Washington

Cannabis prohibition drove a culture of clandestine production in the past and solar helped growers to cultivate it at remote, off-grid sites. Now, as a global commercial cannabis market emerges, solar has an even bigger role to play.

REC Silicon says a cash injection from South Korea’s Hanwha will help it to resume fluidized bed reactor production at the Moses Lake polysilicon plant in the US state of Washington.

The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory has shared its findings on the use of perovskite materials to produce renewable hydrogen, while a number of entities have announced new projects in Europe, North America, and China.

Slovakian business InoBat will use the patented silicon battery material manufactured by U.S. company Group14 Tech to offer bespoke products for the world’s biggest carmakers.

Imports from South Korea and the U.S. dwindled, year-on-year, ensuring Germany’s Wacker and the Malysian unit of Korean company OCI will supply the bulk of the world’s non-Chinese solar polysilicon this year.

The Norwegian polysilicon maker has been been frozen out of the Chinese solar market by political tensions between Beijing and the U.S. and mothballed its Washington State production line last year. However, two recent business agreements could change all that.

But Israeli inverter company Solaredge and Indian engineering, procurement and construction services provider Sterling and Wilson have both offered hope of a recovery in Europe as Chinese glass producer Xinyi said it kept the furnaces going throughout the worst of the pandemic.

The Norwegian company mothballed its Washington State facility more than a year ago and is now reliant on semiconductor-grade poly and silane gas produced at its fab in Butte, Montana – a facility for which the business says it has received plenty of interest from potential purchasers.

Zero-emission, low-cost regional flights with just eight other sanitized folk and a disinfected pilot! Yes, Covid-19 is warping our view of the future but the successful electrically-powered maiden flight of a Cessna Caravan last week offers the potential for new modes of transport to support a wider economic recovery in Australia.

Scientists in the United States have developed a carbon nanotube method of fabricating a lithium-ion battery with a silicon anode. The device reportedly demonstrated better than 87% capacity retention after 1,500 cycles. The developers say their discovery overcomes many of the obstacles to the use of silicon as an anode and could open up the use of other materials for electrodes in lithium-ion devices.