Europe

After turning to clean energy last year, the Spanish oil company plans to deploy 4.5 GW of renewables generation capacity by 2024.

The winners of the eighth round of France’s rooftop PV tender series have drawn lower average prices than peers awarded just four months ago, new results show.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition is wavering on whether to focus on wind or solar power over the next decade to help Germany cut carbon emissions.

Ambitious proposals have emerged to power a major Angus pharmaceutical plant with electricity from a giant solar farm on land a few miles away.

Although the Wiki-solar website ranking only gives a snapshot of PV project engineering, procurement and construction contracts outside China, it is nevertheless a useful indicator of the changing shape of the global solar market.

The central Italian province of Viterbo has 1,359 MW of solar generation capacity in the development and approvals process. The mass of projects has raised opposition from some locals and developers are in talks with government officials to discuss how concerns can be addressed.

Poland’s fourth largest energy company, Enea, will build a 30 MW solar plant for the Bogdanka coal mine in which the utility is majority shareholder. The project will sell power to the mine through a long-term supply deal.

A group of scientists at Netherlands based research institute AMOLF have discovered a method for electrochemical printing at the nanoscale. With further optimizations, the group theorizes, the technique could allow for the development of new, three dimensional solar cells.

The final average price for power generated by solar systems with a capacity of 100-500 kW came in at €97.48/MWh. The price for 500 kW-8 MW installations was €86.54/MWh. Only the latter category saw a fall in price compared to the previous commercial solar tender.

The Spanish manufacturer said the new three-phase device may reach a power output of 160 kWac in a single 75kg unit. The inverter features 1500 Vdc technology and is said to be able to reach a power output of 161 kW (AC) in a single 75kg unit.

Major PV inverter manufacturer, SolarEdge Technologies is taking its patent infringement case against Huawei Technologies to the Regional Courts of Jinan and Shenzhen in China, after fillings in Germany in June and July 2018.

X-Elio has enlisted a Portuguese oil and gas group as offtaker to a large-scale solar pipeline in Spain, adding to the country’s bustling PV power purchase agreement (PPA) scene.

Aberdeen Standard Investments (ASI) has sealed the latest of a raft of solar plays in Poland, purchasing a relatively sizeable portfolio from China’s ReneSola.

Finland’s first roof mounted solar power plant with capacity exceeding 1 MW is currently being built on the roof of Sponda’s Elo Shopping Centre in Ylöjärvi. The project will be completed in November 2019.

Inverter manufacturer Solaredge has filed three additional patent infringement lawsuits against its competitor, Huawei, in China. This comes after three similar legal actions against Huawei that had been undertaken by Solaredge in Germany last summer. While Huawei has decided not to comment on the matter, the Chinese manufacturer revealed that it had filed three patent litigation claims against Solaredge at a Chinese court this May.