Energy

Research institute the Fraunhofer ISE has estimated the technical potential of floating PV at mining sites in Germany at around 56 GW. With floating projects 10-15% more costly than land-based alternatives, researchers have called for further incentives, such as the staging of ‘innovation tenders’.

The English company says its modular solutions are due to undergo flight testing in the U.S. and are ‘three to five years’ from commercial production for aircraft.

The proposed model is said to perform better at energy prediction than software tools such as PVWatts, PVSyst or RetScreen. The approach was validated on two 5 MW PV plants in the same district of the Indian state of Rajasthan.

The German network operator reported around 339 MW of new solar in December. New installations for 2019 exceeded new capacity additions for the preceding year by more than 1 GW.

Irish energy-management specialist Eaton and Enico, a Finnish provider of modular storage systems, have agreed to jointly launch xStorage Container, an easily deployable storage solution that minimizes the internal footprint of buildings. The new offering was specifically designed for commercial and industrial self-consumption power projects.

The country’s cumulative capacity reached reached 13.35 GW at the end of 2019. The statistics also show that 2019 may have been the slowest year for the UK solar industry since 2010. According to the UK Solar Trade Association, however, the official figures released by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strateg are based on incomplete datasets and growth, particularly for PV systems above 50 kW in size, should be stronger.

The Minerals Council South Africa has urged the government to solve the country’s energy crisis by adding more power generation capacity from both distributed and large-scale renewables. Meanwhile, several mining companies operating in South Africa are planning their own big solar parks, including two 200 MW facilities under development by Sibanye-Stillwater and Vedanta.

A new report from Enervis shows that Spain is currently the most attractive European market for PV projects with a PPA, with 4.39 GW of contracted capacity. Italy and Germany are the second and third markets for this type of project, with 1.91 GW and 1.05 GW, respectively.

An international research team is proposing a fuzzy logic approach for optimal site selection of large-scale wind, solar and hybrid wind-solar power projects. The new methodology is based on criterial components for energy optimization through climatological, topographic and human factors.

Only one 5 MW solar project was selected in the 500 MW auction, while wind project developers secured the remaining 495 MW. Final price for the selected solar park was €60/MWh.