Western Europe

An international team of scientists fabricated perovskite solar cells which retained almost all of their initial 21% efficiency after 1,000 hours under continuous operation at their maximum power point. The researchers credit this performance to their discovery of an additive that served to ‘block’ ions that cause device degradation, and also hope their work will contribute to an improved understanding of the relationship between efficiency and stability in perovskite PV.

Swedish energy company Vattenfall is planning to build a 150 MW electric boiler near Amsterdam under the Netherlands’ SDE+ program for large scale renewables. The facility is planned to operate when a lot of electricity from wind and sun is available and to supply hot water to households in the city and its surrounding areas.

Rijkswaterstaat – the water management agency of the Netherlands – has revealed that developers are working on four large-scale PV projects along the A7 highway. They are being built under the Regional Energy Strategy Noord-Holland Noord program.

The proposed technique is based on radiative cooling and consists of a glass coating made with a two-dimensional subwavelength nanostructured grating, which is imprinted in soda-lime glass and has enhanced mid-infrared emissivity, and a micro-structured grating. The temperature decrease provided by the nano-micro-grating coating was found to be approximately up to 5.8 degrees Celsius.

About three-quarters of German solar installers offered residential storage systems last year, according to EUPD Research. Such products have become cheaper, but many people are still discouraged by the high price of storage.

France’s Solar Cloth has announced that Renault Trucks has listed it as a supplier for its factories.

Construction on the facility is expected to be finalized in April 2022. The electricity generated by the plant will be bought by Swedish polymer-based products provider Nolato Group.

The 50 MW facility is located in the region of Navarra and is operated by German specialist Rinovasol. The company buys, fixes and certifies the panels and puts them back on the market, with a new datasheet and a five-year warranty.

The 2.2 MW vertical solar plant, built on a dam wall at an altitude of almost 2,500 meters above the sea level, is expected to be commissioned within four months.

Trade organization Solar Energy UK has called for the government to mandate that solar target in a co-ordinated rallying cry issued with two peers. One of them, the Nuclear Industry Association, is a membership body sure to raise hackles in some quarters of the energy transition movement.