Western Europe

A British-Indian research group has developed an active cooling technique that is claimed to improve a PV system’s yield by around 0.5%. The system could be used in residential solar arrays and the water heated by the PV modules may be fed into a solar water heating system.

While there are still many uncertainties as to the way in which hydrogen trade might evolve and change economic ties and political dynamics between countries, experts agree that green hydrogen can bring winds of change to the global energy arena. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, significant geoeconomic and geopolitical shifts are just around the corner.

The procurement exercise’s final prices ranged between €0.0570 and €0.0828 per kWh.

The PV facility will have a capacity of 7.7MW and will rely on 19,000 of the latest generation solar modules from the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM).

Local planning committees have given a go-ahead to a £2.5 billion gigafactory in the English West Midlands. The facility will be powered by 100% onsite solar and storage and equipped to both manufacture new batteries and recycle used ones.

A worsening price shock, felt to different degrees across Europe, has now seen renewable power purchase agreement tariffs climb for three consecutive quarters. Despite that, however, developers and energy buyers are still signing contracts, with non-standard agreements on the rise, according to renewable transaction infrastructure provider LevelTen Energy.

Spanish researchers have developed a new modeling technique to assess the performance of semi-transparent PV systems for greenhouses. Their novel approach considers the broadband and spectral content of the irradiance, the solar cell technology and its performance metrics, and the relationship between the photosynthetic rate and the effective photon flux that falls on the crops.

The Italian energy major this morning announced it had acquired German-owned clean power developer Solar Konzept Greece.

Figures released by Eurostat this week indicated the monumental task facing the renewables industry as Europe attempts to replace a power source which generated a quarter of the bloc’s electricity in 2020.

A new underwater battery storage technology is coming from Netherlands-based Ocean Grazer to address the issue of offshore long-duration storage. The company’s Ocean Battery is touted as innovative yet simple, based on existing technology, and capable of enhancing marine life along the way.