Finland

Finnish startup Polar Night Energy is teaming up with a district heating company to construct an industrial-scale thermal energy storage system in southern Finland. The sand-based system will use soapstone, a byproduct from a fireplace manufacturer, as its storage medium.

Wood Mackenzie has urged policymakers and companies to focus on the full life-cycle emissions of hydrogen, while a European Commission has revealed that a European business mission will visit Mauritania in March to explore hydrogen investment opportunities.

Scientists from Finland have built an experimental system that allows the drying of woody biomass with solar thermal energy and a heat pump. They claim PV may play a complementary role in the proposed setup.

GM and Autocar Industries have agreed to jointly develop hydrogen-powered heavy-duty vehicles using GM’s Hydrotec power cubes, while European lawmakers have reached a provisional agreement on common market rules for renewable gases and hydrogen.

In the land of a thousand lakes and long, harsh winters, a surprising gold rush is under way – not for precious metals but for sunlight. Finland, often associated with its stunning natural landscapes, has become an unlikely contender in the global renewable energy market, particularly in the realm of solar power.

UK-based researchers have developed a novel method to estimate the amount of defrost cycles a heat pump will experience in the winter and how much energy it would require to implement the cycles. The results of their simulation showed a strong relationship between the number of defrost cycles and the ambient temperature.

A Finnish-Norwegian research group has investigated model chains for horizontal-to-vertical solar irradiance conversion in east-west oriented vertical PV systems located at high latitudes. They have found that accuracy and bias of the model chains are different for the east and west sides of solar array.

Italian energy group Enel says it is scrapping its plans to build a hydrogen project in La Spezia, Italy, despite €13.72 million ($14.7 million) in European subsidies, while Toyota has introduced its new Crown Sedan fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV) in Japan.

The new SolarSTEPS forecasting method improves ensemble forecast quality by 9.3% compared to approaches that consider only cloud advective motion.

A Finnish-German research group has developed a 6 × 6 mm low bandgap GaAsNBi solar cell with an active area of 0.25 cm2. The device has an energy bandgap of 0.86 eV and is reportedly suitable for applications in multi-junction solar cells.