Europe

Portugal has unveiled the final results of the solar auction held over the summer, identifying a handful of major foreign winners of a tender hailed as a worldwide milestone.

The Swiss battery maker Leclanché will build a 35.6 MW / 44.2 MWh solar-plus-storage power plant, which will provide with clean power state-owned St.Kitts electric utility Skelec over a 20-year period. The new facility will be able to cover around a fourth of the archipelago’s total electricity demand.

Chinese thin film producer Hanergy has set a new record of 24.85% module efficiency for silicon heterojunction technology. The record was achieved at the company’s research & development center in Chengdu, China, and has been confirmed by the Institute for Solar Energy Research in Hamelin, Germany.

French renewables developer Neoen has won development approval from the South Australian government for a major renewable energy project, with 125 MW of wind, 150 MW of solar PV and 130 MW/400 MWh of lithium-ion battery storage. The project could also include up to 50 MW of on-site hydrogen production capability.

Earlier this week, the French government published a list of winning projects for the sixth round of its tender for large-scale solar. There were a few changes from the preceding round, with French companies such as Urbasolar, Engie and Total consolidating their positions. However, even though a higher number of projects were submitted, prices increased slightly in the end. In a short conversation with pv magazine, Xavier Daval — a representative of SER, the French renewable energy association — explained the reasons for this.

One of Spain’s largest banks has gotten behind a utility-scale solar portfolio, planned without support from auctions nor power purchase agreements (PPAs).

Major PV inverter manufacturer, SolarEdge Technologies has been forced to accelerate expedited shipping via air freight, despite a 25% increase in manufacturing capacity as the company continues to set quarter sales records.

The costs of residential solar-plus-storage have already dropped or will only take a few years to drop to nation-wide grid averages across key European markets, according to Wood Mackenzie.

Ukraine’s recently elected president has rubberstamped new legislation designed to promote domestic solar via special tariffs.

The wind power specialist has started prequalifying EPCs for the ground-mounted solar plant, which will be built near Timahoe North, County Kildare.

The projects will be tendered under single-round competitive bidding processes, supervised by the European Bank for Development and Reconstruction.

The average price guaranteed to the winners of the tender’s sixth window is €64/MWh. For installations above 5 MW, the price is €59.5/MWh, which is higher than the fifth window.

A major ground-mounted PV auction in France is set to boost the country’s solar capacity by 10%, with 107 developers successfully bidding on 858MW of capacity spread evenly across the country.

New textile-based solar cells developed by Fraunhofer researchers, semitrailers could soon be producing the electricity needed to power cooling systems or other onboard equipment. In short, textile-based solar cells could soon be adding a whole new dimension to photovoltaics, complementing the use of conventional silicon-based solar cells.

Researchers at Siberian Federal University, together with colleagues from the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden), discovered new properties of material based on palladium, which can increase the performance of solar cells.