Europe

The BMW Group has reached another electro-mobility milestone and already delivered half a million electric vehicles to customers worldwide.

The Danish government has agreed to provide $19 million in funds for two large-scale hydrogen projects under development on the Jutland peninsula. The two projects will produce green hydrogen for the transport sector from renewables sources. Denmark’s largest energy company, Ørsted, has also announced plans for an ambitious 2 MW electrolysis plant with appurtenant hydrogen storage.

Wind took the largest share of the awarded capacity, according to the preliminary results, but newly introduced limitations for such projects helped solar to take a significant portion of the allocated power for the first time in a Polish energy auction, with the highest bid coming in at $0.0608/kWh.

The British company, which has tested its liquid air energy storage technology in the U.K., says it is preparing to deploy its first plant on U.S. soil. Highview claims its CRYOBattery is half the price of utility scale lithium-ion storage.

Solar investor Foresight has penned a 10-year power purchase agreement with EDF Trading for a 50MW project in Spain.

Spanish researchers have developed an analytical model to optimize the operation of PV water pumping systems. They say simultaneously irrigating different parts of a farm could help minimize costs and maximize energy use. The model was tested on an olive farm divided into four zones in the Spanish province of Almería.

Researchers from the two prestigious U.K. universities are analyzing spatiotemporal charge-carrier dynamics in the perovskite materials used for solar applications. They have discovered the carriers propagate ballistically over 150nm within 20fs of photon absorption.

With its app already present in Belgium and the Netherlands, start-up Jedlix is introducing smart charging in France. The solution enables Tesla drivers to optimize their charging strategy.

Spain’s renewable credentials have attracted the eye of an Italian infrastructure investor. Already, the Italian has acquired a PV Developer and the merchant projects it was working on.

PV equipment supplier Meyer Burger will shutter its Hennecke-branded manufacturing facility in Zülpich, Germany, affecting some 60 employees.

UK battery storage firm Zenobe has secured £25 million in funding from Santander as it looks to continue its growth.

The Munich-based group sold five solar parks with a total generation capacity of around 35 MW to the Hamburg-headquartered power producer. One of the five plants was among Germany’s first unsubsidized PV projects.

Plans for what is being billed as “Europe’s largest solar plant” have been put forward in Spain as the UN climate negotiations came to a close in Madrid.

Southern Water has issued a request for information to source solar energy through bilateral power purchase agreements. The business is thinking about buying power from a blend of generation facilities.

Three major companies from Netherlands are going to turn the Drenthe-based excessive clean power capacity into green hydrogen. The partners are investigating which green power projects can be excluded from electricity grid.