Netherlands

Household heat pumps, EV chargers and rooftop solar panels will be able to earn their owners benefits in return for helping to balance grid networks struggling to accommodate new solar and wind power generation.

Swedish energy company Vattenfall is planning to build a 150 MW electric boiler near Amsterdam under the Netherlands’ SDE+ program for large scale renewables. The facility is planned to operate when a lot of electricity from wind and sun is available and to supply hot water to households in the city and its surrounding areas.

Rijkswaterstaat – the water management agency of the Netherlands – has revealed that developers are working on four large-scale PV projects along the A7 highway. They are being built under the Regional Energy Strategy Noord-Holland Noord program.

Pieces of solar panels were found in an area of ​​several kilometers around the warehouse. The local municipality has urged farmers to prevent livestock from eating the fragments. An expert on fires in PV arrays, however, told pv magazine that these fragments are not dangerous for the animals.

The plant is being built by Dutch developer Groenleven on a former sand extraction lake in the northern Netherlands. The company’s project manager for floating PV, Willem Biesheuvel, told pv magazine about its approach to deploying floating arrays always with a west-east orientation, which he claims ensures more stability and resistance to wind and waves.

Baywa re and Dutch researchers have evaluated the first positive effects of floating PV on the flora and fauna in water. They have also ascertained that the erosion of a lake’s banks has decreased.

Grid congestion issues are increasing in the Netherlands and several Dutch farmers claim to have remained without access to the grid despite having completed their rooftop arrays.

Dutch researchers have studied how solar parks can be blended into the landscape across 11 “frontrunner” sites in Europe. They considered visual impact, land availability, and end-of-life issues.

In a recent pv magazine webinar, module degradation experts took our audience through the role of temperature and mechanical stress in causing modules to under-perform. We were treated to a look at some impressive results for modules integrated with Coolback – a solution that replaces the backsheet/rear glass and frame in a conventional panel and promises lower operating temperatures and better mechanical strength. Here, Simon Meijer and Alex Masolin, from Coolback – along with Fraunhofer ISE’s Andreas Beinert – answer some of the questions we didn’t have time for during the live broadcast.

Dutch floating structure specialist Solarduck has built a pilot 65 kW floating PV array that will be connected to a 10 kW electrolyzer to produce hydrogen bonded with a liquid organic hydrogen carrier. The system is relying on the company’s proprietary floating technology that resembles an offshore oil platform.