Western Europe

Austrian tech company ecop has developed a rotation heat pump with a reported coefficient of performance (COP) of 4.0 – 7.0. The 700 kW machine operates under temperatures of 150 degrees Celsius and is based on an anticlockwise running Joule process, during which there is no phase transition of the working medium that always remains gaseous.

The Italian government has decided to unlock 1.4GW of new renewable energy projects since the end of 2021.

Spanish engineering company Sener has developed a software that analyzes different combinations of panels, trackers or tables, inverters and storage systems, as well as construction costs, depending on the market situation at any given time and the client’s preferences.

A document compiled by three Italian renewables associations identifies with extreme precision the area that is allowed to be used for power generation in the two most common agrivoltaics configurations — solar arrays with elevated solar modules and PV systems deployed between crop rows.

Scientists in Spain have designed a BIPV forced ventilated facade that can be used as support for heating and a domestic hot water (DHW) building system based on air source heat pumps (ASHPs). In the proposed system configuration, the heat pump is expected to cover building heating demand at all times, regardless of the performance of the solar array.

The solar modules for the solar array were supplied by Chinese manufacturer Longi, which is a major partner in the project.

The nation accounted for almost a quarter of the UK’s clean energy generation in a Covid-hit year as renewables accounted for 61.8% of its power mix, according to a study produced by the UK government.

The Agua+S project under development in the Spanish region of Andalucia is aimed at combining a desalination plant, a pumping station network, and an onshore, floating photovoltaic plant in a single project design. According to its developers this is the first time that these three facilities have been combined together in a fully reproducible design that could be replicated in any river basin that has a reservoir and is close to the coast, to produce fresh water for both irrigation and human consumption.

The German battery manufacturer said this week its residential storage systems were automatically switched to a regulated stand-by mode in Germany. The background to the remote shutdown is three reports of explosions in houses in which Senec products were installed.

The procurement exercise’s final average price is 7% higher than that of the previous tender of the same kind. Around 704.9MW of PV capacity was allocated by the French authorities.