Europe

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.

The €29.7 million financing package was awarded by Banco Sabadell. Renovalia’s 79.2 MW solar park will be Spain’s first PV facility to sell all of its output on the spot market.

U.K. solar developer Lightsource BP plans to host a community information event in the town of Mannum, South Australia, to outline a proposal to fund, build and operate a 100 MW solar project.

Scientists at the U.K.’s Faraday Institution have been able to observe degradation mechanisms at the lithium metal anode in a solid state battery, and made several discoveries which could improve the performance and design of future solid-state lithium-ion batteries.

A German player has become the owner of a distributed solar pipeline in El Salvador, laying the groundwork for construction to launch later this year.

Amazon revealed plans for a 45MW / 100,000MWh solar farm in Virginia and a 23.2MW / 68,000MWh wind farm in Cork, Ireland on Thursday.