Monday, 27 July 2026

Quinbrook is seeking planning approval for large solar farms intended to supply electricity to Australia's move into silicon production for photovoltaic manufacturing, according to RenewEconomy.

The silicon-making centre sits at Lansdown and runs on solar power, RenewEconomy reported.

The approval request ties generation capacity directly to an industrial offtaker rather than to merchant market exposure, with the solar farms positioned to feed the silicon facility. Silicon is the base input for PV cells, placing the project upstream of solar panel manufacturing itself.

Hazer Group Ltd and KBR have completed a standardized Process Design Package for the Hazer Process, a blueprint sized for turquoise hydrogen plants of 30,000 tonnes per annum, according to Hydrogen Fuel News. The package opens the technology to global licensing.

The Hazer Process applies methane pyrolysis, splitting natural gas into hydrogen and solid graphitic carbon rather than releasing CO2, Hydrogen Fuel News reported. The solid carbon output is what separates turquoise hydrogen from the gray route, where the carbon leaves as gas.

Hydrogen Fuel News said the standardized engineering blueprint is aimed at licensing into steel, ammonia, and methanol production. Those three industries are among the largest existing consumers of hydrogen as a feedstock, which makes a licensable, repeatable plant design the commercial lever rather than a bespoke one-off build.

Standardizing the design at a single capacity point is the mechanism here: a fixed 30,000 tpa configuration removes front-end engineering from each deployment and lets a licensee take the same package to multiple sites.

ARENA has pledged up to A$32 million to HAMR Energy for a biomass-to-fuel chain that pairs forestry residues with green hydrogen, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

The plant is planned for Australia's Green Triangle region, where HAMR Energy intends to run a 200 MW+ electrolyser to supply hydrogen at scale, Hydrogen Fuel News reported.

Output is expected to reach 300,000 t of renewable methanol and 140 million L of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) each year, per the same report.

The design links two feedstock streams into one conversion route: forestry residues on the carbon side, electrolytic hydrogen on the energy side. Methanol and SAF are the two products drawn from that combination.

ARENA's commitment is capped rather than fixed, structured as a maximum of A$32 million.

Meeting the EU's renewables targets would save twice as much gas as Qatar could supply to the bloc by 2030, according to IEEFA.

Heat pumps, solar and wind together could cut EU gas demand by around a quarter by 2030 if installation targets are met, IEEFA said. The institute estimates those same technologies already trimmed EU gas demand in 2024 by roughly two-thirds of the volume of Qatari liquefied natural gas the bloc imported that year.

The recent record is substantial. IEEFA puts the reduction in EU gas demand between 2021 and 2024 at approximately 78.5 billion cubic metres, a 20% decline. Renewables and heat pump deployment, alongside gas demand reduction policies, were significant drivers of that fall, according to the institute.

The cuts were spread across every consuming sector. IEEFA reports that over the same period EU households reduced gas use by 24%, industry by 20%, commercial and public services by 19%, and electricity and heat generation by 18%.

Demand destruction has not stopped the bloc buying more seaborne cargoes. EU LNG imports rose 84% between 2021 and 2025, hitting a record high, IEEFA said.

The policy frame dates to the European Commission's REPowerEU Plan, launched in May 2022 to end EU dependence on Russian energy imports through lower energy consumption, wider use of renewables and alternative supply sources, according to IEEFA.

The Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) has started connecting the 20 MW Los Tecales photovoltaic plant to Costa Rica's national electricity system, according to pv magazine.

The plant sits in the canton of Nandayure in Guanacaste province and was developed by Solar Generation Sur SA, pv magazine reported.

Los Tecales is one of five private photovoltaic projects that ICE awarded in April 2024, a group totalling 86 MW of installed capacity, according to the same report.

All five projects were awarded at an energy purchase price of USD 0.05626/kWh, per pv magazine.

Seatrium Offshore Renewable Services has started building a new operations hub in Lowestoft to widen its offshore wind capabilities and serve a growing pipeline of renewable energy projects across Europe, according to Offshore Engineer OEDigital.

The site is being set up to serve work already contracted. Offshore Engineer OEDigital reported that the hub will support delivery of four TenneT 2 GW offshore converter platform projects in the Netherlands and Germany. It will also support RWE's Sofia offshore wind farm.

The operations hub is intended to expand the company's offshore wind capabilities and back a growing pipeline of renewable energy projects across Europe.

Colin Yaxley, Managing Director of Seatrium Offshore Renewable Services, said demand for specialist offshore renewable services continues to grow across Europe and that the investment ensures the company is well positioned to support customers wherever they are delivering projects.

Croatia's first energy community has begun operating, drawing power from a rooftop solar plant on a volunteer fire brigade building in Špičkovina, a settlement near Zabok in the county of Krapina-Zagorje, northern Croatia, according to pv magazine.

The rooftop array currently measures 32 kW, with plans to double it to 64 kW, pv magazine reported.

Seventeen members share the output. They include volunteer firefighters, local residents, one micro-enterprise and the volunteer fire department itself, DVD Špičkovina, according to pv magazine.

The project was implemented by the North-West Croatia Regional Energy and Climate Agency (REGEA). The City of Zabok co-financed around half of the investment, and the members covered the other half, pv magazine reported.

Energy sharing is the newest element of Croatian energy legislation. Croatia's distribution system operator, HEP ODS, introduced the mechanism at the start of April this year, according to pv magazine.

Three energy communities are officially registered in Croatia, RES Croatia said, and the Špičkovina community is the first to begin operations, pv magazine reported.

The scheme arrives as national solar deployment climbs. Croatia's cumulative solar capacity passed the 1 GW threshold last year and exceeded 1.2 GW by the end of the year, according to pv magazine. Against that base, the Špičkovina installation is a test of the sharing rules rather than a volume addition: it establishes whether HEP ODS metering and settlement can allocate output from a single small rooftop across seventeen separate accounts.

European Union offshore wind commissioning dropped to 1 GW in 2025 from 1.7 GW the previous year, according to Offshore Magazine. Only France and Germany brought new offshore capacity online across the bloc during the year.

The grid queue dwarfs what is being built. WindEurope reported on June 30, 2026 that more than 500 GW of European wind capacity was still waiting for grid connection approval, Offshore Magazine said.

Government ambition points in the opposite direction to the build rate. Under the Investment Pact for the North Seas agreed in January 2026, nine European governments committed to installing 15 GW of offshore wind a year between 2031 and 2040, with USD 1.2 trillion in mobilized finance behind the target, according to Offshore Magazine.

Onshore permitting shows what administrative change can do. Germany permitted 21 GW of new onshore wind in 2025 by applying the "overriding public interest" principle more fully, Offshore Magazine reported. That single-country onshore figure is 21 times the entire EU offshore total commissioned in the same year.

The gap between the pact's 15 GW annual pace and last year's 1 GW of EU offshore commissioning is the measure of the delivery problem, and the 500 GW connection backlog sits between the two.

The European Commission has opened a non-binding infrastructure testing round under the EU Hydrogen Mechanism, aimed at measuring market interest in planned hydrogen pipelines and storage sites, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

Hydrogen Fuel News reported that the exercise is intended to guide future investment decisions rather than commit participants to volumes or capacity.

Transmission System Operators (TSOs), Hydrogen Network Operators (HNOs), and developers are invited to signal demand for pipeline and storage projects already in the works, per the same report.

The program sits on the EU Energy and Raw Materials Platform and runs with the backing of the European Hydrogen Bank, Hydrogen Fuel News said.