UK

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.

The governmental body responsible for keeping mine pollution out of waterways has announced completion of the first phase of a plan to use solar to keep down its electricity bills.

MIT engineers have combined RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags with thin-film perovskite solar cells to create energy-harvesting IoT sensors.

The U.K. province’s grid operator SONI has announced a £500 million plan to prepare the network for an almost fully renewable electricity system within just five years. Despite the U.K. being seemingly paralyzed by Brexit, the network operator says it can already cope with 65% clean energy in the mix.

The International Renewable Energy Association says the integration of hydrogen into the energy transition will not happen overnight and electrolysis costs will not be halved until the 2040s. That hydrogen and related products could revolutionize the world energy landscape, however, is not in doubt.

The world is witnessing an “organic nuclear phaseout” partly precipitated by a drop in solar and wind costs, according to a new report that posits that nuclear power is too slow to build and too expensive to run to effectively fight climate change.

Macquarie Group intends to build a 20GW renewables pipeline over the next five years through its Green Investment Group (GIG), the green finance bank it purchased from the British government in 2017.

Top UK solar investor Bluefield Solar Income Fund (BSIF) has hailed the advent of subsidy-free utility-scale solar in the UK, announcing a number of agreements to bring forward unsubsidised projects in the country.

A handful of European states have moved to bankroll various World Bank clean energy initiatives, with US$100 million of French and Dutch money set to back PV in Sub-Saharan Africa.

U.K. nonprofit organization Together Housing is launching a solar-plus-storage demonstration project in a social housing complex. The $2.4 million pilot is designed to identify alternative commercial models for residential storage, following the abrupt reduction of feed-in tariff rates.

London-based markus kayser, a masters candidate in design products at the royal college of art, converts the raw resources of sunlight and sand into glass products with his fully automated, solar-powered ‘solar sinter‘ 3D printer.

A research team led by the University of Liverpool has developed a transparent conductive oxide material to replace tin with molybdenum. The results demonstrated better performance and potentially lower material costs than the transparent conducting layers used in today’s commercial solar cells.

UK solar developer Solarcentury and Dutch counterpart PowerField have unveiled plans to build the “largest” solar project in the Netherlands on behalf of Impax, the British asset manager that owns the site.

Energy companies are lacking any kind of certainty over Brexit and how it will affect the sector, but cannot allow it to have any impact on the “fundamental issue” of climate change and the energy transition, some of Europe’s leading utilities have said.