Asia

LG Energy Solution has agreed to take 100% of the cobalt and nickel from the proposed Sconi Project in Queensland. The company says the deal will give it an “upper hand” in EV battery production and improve its ESG competitiveness.

Solar’s share in the installed 100 GW renewable energy capacity stands at around 44%, and wind at 40% as per the data available from India’s Central Electricity Authority.

Japanese scientists have developed a new lithium-sulfur battery by using titanium oxide and titanium nitride to prevent the formation of polysulfides during the fabrication process. This allows the battery to retain 85% of its capacity after 500 cycles at 2 C.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) have devised a method that increases hydrogen production up to three times while significantly lowering the energy required for water electrolysis.

Scientists in India fabricated a redox flow battery based on zinc and iron that showed strong storage characteristics and no signs of degradation over 30 charge-discharge cycles. The battery also showed no signs of dendrite formation, overcoming one of the key hurdles for redox-flow batteries based on these low-cost, abundant materials.

The Indian Railways initially plan to convert diesel-powered trains in the 89km Sonipat-Jind section of Northern Railway to run on hydrogen. The hydrogen fuel cell retrofitment kit, along with the balance-of-plant and energy storage and hydrogen storage modules, will replace the existing power-train items onboard 1,600HP diesel-electric multiple unit (DEMU) rakes.

South-East Asia’s biggest floating PV installation is under construction by Masdar and Indonesian energy company PT PJB. The two companies secured a PPA for the project with state electricity company Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) in January 2020. The agreed tariff is US$0.0581/kWh.

Researchers in China have developed a smart solar window tech based on a photovoltachromic device that is able to achieve a high pristine transmittance and to be self-adaptable to control indoor brightness and temperature. The device was assembled via a full solution process in an architecture incorporating glass, a fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) layer, a perovskite-based PV cell, an electrochromic gel, another FTO layer, and glass.

Developed by a Vietnamese-Korean research group, the complex PV device was built with a bottom bifacial crystalline silicon perovskite-filtered heterojunction sub-cell that is able to absorb all solar spectra in the short-wavelength range.

Developed by Chinese researchers, the novel design methodology consists of utilising metal brackets as mounting structures, conventional solar panels, and a grooved glass plate placed between the solar panels. According to its creators, it ensures a farmer’s average income increases by 5.14 times, including the solar power generation business. A system built with this approach should cost around €715 (AU$1145) per kW installed.