Spain

Originally intended to allocate 1.8 GW of solar power and 1.5 GW of wind power, the Spanish auction concluded with only 45 MW of assigned wind capacity, with the war in Ukraine blamed.

Intergia will install a floating PV system for self-consumption in the slurry pond of a pig farm in Spain. The project is aimed at studying both an expected reduction of ammonia emissions, and the long-term degradation of the PV components in the environment.

Poland has started operating one of its first floating PV arrays on an artificial reservoir. The project features 110 bifacial modules floating on a platform supplied by Spain’s Isigenere.

An irrigation community has built a 786 kW floating solar array on a small water reservoir in Murcia, Spain. The facility will provide power for a solar water pumping system, a desalination unit, and the community itself.

PV Hardware (PVH), a solar tracker and mounting systems manufacturer, has opened a new factory in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It is expected to produce 8 GW of trackers and solar structures per year, mainly for projects in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

An international research group has developed new technology to measure soiling losses in PV installations, by using a simple pocket light. They said the new system offers similar performance to their reference devices.

Germany’s BayWa r.e. and Denmark’s Velux have announced the first agrivoltaic corporate power purchase agreement (PPA) in Europe. BayWa will build two solar parks in Spain to power Velux’s operations, with capacities of 60 MWp and 56 MWp. One of them will partly be an agricultural PV project.

India is the top market for solar investment, according to the latest edition of Ernst & Young’s renewables attractiveness index. Spain, Germany and the United States are the top three markets for corporate power purchase agreements (PPAs).

The SisAl Pilot project produces solar-grade silicon from Spanish quartz without using coal and with zero CO2 emissions. The company behind the project claims that the process is cheaper and more sustainable.

A new EU-funded project aims to show how heat pump technologies could supply various industrial processes with heat in the 90 C to 160 C temperature range. It also looks at how heat can be extracted from renewable sources like solar thermal, as well as ambient heat and industrial waste heat.