Germany

The European Investment Bank has agreed to provide €400 million ($406.5 million) in funds for the €2.8 billion project. Construction on the infrastructure should begin by the end of this year.

High temperatures can affect different components of PV systems. Inverters can fail, the efficiency of solar modules can decline, and existing cell damage can become worse. However, investors, planners, and operators can adjust to heat waves in a number of different ways.

Germany’s RWE is partnering with offshore PV specialist SolarDuck to build a 0.5 MW floating solar plant near an offshore wind farm in the North Sea.

TubeSolar and the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg have achieved a power conversion efficiency of 14% for a photovoltaic film based on perovskite.

The stadium of German football club SC Freiburg hosts a 2.4 MW rooftop solar array relying on heterojunction modules provided by Swiss manufacturer Meyer Burger.

Estimating the total cost of energy storage connected to a rooftop PV installation is a complex affair, involving factors such as tax, the policy environment, system lifetimes, and even the weather. As part of its extensive overview of distributed energy storage in Germany, pv magazine Germany analyzed the efficiency of different battery energy storage systems to create a comparable index that illustrates the cost of a stored kilowatt-hour.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) developed a two-phase hydrogen production technology that is capable of using steam to produce hydrogen from biomass. Furthermore, an Indian-Norwegian consortium is developing green ammonia in Oman, Toshiba is starting research on hydrogen production from geothermal energy, and Thyssengas is selecting personnel for the conversion of around 20% of its gas network.

Scientists in Germany looked to eliminate the use of toxic solvents in the production of perovskite solar cells, replacing them with a more environmentally material called dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) which has so far proved difficult to integrate into processes suitable for large-scale production. The group demonstrated a scalable blade coating process using DMSO as the only solvent, and reached cell efficiencies close to those achieved using more toxic substances.

GlobalData has predicted that the global electrolyzer market will hit 8.52 GW by 2026. BP and Thyssenkrupp have agreed to cooperate on the use of hydrogen in the steel sector, while electrolyzer supplier Nel Hydrogen has secured orders in Australia and Denmark.

German researchers have looked at how vertical PV systems could provide more electricity during periods of higher demand, while enabling a higher level of integration with agricultural activities.