Texas

Offering solar savings to apartment dwellers, and particularly renters, is not a simple task – as low take-up in Germany has demonstrated. Mel Bergsneider, from Australian startup Allume Energy, explains how a product offered by her company could change all that.

The world would have been a different place today had John Goodenough accepted the Shah of Iran’s $7 million offer, in 1974, to carry out solar research. Instead, he secured a job as the head of inorganic chemistry at the University of Oxford. During his tenure, he made a lithium-ion battery discovery that would affect the lives of almost everyone.

Representing an investment of $250 million, the facility is expected to bring 1,500 jobs.

Under a new bill, existing projects could be retroactively removed if new permit requirements are not made. New solar and wind farms would need to win the approval of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, while undergoing yearly fees, tight siting requirements and more.

Promising to replace fossil fuel jobs with an identical number of clean energy roles in coal-dependent communities is overly simplistic and ignores the fact that communities need to be brought onside with credible expectations of better-quality employment.

A lot has changed in tracker technology in the past decade, so in upgrading its Alamo plants, OCI Solar Power completely replaced the old tracker with a new state-of-the-art system, all while keeping the plant energized.

When it comes to gravity batteries, pumped-hydro storage is the gold standard, but its cost and topography-specific limitations are driving innovations ranging from freight-train braking to super-dense liquids. We consider whether any of the new technologies can punch above their weight.

The European Commission has presented the final version of its new rules for green hydrogen, with looser requirements to qualify hydrogen as “green.”

South Korean researchers have reported higher performance with a newly proposed BM/BiFeOxHy electrocatalyst for oxygen evolution reaction (OER), due to higher lattice vacancies and the amorphous structure. Institutions in the EU, the UK, and Canada, meanwhile, have announced new plans to provide funds for hydrogen projects.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has opened a new door for US solar manufacturers, as one of the executives behind a US-Jordanian project to bring PV production to the US explains.