United Kingdom

Local planning committees have given a go-ahead to a £2.5 billion gigafactory in the English West Midlands. The facility will be powered by 100% onsite solar and storage and equipped to both manufacture new batteries and recycle used ones.

In other news, Oil India is setting up a 100 kW green hydrogen production facility in Assam, while the German government is providing €60 million for a project aimed at preparing electrolyzer technologies for industrial production at gigawatt scale.

Researchers in the UK have developed a novel controllable unidirectional ice-templating strategy to fabricate new carbon electrode materials which can boost the performances of sodium and potassium-ion batteries.

Developed in partnership with Dutch heating specialist Feenstra, the all-electric heat pump solution will initially be available in the Netherlands. The system’s buffer works as a heat battery that is used to provide heat to radiators and generate hot tap water.

Reliance Industries said its solar unit will buy UK-based sodium-ion battery technology provider Faradion for GBP100 million (US$135 million) including debt, as the Indian conglomerate pushes forward with its ambitious plan to move into the renewable energy industry.

COP26 was either a great success or an abject failure, depending on who you talk to. What matters for the solar industry is the extent to which decisions agreed in the Glasgow Climate Pact are going to change the direction of the energy and financial sectors.

Scientists in the UK investigated the relationship between two of the most worrisome defects that can affect solar cells in the field – cracking and hotspots. Their work analyzed solar cells with different levels of cracking under varying light conditions, finding that the most severely cracked cells were considerably more likely to run at high temperatures and form damaging hotspots.

Once deployed, the battery will be Europe’s largest storage facility.

Another round of the so-called “cap and floor” regime is expected to be held next year and will help the U.K. reach a total electricity interconnection capacity of 16 GW by 2030. The new interconnectors will likely be intended to harness large amounts of power from big offshore wind farm clusters in the North Sea.

The fourth round of the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme is expected to allocate 12 GW of renewable energy capacity. Solar and on-shore wind, which the British government considers well-established technologies, are entitled to secure up to 5 GW, but the limited budget these two technologies have been awarded may not be enough to reach this level.