Emiliano Bellini

UK scientists designed a new heat pump concept that they claim could be particularly beneficial to newly developed areas or potential residential complexes. The system uses ice or ice slurry as the heat source and its energy consumption is reportedly lower than that of several types commercially available heat pumps.

The Romanian authorities expect to allocate 1 GW of wind power and 500 MW of PV capacity through the country’s first procurement exercise. The Romanian Ministry of Energy has set a maximum strike price of €91 ($100.7)/MWh for solar projects and €93/MWh for wind projects.

The largest heat pump in the Netherlands is now online at the Utrecht sewage treatment plant. It generates heat up to 75 C for the local network by using purified hot wastewater from a regional water authority.

In a paper published in nature, the Chinese module maker explained that the 33.9%-efficient tandem device it unveiled in December 2023 is based on a bilayer intertwined passivation strategy that combines efficient electron extraction with further suppression of nonradiative recombination. It also revealed that its two-terminal tandem prototype devices achieved an efficiency of 34.6%.

Chinese module maker Aiko Solar says it has built a 150 kW off-grid solar carport at an altitude of 4,300 meters on Mount Everest, featuring 645 W bifacial dual-glass modules and 200 kWh of battery storage.

A group including scientists from Insititute for Solar Energy Research Hamelin (ISFH) and German PV equipment manufacturer Centrotherm has developed a POLO back junction solar cell by using an industrial plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) system with a low-frequency plasma source. The device achieved a slightly higher efficiency than a reference device fabricated via more expensive atomic layer deposition (ALD).

Lebanon’s Minister of Energy and Water has opened a tender for an 8 MW solar plant under the Beirut River Solar Snake project, which will be publicly funded and connected to the medium-voltage grid to supply power to Electricité du Liban.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs (MoEA) says the island added 2.7 GW of new solar capacity last year, bringing its total capacity to 12.41 GW by December 2023. Feed-in tariffs for installations up to 100 kW continue to drive the market.

Researchers in China have found that a special type of hygroscopic hydrogel made of the polyacrylamide polymer and lithium chloride may reduce PV module temperature by up to 7.5%. They have also developed a mathematical model to analyze the operational mechanisms and factors responsible for the cooling performance.

Researchers in the United Kingdom have presented a new heat pump system that may avoid reducing heat supply during defrosting operations. The proposed concept can reportedly execute defrosting operations while ensuring continuous heating by condensing the refrigerant in the frosted evaporator.