Thursday, 2 July 2026

Salzgitter AG and EWE AG signed a binding offtake agreement for around 10,000 tonnes of green hydrogen each year, according to hydrogenfuelnews.com. Deliveries under the contract are set to begin in 2030 for an initial seven-year term.

Salzgitter will complement the external supply with its own 100 MW electrolyser on-site, hydrogenfuelnews.com reported. The hydrogen supports the steelmaker's low-carbon production shift.

Separately, South Korea has launched hydrogen power auctions offering 1.43 TWh of generation under long-term contracts, according to hydrogenfuelnews.com. The auctions set aside 500 GWh exclusively for low-carbon hydrogen sources, while 930 GWh can draw on a wider range of hydrogen options.

South Korea's first clean hydrogen power bidding market launched in 2024 under the Hydrogen Economy Promotion and Hydrogen Safety Management Act, hydrogenfuelnews.com reported.

A research team reported an all-perovskite tandem solar cell that reaches 29.1% efficiency without using PEDOT:PSS, the highest figure logged for that configuration to date.

In place of PEDOT:PSS, the group used a phenothiazine-functionalized self-assembled monolayer called 4PAPT as the hole transport layer. The paper reports that 4PAPT drives a direct phase transition, sharpens crystal orientation, and cuts non-radiative recombination losses.

Encapsulated devices held 90% of their starting efficiency past 800 hours of maximum power point tracking under simulated one-sun illumination at around 40 C.

The same interface approach produced a narrow-bandgap single-junction perovskite cell rated at 23.2% efficiency, showing the chemistry carries through to the bottom subcell on its own.

PEDOT:PSS has served as a standard hole transport layer in perovskite research, but its acidic, moisture-drawing character has been tied to degradation during long-duration testing. Swapping it for self-assembled monolayer chemistry is one way researchers have chased both higher output and longer operating life in tandem stacks.

The work appears in Joule under the title "Interface-mediated crystallization enables PEDOT:PSS-free all-perovskite tandems with 29.1% efficiency and enhanced durability".

Gas set Spanish wholesale electricity prices 9% of the time across the first five months of 2026, down from 52% in 2021, according to Ember data cited by pv magazine.

The decline follows a wind and solar expansion that lifted output 37% between 2021 and 2025. From May 2025 through February 2026, Spain installed 1.3 GW of new wind and solar capacity each month on average, pv magazine reported.

With gas exerting less pull on price formation, Spanish households save an estimated EUR 10 per month on electricity, according to Ember. The price gap with neighbouring markets showed in March, when average Italian wholesale prices hit EUR 143/MWh against EUR 42/MWh in Spain.

Large-scale storage capacity in Spain quadrupled in 2025, and Ember expects it to quadruple again in 2026. By May 2026, roughly 6 GW of renewable capacity was supplying ancillary services, which could ease reliance on combined-cycle gas plants for grid stability, pv magazine reported.

The capacity additions came alongside regulatory reforms to strengthen power system resilience after the Iberian blackout on 28 April 2025. Those reforms accompanied the continued build-out through the following months.

The Ember figures show a widening split between Spain and central and southern markets where gas-fired plants still set the marginal price. Spanish households now sit largely outside gas-linked wholesale swings, with renewables clearing most hours.

A research team led by corresponding author Kun Yang has built a scene-aware model that reads panel surface temperature at utility-scale photovoltaic plants from MODIS thermal infrared satellite data. Standard land-surface emissivity methods misread panel temperature because they treat solar modules as generic ground cover.

Each MODIS pixel spans 1 km, so a single reading blends PV modules with inter-row gaps, vegetation, access roads, and bare soil. Pulling a clean panel temperature out of that mixed signal has been the core obstacle for satellite thermal products over solar farms.

Yang said that assigning panels the emissivity of a typical natural surface pushes retrieved temperature into a systematic cold bias of around 10 C. The new model corrects for the optical properties of the modules instead.

During the warm season, the algorithm cut root mean square error from a conventional baseline range of 10.8-18.9 C to 3.7-8.6 C. It narrowed the cold bias from roughly -10 to -17 C down to -2 to -3 C, an improvement that lowers PV power simulation bias by 3-5%.

The team checked the model against ground measurements at two utility-scale plants: an arid installation in Wujiaqu, Xinjiang, and a humid site in Ganzi on the eastern Tibetan Plateau, Sichuan Province. The two locations bracket sharply different climates for Chinese solar operators.

That 3-5% cut in power simulation bias feeds directly into yield modeling, where module efficiency drops as cell temperature climbs. Satellite-derived temperature maps can extend that monitoring to plants without dense on-site sensor networks.

The European Commission will withhold EU funding from projects that install inverters and other energy hardware supplied by vendors it labels high-risk, a decision aimed squarely at solar developers that depend on those suppliers.

pv magazine reports that the financing curbs will touch an estimated 10-20% of the money flowing into Europe's solar market, and that officials have flagged the same approach for wind and battery energy storage systems.

The rule does not force existing hardware offline. More than 300 GW of Chinese-made inverter capacity already runs across the continent and would keep operating for years even under an import ban, pv magazine reports. That installed fleet sets the near-term security exposure whatever pace the funding rules take on new construction.

The December 2025 compromise of 30 solar plants in Poland, which exploited VPN vulnerabilities, is being used as evidence that the risk extends beyond the inverter itself into the wider control systems, pv magazine reports.

The funding curb follows a wider regulatory push. Earlier this year the Commission published the draft Cyber Security Act 2, naming solar as a sector under examination. Developers now face two open questions at once: how the high-risk vendor label will apply to grant and concessional finance decisions, and how the draft act will set compliance duties for new and existing fleets.

Developers that rely on EU-backed finance must now vet their equipment supply chains against the restriction, while owners of the 300 GW Chinese-made inverter base confront a separate, slower discussion over retrofits, monitoring, and network segmentation, pv magazine reports.

Kyrgyzstan has switched on a 175 MW solar plant, the opening phase of a project designed to reach 1.9 GW, according to pv magazine.

That first stage brought online the 175 MW array together with a 110 kV substation and transmission links, according to pv magazine. Spending on the opening phase came to USD 130 million, national news agency Kabar reported.

The installation, named ROX Issyk-Kul, is built, funded and run by Vietnam's Rox Energy Global and RECA LLC. Construction started in July 2025 after the developers signed a deal with Kyrgyzstan's Ministry of Energy.

The new phase adds more solar than the country had installed to date. IRENA figures put Kyrgyzstan's cumulative solar capacity at 100 MW by the end of 2025, up from 0 MW a year earlier, according to pv magazine. The 175 MW now energized runs past that entire tally.

ROX Issyk-Kul is not the only utility-scale solar contract in the pipeline. Kyrgyzstan's National Investment Agency signed an agreement with Hungary's Electron Holding last November covering 300 MW of solar. A timeline for the remaining phases of the 1.9 GW project has not been disclosed.