Western Europe

A Danish consortium is seeking to store electricity from large scale renewable energy plants in the form of thermal energy in big tanks containing crushed, pea-sized stones made of basalt. The first 10 MWh demonstrator is planned to be developed in Denmark and to be powered by a wind facility. Another project is also under development in the United States and is planned to be linked to a solar plant.

Scientists investigating the aging mechanisms affecting today’s lithium-ion batteries observed that the loss of lithium over time is one of the main causes of performance loss. With this in mind, they developed and tested a “relithiation” process that promises to eliminate much of the cost and complexity from recycling battery components and materials.

Manufactured by Germany’s Fenecon, the modular battery has a storage capacity ranging from 8 kWh to 22 kWh. The product is claimed to allow predictive, grid-friendly charging and discharging.

Researchers at the Norwegian institute Sintef are testing a special floating structure that Equinor wants to deploy in offshore waters. The structure is built with an anchoring system that is claimed to give the installation enough freedom to cope with the waves.

A new €99 million solar project will help the Rambla Morales desalination plant, which shut down in 2011, to resume operations by fall 2022.

Germany wrapped up another oversubscribed tender for large-scale solar last week, as well as an innovation tender for storage-linked PV projects.

The municipal government of Barcelona is supporting the development of a 50-square-meter pilot project to test the feasibility of PV-paving tech.

Dutch floating structure specialist Solarduck has built a pilot 65 kW floating PV array that will be connected to a 10 kW electrolyzer to produce hydrogen bonded with a liquid organic hydrogen carrier. The system is relying on the company’s proprietary floating technology that resembles an offshore oil platform.

In the first three months of 2021, newly installed solar capacity reached 1.42 GW.

Developed by Swedish scientists, the proposed algorithm is said to calculate a project’s ideal design by combining climatological data with figures on expected solar power generation, shading distribution, water for irrigation, and agricultural yield. Its creators spoke with pv magazine about the key parameters that the model seeks to determine, one of which is the optimal distance between the solar module rows depending on the kind of crop.