Finland

Finnish energy technology company Wartsila Energy, which is playing a key role in the second stage of the Eraring Power Station battery facility, has released a new turnkey battery storage system that includes significant fire-safety features.

Tasmanian shipbuilder Incat will team with two European companies to test the waters on building 100% battery-electric powered passenger and car ferries as part of a push to help decarbonise the maritime transport sector.

Researchers at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland said that chemical energy storages were needed for short and long-term balancing in every climate region, especially in the northern climates. Meanwhile, companies are moving forward with their plans to produce hydrogen in Namibia and Morocco.

Finnish researchers have proposed the use of solar, wind, and storage to provide desalinated seawater to restore forests. Their model predicts that an additional 10.7 TW of PV would be needed to actually do this by 2100, leading to a cumulative carbon dioxide sequestration potential of 730 gigatonnes.

Australian research that has seen crystalline silicon (c-Si) PV technology takes its place in the mainstream of the global energy industry has been recognised by picking up Finland’s top technology award. The €1 million (AUD 1.55 million) Millennium Technology Prize has been awarded to UNSW Scientia Professor Martin Green, in recognition for his work in developing passivated emitter rear contact (PERC) technology – the mainstay cell of the modern solar industry.

New research from Lappeenranta University of Technology shows that there is no single correct orientation for a PV installation.

A West Australian joint venture seeking to recover high-purity vanadium from a steel industry waste product using a carbon negative process has won the support of the European Union. “We’re not the first people to look at that project, but we’re the first people to look at it through a different lens and use this type of process,” Neometals’ General Manager of Commercial and Investor Relations, Jeremy McManus, told pv magazine Australia. The project, which is still in the early stages, is already been sought out by potential offtakers “desperate to secure green vanadium,” McManus added.

Researchers from Finland and Sweden have reviewed different ways to store compressed gaseous hydrogen, including storage vessels, geological storage, and other underground options.

With manufacturing ramping up year by year and policies already looking to get ahead of the large volumes of end-of-life products, the landscape for lithium-ion battery recycling is rapidly changing. pv magazine recently spoke with Mari Lundström, associate professor of chemical and metallurgical engineering at Aalto University, to find out what is needed on the research side for the effective recycling of batteries.

Although self-consumption of solar power is the optimal economic approach, the expense of household batteries at present outweighs the increased ability they offer to use electricity generated on the roof. Whether aggregated ‘virtual batteries’ offer better returns is an open question, due to lack of electricity company transparency.