Tuesday, 28 July 2026

New offshore wind contract awards collapsed to 11.4 GW in 2025 from 56 GW the year before, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, as cited by Mongabay.

Grid connections told a different story. Mongabay reported that 9.3 GW of offshore wind capacity came online globally in 2025. China accounted for 6.6 GW of that total, while European countries added around 3 GW, per the same report.

The pipeline thinned as developers walked away from committed projects. Ørsted canceled the 2.4 GW Hornsea 4 project in the UK in May 2025, citing an increase of supply chain costs, higher interest rates, and an increase in the risk to construct and operate, according to Mongabay. The project would have ranked among the largest offshore wind farms in the world.

TotalEnergies followed a year later. In May 2026 the company pulled out of offshore wind plans in Germany, with two major projects totaling 3 GW, citing rising construction costs and grid connection delays, Mongabay reported.

Policy has removed capacity as well. The Trump administration has spent USD 2.6 billion buying back leases for offshore wind projects to ensure they do not proceed, according to Mongabay.

Where fleets are already built, the output is material. Mongabay reported that offshore wind supplied nearly 20% of the electricity the United Kingdom generated in 2025, with around 3,000 turbines producing enough power for approximately 15.5 million homes.

Turbine scale continues to climb. Mingyang Smart Energy unveiled a 50 MW configuration pairing two 25 MW turbines on a single floating platform, according to Mongabay. Floating designs extend siting options beyond the shallow water depths that fixed-bottom foundations require.

The gap between the 11.4 GW awarded and the 9.3 GW connected leaves little cushion for the years when today's contracted projects would have reached commissioning.

A team at the University of Sydney in Australia has measured a power conversion efficiency of 30.2% on a two-terminal monolithic perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell with an area of 10 cm², according to pv magazine.

The measurement was confirmed by the PV Performance Lab at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), pv magazine reported.

Cell area is the substantive change. The device is ten times larger than the team's earlier 1 cm² perovskite-silicon tandem cell, which reached 30% efficiency and was independently certified by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in 2024, according to pv magazine. Scaling from a square centimetre to ten while holding efficiency above 30% is the step that separates laboratory records from anything a manufacturer can use.

On the device architecture, pv magazine reported that a heterojunction silicon cell serves as the bottom junction of the tandem stack.

The work was led by Professor Anita Ho-Baillie, John Hooke Chair of Nanoscience, per pv magazine. The team said the result reinforces the University of Sydney's position as a leader in perovskite-silicon tandem research.

Hawaiian Electric has filed an Integrated Grid Planning proposal to add renewables and energy storage across Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi Island, and Maui, according to CleanTechnica.

The utility will seek an additional 500 MW of firm generation on Oʻahu, CleanTechnica reported. Firm generation refers to capacity a system operator can call on when needed, the counterpart to variable solar and wind output that the storage component of the filing is meant to shift across the day.

CleanTechnica describes the procurement as one of the state's largest energy procurements ever and as significant progress toward 100% renewable energy. The three islands named in the filing are separate grids rather than one interconnected system, so capacity procured for one cannot be dispatched to another.

The filing sits in the Integrated Grid Planning docket, the process Hawaiian Electric uses to set resource needs before opening competitive solicitations. That sequencing means the 500 MW figure is a procurement target rather than contracted capacity.

A 22 MW solar plant at the Natural Resources Development College (NRDC) in Zambia is feeding electricity into the national grid, ZANIS reported. The plant was commissioned on March 24, 2026, at a total cost of USD 17.5 million.

According to ZANIS, the project was developed by Kiyona Energy Limited in partnership with NRDC. Peter Sakala, Head of Projects at Kiyona Energy Limited, said the plant is currently injecting 22 MW into the national grid and can supply power to approximately 15,000 households.

The installation was established under the Presidential Solar Initiative through a partnership between NRDC, Kiyona Energy Limited and ZESCO Limited, ZANIS reported.

A research team from Switzerland and the Netherlands has released an open-source framework for intraday, national-scale PV power forecasting that pairs satellite-based deep learning with optical-flow techniques and numerical weather prediction models, according to pv magazine.

The framework was tested against Switzerland's installed base. Per pv magazine, the researchers trained a separate XGBoost model for each of the 6,434 operational PV systems identified in the country. That per-system approach replaces the single aggregated model typically used for fleet-level output estimates.

Accuracy at the national aggregate was the headline result. Satellite-based models forecast daily total PV generation with relative errors below 10% on 82% of days across the study period of 2019-2020, pv magazine reported.

The forecasting chain runs on clear-sky index imagery. Each model received four consecutive clear-sky index images covering the previous hour and predicted the next eight images over a two-hour forecast horizon, according to pv magazine. Two hours is the window that matters most for intraday electricity trading and for balancing decisions taken after the day-ahead auction has cleared.

The combination of three method families in one pipeline addresses different failure modes. Optical flow tracks cloud motion from image to image and works well over short horizons; numerical weather prediction carries further out but resolves individual cloud fields poorly; satellite-based deep learning sits between them.

The work was published in the journal Energy and AI under the title "Intraday spatiotemporal PV power prediction at national scale using satellite-based solar forecast models," per pv magazine.

System-level forecast error translates directly into balancing costs, since transmission operators must procure reserves to cover the gap between scheduled and delivered solar output. Distributed rooftop fleets are harder to forecast than utility-scale plants because output data from thousands of small systems is fragmented or unavailable in real time. Modelling each of the 6,434 systems separately, rather than scaling up a representative sample, is the design choice the Swiss test case demonstrates.

Because the code is published open source, other jurisdictions can apply the same chain to their own PV registries and satellite feeds.

Floating photovoltaics on the reservoir behind Morocco's Hassan Addakhil Dam would deliver electricity at a real levelized cost of USD 0.045/kWh with an internal rate of return of 7.36%, according to research from Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University reported by pv magazine.

The modelling tested several coverage scenarios for the reservoir. First-year output ranged from 316.2 GWh at the low end to 948.6 GWh at the high end, pv magazine reported.

Water retention is the second output of the design. Covering 15% of the reservoir surface suppresses 70% of evaporation across the covered area, which the researchers put at water savings of up to 4.18 million cubic meters per year.

The cost figure rests in part on a thermal advantage over dry land. Panels sitting on water run roughly 5 to 7 degrees cooler than ground-mounted equivalents during the summer period, and that cooling translates into an annual energy gain of 10.6% against conventional land-based installations, according to pv magazine. Cell efficiency falls as module temperature rises, so the reservoir surface acts as a passive heat sink through the hottest months.

The economics reported for the site sit against a national utility-scale solar base that remains small. Morocco added 204 MW of new utility-scale solar capacity in 2025, lifting cumulative utility-scale capacity to 1.29 GW, pv magazine reported. On the upper coverage scenario for a single reservoir, the modelled 948.6 GWh of first-year generation would come from one water body.

The 7.36% internal rate of return is the metric that determines whether a developer or a public offtaker can finance the build, and the study treats the deployment as economically viable on that basis. Dual-purpose siting is what carries it: the same surface area produces power and cuts reservoir losses, and the 4.18 million cubic meters retained annually accrues to whoever manages the dam rather than to the generator.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) published research on 28 July 2026 assessing hydrogen bioenergy with carbon capture and storage technologies, the United Kingdom department said. The evidence was gathered by the Energy Systems Catapult under a DESNZ commission.

Five routes were examined, according to DESNZ: biomass gasification with carbon capture and storage (CCS), anaerobic digestion paired with steam methane reforming and CCS, wastewater ammonia conversion, biomass pyrolysis with CCS, and dark fermentation.

DESNZ describes hydrogen BECCS as a technology that pairs hydrogen production with the capture of carbon dioxide for storage. Two of the five assessed routes rely on gasification or pyrolysis of biomass feedstock, while a third converts ammonia recovered from wastewater.

The anaerobic digestion route combines biogas production with steam methane reforming and CCS, placing the capture stage downstream of the reforming step rather than at the point of combustion. Dark fermentation, the fifth route in the assessment, produces hydrogen biologically.

The publication is framed by DESNZ as an updated assessment, following the department's decision to commission the Energy Systems Catapult to collect evidence on the technologies.

Average wholesale electricity prices in Australia's National Electricity Market fell 47% year-on-year to AUD 74/MWh in the June quarter, their lowest quarterly average since 2020, and AEMO attributed the drop to a record renewable share, according to pv magazine.

That renewable share reached a June-quarter high of 42.1% of NEM generation, up from 37.1% a year earlier, pv magazine reported.

Rooftop capacity did much of the lifting. Cumulative rooftop solar in the NEM rose to 26.4 GW at the end of the June quarter from 25.7 GW three months earlier, according to pv magazine. Output from distributed PV averaged 2,520 MW over the quarter, a record for the period and 6.9% higher year-on-year, lifting its share of the energy mix to 10.3%.

Household batteries scaled faster in percentage terms. Residential storage capacity across the NEM expanded by almost 3.3 GWh, or 41%, over the quarter, pv magazine reported.

Grid-scale commissioning also accelerated. Fourteen new generation and storage projects totalling 3.9 GW reached full output during the quarter, double the previous quarterly record, according to pv magazine.

Gas was the loser in the dispatch stack. Gas-powered generation in the NEM averaged 1,050 MW, down 30% year-on-year and the lowest June-quarter average since 2003, pv magazine reported.

The picture diverged in the separate Western Australian market. In the Wholesale Electricity Market, average real-time wholesale prices rose 30% year-on-year to AUD 118/MWh, according to pv magazine.

Researchers at Westlake University have built an anion exchange membrane, designated PAMQ, that reduces superacid use by 62.5%, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

The team behind the membrane is based in Hangzhou, Hydrogen Fuel News reported.

Durability is the second claim attached to the material. Hydrogen Fuel News reported that PAMQ endures alkaline stability testing running to 10,000 hours.

Under load, the membrane has run for more than 2,500 hours at a current density of 1.0 A/cm² in electrolyzers using non-platinum-group-metal catalysts, according to Hydrogen Fuel News. That combination matters for anion exchange membrane water electrolysis, where the appeal over proton exchange membrane systems is the ability to drop precious-metal catalysts, and where membrane degradation in caustic conditions has been the constraint on stack lifetime.

Superacid chemistry is used in making the polymer backbones of high-performance ion exchange membranes. Cutting that input by 62.5% addresses both the cost and the handling burden of the synthesis step, per the figure reported by Hydrogen Fuel News.

The PosHYdon pilot has produced its first green hydrogen offshore, on the fully electrified Q13a-A platform in the North Sea off the Netherlands, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

The platform sits about 13 kilometers off the Dutch coast, Hydrogen Fuel News reported.

The pilot combines offshore wind power, electrolysis, and existing gas infrastructure on the same installation, per the same report. Hydrogen Fuel News described the setup as the world's first demonstration of combined offshore wind, gas, and hydrogen systems operating together.

Zambian state-owned utility ZESCO has commissioned the second phase of the Chisamba solar power plant, lifting the complex to 200 MW of generation capacity, according to pv magazine.

The added 100 MW took seven months to build and created more than 1,400 jobs, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema said, as reported by pv magazine.

The expansion came in at USD 70 million against an initial estimate of USD 100 million, pv magazine reported. That is below the USD 100 million price tag attached to the first phase, which was completed by May 2025 with ZESCO subsidiary Kariba North Bank Extension Power Corp as developer and Powerchina as engineering, procurement and construction contractor, according to the same report.

Chisamba sits inside a government programme to deploy 1 GW of utility-scale solar by the end of the year, pv magazine reported. The wider goal is to raise Zambia's installed electricity generation capacity to 10 GW by 2030.