Sustainability

With the rapid growth in electric vehicle (EV) demand bringing fears of a mountain of EV battery waste piling up further down the line, the EU-Swiss government-funded Recirculate program is planning how to keep batteries in use for much longer before they head to recyclers.

The world would have been a different place today had John Goodenough accepted the Shah of Iran’s $7 million offer, in 1974, to carry out solar research. Instead, he secured a job as the head of inorganic chemistry at the University of Oxford. During his tenure, he made a lithium-ion battery discovery that would affect the lives of almost everyone.

PV initiatives should be designed to last, as several well-meaning off-grid solar projects for the developing world have floundered over the years.

In this exclusive interview with pv magazine, Guoguang Chen, President of Smart PV & ESS Business at Huawei Digital Power, in this, discusses company strategy and recent announcements around FusionSolar, latest technology and product innovations in solar and storage, and more.

In a bid to avoid costly grid augmentation, Spanish electric vehicle (EV) charger supplier Wallbox has designed a multi-layered energy intelligence solution – proving that necessity is the mother of invention.

The opportunities available from the aggregation and interpretation of mass data are huge and could help attract investors and ensure more efficient electricity networks as the world races to try and achieve the UN goal of access to reliable energy for all this decade.

In May 2022, PV experts from around the world convened in Germany for the third Terawatt Workshop. Almost one year later, takeaways from discussions at the workshop – combined with a wide-ranging review of research on decarbonization pathways, energy demand projections, and the state of the art in PV technology – led to the conclusion that 75 TW of installed solar capacity by 2050 was a realistic global target. More than 50 leading PV industry figures recently outlined the opportunity and the challenges that solar will face in reaching this goal.

The European solar landscape changed forever in 2022 and managing the supply chain, grid, and permitting constraints will be key to a solar-dominated energy future for the continent.

Lhyfe has started producing offshore hydrogen via a pilot project in France, and Toyota and its partners have agreed to invest in hydrogen in Thailand. The Australian authorities, meanwhile, have approved a hydrogen project in Victoria.

The world’s most efficient energy network, at an Antarctic research base, has had a solar upgrade.