Italy

Lhyfe has revealed plans to jointly develop offshore renewable green hydrogen with Centrica in the United Kingdom. Separately, the Paris-listed hydrogen producer said it has also acquired a stake in Finland’s Flexens.

Solitek has revealed plans to build a new manufacturing facility in Benevento, Italy.

The European Commission says it will set up the new European Hydrogen Bank by the end of this year, with additional plans to hand out 10-year contracts in a new hydrogen auction. Linde Engineering, meanwhile, is teaming up with several other companies to test solid oxide electrolyzer cells (SOEC) and ammonia cracking technology.

CEA-INES researchers and Enel have developed a new solar cell with an active area of 9 cm² and an open-circuit voltage above 1,880 mV. Their results improve on the 25.8% efficiency they achieved for the same kind of cell in December 2022.

Italy-based Rhoss has developed a cascaded air-source heat pump that uses propane (R290) as the refrigerant. It can produce between 47.4 kW and 190.5 kW of heat and domestic hot water to a temperature of up to 75 C.

Italy hit 959 MW/1,826 MWh of distributed storage capacity at the end of 2022. The segment continues to grow in the country, led by the regions of Lombardy and Veneto.

FuturaSun, an Italian solar panel manufacturer, has acquired land for its new 2 GW solar module plant in an industrial area near Padua, Italy.

SolarPower Europe says in a new report that households in Germany, Spain, and Italy can more than triple their savings by pairing PV with heat pumps. It said this combination helped families to save between 62% and 84% on their annual energy bills in 2022.

Italy’s FuturaSun has developed new bifacial double-glass PV modules based on n-type heterojunction (HJT) half-cut multi-busbar solar cells. The Velvet Pro line features M6 cells with power ratings ranging from 380 W to 480 W for rooftop applications. The Velvet Premium line features M12 cells, with power ratings from 615 W to 700 W for large-scale applications.

Italy deployed 2.48 GW of new PV systems in 2022, with the residential solar segment accounting for almost 50% of the total installed capacity.