Energy

ArcActive, a New Zealand-based battery tech specialist, plans to set up a factory in Australia within 18 months. It says the facility will be able to produce 30,000 lead acid-based residential energy storage systems per year.

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Allye Energy have agreed to collaborate on a 270 kWh portable battery energy storage system (BESS) built with second-life Range Rover batteries. The system, which is set to become the first commercially available BESS with JLR battery packs, can fully charge up to nine Range Rover PHEV vehicles at once.

Nhoa Energy, an Italian developer, has commissioned a battery energy storage project for Taiwan Cement Group in Yilan county, Taiwan, with a capacity exceeding 120 MWh.

ABB Motion has unveiled a new solar drive for water pumping, featuring integrated maximum power point tracking (MPPT) logic to maximize operations, with an input voltage ranging from 225 V to 800 V.

Renewables developer Vast Solar has signed a key engineering contract as it pushes toward construction of a 30 MW/288 MWh thermal concentrated solar power (CSP) plant with more than eight hours of energy storage capacity near Port Augusta, South Australia.

A Saudi research group has assessed how polymeric coatings, such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), could be used for radiative cooling in photovoltaic panels and has found that both materials could reduce the operating PV module temperature by between 1.15 C and 1.35 C.

An international research team has placed a neem oil tank on the back of solar modules for cooling purposes. The proposed solution reportedly improves PV panel performance by up to 17.8%.

The European Union has formally adopted a directive on energy performance for buildings. It requires member states to develop their trajectories for reducing energy use in buildings, in addition to ensuring that new structures are solar ready. The legislation will go into force in the coming weeks.

Researchers in China have developed a photovoltaic cold storage system that is reportedly able to improve refrigeration capacity and ice storage rate. The system is said to ensure a stable cooling system operation for the refrigeration needs of agricultural products.

The German manufacturer said the new air-to-water systems are part of its Hybrox series. Their coefficient of performance is between 4.3 and 5.3 and their size ranges from 11 kW to 16 kW.