Western Europe

An Australian thermal energy storage company has reached in principle agreements to pilot thermal batteries in the telecommunication and eco-housing industries.

On August 9, a thunderstorm caused 1.5 GW of generation capacity to go offline within seconds in the U.K. The incident caused millions of households to temporarily lose power but the situation could have been considerably worse if not for the country’s battery storage reserves.

The STA has warned Italian company Fimer, which is set to acquire Swiss company ABB’s inverter business, it will have to honor customer service commitments made to its British members, and voiced fears related to historic quality issues with ABB inverters.

With the 200 hydrogen bikes offered to journalists and world leaders at the G7 summit in Biarritz, France proving popular, manufacturer Pragma Industries has received an order for 1,000 of them from Chilean president Sebastian Pinera. The company’s founder, Pierre Forté, wants the bike to have a societal impact in developing countries.

A consortium of European research institutes has received €10.6 million in EU funding to establish pilot production of a high efficiency module concept developed by Swiss startup Insolight. The module combines high efficiency multijunction cells with a solar concentrator lens and has previously demonstrated 29% efficiency.

An international team of researchers led by the University of Tokyo has discovered a new material which, when rolled into a nanotube, generates an electric current if exposed to light. If magnified and scaled up, say the scientists, the technology could be used in future high-efficiency solar devices.

With the benefits solar panels can bring to cropland being considered in Europe, PV and aquaculture are working in tandem in Vietnam. Shrimp and fish farming requires land and lots of water but solar panels are helping mitigate those demands.

Engie has raised eyebrows with the installation of several solar benches in Biarritz, southwestern France, as a local official has asked citizens to avoid sitting on them for long periods of time in order to keep their energy yield up. But the authorities over in Cannes are clearly impressed, as the municipal government in the French Riviera resort town has also revealed plans to buy more of the PV benches, which are designed by Croatian startup Include.

Toulouse-based startup Sunbirds has set up an office, assembly workshop and maintenance centre in Brisbane. The company is providing solar-powered drones and drone-as-a-service solutions to surveyors, cattle stations and environmental monitoring companies.

A German research team claims to have created a new visualization technique it says can enable detailed mapping of the energetic landscapes of organic PV cells on a nano scale. The technique could lead to organic cells with reduced power losses.