Western Europe

An Enervis study commissioned by Green Planet Energy sees great potential for reducing CO2 emissions and avoiding peak feed-in times in intelligent control, particularly in adapting to available PV power. Not only users of electric cars and heat pumps could benefit from this, but also all other electricity customers – thanks to lower electricity prices.

pv magazine spoke with Garikoitz Sarriegi, senior project manager at Kiwa PI Berlin Ibérica, about the Reuters report published on Wednesday that devices susceptible to spying and sabotage had been found in inverters and batteries from China.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, reports that solar irradiance in the British Isles reached up to 35% above the norm during the first half of May, while The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany each recorded irradiance levels around 25% above average.

Trade group Swissolar has called for a national energy storage strategy to support the growing popularity of home solar-plus-battery systems in Switzerland.

New research from Spain has sought to understand if dimethyl ether and ternary mixtures of carbon dioxide, dimethyl ether and butane could represent an alternative to propane in heat pump systems. Their analysis has shown dimethyl ether could be the best alternative to R290, as it offers the highest coefficient of performance values for both cooling and heating, and avoids issues related to temperature glide.

Using Google Earth imagery and 2019-2022 Sentinel-2 datasets, Chinese scientists have developed a two-stage classification framework to obtain the annual global dataset of solar photovoltaic panels at 20-meter resolution from 2019 to 2022.

AleaSoft Energy Forecasting’s says weekly average electricity prices increased across most major European markets last week, despite an influx of negative prices over the weekend. Portugal, meanwhile, broke its all-time record for solar energy production.

In the first three months of 2024, the addition of new PV systems in Austria was just under 500 MW. This year, according to estimates by PV Austria, the figure is around 20% lower in the same period. The association is appealing to the government not to further stifle the market.

Qcells says its perovskite/silicon tandem solar modules have passed several independently verified stress tests. The South Korean module maker claims the results meet benchmarks for commercial acceptance of its tandem tech.

Spain’s ecological transition minister has confirmed that the problem was not a reserve or coverage issue, nor was it due to the size of the grids. The government is also analyzing whether the fluctuations felt in Europe half an hour before the blackout were related to the incident.