Russia

The latest edition of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report indicates the stagnation of the sector continues. Just 2.4 GW of net new nuclear generation capacity came online last year, compared to 98 GW of solar. The world’s operational nuclear power capacity had declined by 2.1%, to 362 GW, at the end of June.

As nations begin to move towards clean energy, fossil fuel exporting countries will need to rethink and reshape their economies. Taking Russia as an example, an MIT study has examined the likely impact on oil, gas and coal exports and the opportunities the energy transition could offer.

Researchers claim to have developed a cheaper, faster method of assembling the field flow plate layers of the membrane electrode assembly used in vanadium redox flow batteries, which they claim outperforms traditional components.

The facility was built with 140 heterojunction solar panels mounted on pontoon-type floats. The project is located at the site of the 320 MW Nizhne-Bureyskaya hydropower plant, owned and operated by Rushydro in the Russian Far East’s Amur region.

Hevel Group has announced it will source all the 65 GWh required annually to run its Novocheboksarsk factory from renewables sources via the wholesale market.

The pilotless, high-speed solar boat, now under development by Russian scientists, purportedly has unlimited power reserves. It could be used for marine patrols, search and rescue operations, and cargo delivery, they said.

Scientists at Moscow’s Skoltech Center for Energy Science and Technology have developed a method of visualizing the formation of layers on battery electrodes during their initial operation. The observations reveal various mechanisms that could be optimized to improve battery performance and operational lifetime.

As a focus of research at leading institutes the world over, new developments in the perovskite field come thick and fast almost every week. From x-ray observations on a nanoscale to financing and plans for mass production, pv magazine is bringing together some of the most exciting developments of recent weeks.

Russian researchers have improved the efficiency of a thin-fim GaAs‐based solar cell by 0.9% by applying single‐walled carbon nanotubes as the topmost layer. The cell also showed a slight increase in the short circuit current density, from 16.9 to 17.9 mA/cm2.

The losers in a world which no longer runs on fossil fuels are obvious but the dividend from shrugging off hydrocarbon dependency will be spread around most of the world so it is the nations which are winning the cleantech manufacturing and intellectual property race which appear best positioned for the future.