Germany

The Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security (Jogmec) and Germany’s H2Global Foundation have agreed to cooperate on clean hydrogen, while officials from Japan and South Africa met this week to discuss hydrogen collaboration opportunities.

German manufacturer Viessmann says its new heat pumps have a coefficient of performance (COP) of up to 4.57 and a seasonal coefficient of performance (SCOP) of up to 4.4. The pumps have a heating output ranging from 32 kW to 128 kW, and a cooling capacity of 34 kW to 139 kW.

Tripling clean energy generation capacity to 11 TW by 2030 was a leading pledge from the United Nations’ (UN) climate change conference in Dubai. With few details about infrastructure and energy storage and no clear PV targets, however, it is hard to judge the effectiveness of the 28th global Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting. Angela Skujins considers possible impacts for the solar industry.

The US Department of Energy (DoE) has announced plans to invest $20 million in 16 projects across eight states to accelerate the exploration of geologic hydrogen.

A Dutch-German research team has built an interdigitated back contact PV device with a new patterning approach based on the enhanced oxidation rates under the local laser-doped n++ BSF regions. The cell achieved an open-circuit voltage of 656.6 mV, a short-circuit current density of 40.38 A/mAcm2, and a fill factor of 77.39%.

Several containers with fake glass-glass module are said to be in circulation in Europe. Germany’s Bauer Solar has taken legal action against the counterfeiters, who are suspected to be based in China. It said the fake panels can be identified by the packaging and a lack of wooden reinforcements for the pallets.

A new study by ManpowerGroup and Cepsa suggests that green hydrogen and biofuels could create more than 1.7 million new green jobs in Europe by 2040, while Airbus, Vattenfall and other partners have agreed to assess the feasibility of hydrogen infrastructure at airports in Sweden and Norway.

Germany’s latest auction for utility-scale solar concluded with prices ranging from €0.0444 ($0.048)/kWh to €0.0547/kWh. The procurement exercise was significantly oversubscribed.

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE) announced today that it had produced at 421 W perovskite-silicon tandem glass-glass module measures 1.68 m2. The module was assembled by Frauhofer ISE using perovskite-tandem cells from UK-based manufacturer Oxford PV. The researchers used commercially available PV production equipment to fabricate the panel.

Baker Hughes has revealed plans for hydrogen projects in Europe and North America, on top of new announcements from Masdar, Air Liquide and TotalEnergies.