Western Europe

The list of planned gigawatt-scale battery cell manufacturing plants in Europe has grown, with Anglo-Korean battery maker Eurocell announcing plans for a gigafab in Western Europe to start manufacturing at scale within 12 months.

Solar was able to cover over 3% of France’s total electricity demand last year and its cumulative capacity reached 13,067MW at the end of December.

The stadium of German football club SC Freiburg will host a 2.4MW rooftop solar array that will be built with heterojunction modules provided by Swiss manufacturer Meyer Burger.

Called Tracker Sun Hunter, the new factory will be located in an area of over 30,000 square meters inside Enel’s Montalto di Castro power plant which is no longer used for energy generation.

The Green Party members of the coalition governing the EU member state are losing patience with the slow progress of a bill they tabled eight months ago to remove the requirement for schools and other public buildings to have planning permission to install panels.

Apollo Power is providing its flexible solar modules for a €750,000 photovoltaic project planned by Amazon in France. Each of the module units provided by the Israeli manufacturer has a size of 2,040×6,130mm and weighs in at only 3kg/m².

With solar readmitted to the process for subsidizing new renewable energy generation capacity, the government says it is “hitting the accelerator” on clean power as it aims for a fully decarbonized electricity system by 2035.

As research into non-rare metal catalysts continues, companies in northwest Europe are working on an offshore green hydrogen demonstration project, the first European data center to run on green hydrogen, and on hydrogen-based solutions for container transport. Meanwhile, European institutions are prepping for stronger hydrogen collaboration with Africa.

New research from Sweden showed that financing conditions and the choice of location are crucial factors in reducing the levelized cost of energy for utility scale solar parks built without subsidies in the Scandinavian country. According to the researchers, the project with the lowest LCOE in Sweden, of €0.02737/kWh, is a plant with an expected lifetime of 45 years, a 2% annual degradation rate, capex of €703,758 per megawatt installed, a yearly fixed operations and maintenance cost of €11,277 per megawatt, and a nominal weighted average cost of capital per annum of 0.2%.

TOPCon solar modules will gain more market share if their average efficiency, already higher than that of PERC panels, continues to improve, according to Stefan Glunz, PV research chief at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE. In an upcoming pv magazine webinar on the potential of TOPCon tech, Glunz will show how to reduce costs and increase efficiency.