Western Europe

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has launched a hydrogen funding call for African projects, while the European Commission has registered 265 supply opportunities under its Hydrogen Mechanism.

The Italian authorities have dentified seven Trentino-based photovoltaic companies, controlled by an unspecified German operator, accused of allegedly evading over €60 million in taxes and improperly obtaining €33 million in incentives from the state energy agency GSE.

Soluxtec has entered provisional insolvency proceedings as declining module prices and international competition continue to pressure European solar manufacturers. The company said it plans to restructure operations, maintain module deliveries, and preserve jobs while seeking investors.

Researchers in Austria found that unusually high photovoltaic efficiency in lead-halide perovskites can be explained by internal electric fields generated at strain-induced domain walls, which separate charge carriers and enable long-range transport. Their experiments indicated that these effects arise from mesoscopic structural inhomogeneities rather than a uniform crystal structure, providing a general mechanism for charge separation in these materials.

Spain and Portugal are 53% less exposed to gas price volatility than they were three years ago, according to a new report from Positive Money.

Spanish researchers found that combining agrivoltaics with regulated deficit irrigation (RDI) can cut tomato irrigation water use by about 50%, while improving land-use efficiency through simultaneous crop and solar energy production.

In a week marked by the largest sodium-ion battery order to date, widely seen as a watershed moment for the technology’s commercialization at scale, one of Europe’s emerging players, Spain’s Bihar Batteries, is strengthening the outlook for European-made sodium-ion batteries.

RCT Hydrogen has launched operations at a new electrolyzer manufacturing facility in Saarbrücken, Germany, with planned annual production capacity of 250 MW and a first 5 MW system scheduled for assembly in 2026.

Rosi has raised more than €20 million in a Series B funding round to scale its photovoltaic module recycling business and build a new 10,000-tonne-per-year facility in Teruel, Spain. The company uses pyrolysis-based technology to recover high-purity materials including silver, silicon, copper, aluminium and glass from end-of-life solar modules.

A UNSW-led research team proposed two low-power ride-through strategies for standalone PV–electrolyzer systems to maintain stability during sudden solar power fluctuations without using battery storage.