weeks.