Friday, 14 August 2026

Portugal's MCA group has brought two large-scale off-grid solar-plus-storage plants online in Angola since December 2025, according to pv magazine.

The first of the pair, switched on in December 2025, was described by MCA as Africa's largest off-grid renewable energy system, pv magazine reported.

One of the sites, the Cazombo photovoltaic park in eastern Angola, pairs a 25.4 MW off-grid solar array with a 75.26 MWh battery energy storage system, according to pv magazine.

The plants sit inside Angola's rural electrification program. That program targets 46 autonomous solar and storage minigrids serving 60 communities across six provinces, pv magazine reported.

Off-grid minigrids of this scale carry their own generation and storage rather than drawing on transmission capacity, which places the full daily load-following duty on the battery. At Cazombo, the 75.26 MWh of storage backs 25.4 MW of solar output with no interconnection to fall back on.

The 46-minigrid target and the 60-community figure set the yardstick against which the two commissioned plants can be measured.

A parliamentary inquiry in Victoria, Australia, has handed down its findings on apartment energy, naming several matters that need urgent attention to fix failures of energy policy, according to RenewEconomy.

Roof area is the binding constraint for the buildings in question. Tall apartment blocks offer occupants almost no usable roof, and that shortage is pushing interest toward plug-in balcony panels mounted close to vertical, RenewEconomy reported.

Modelling for Tullamarine near Melbourne using PVWATTS gives that mounting style a workable case over the cooler part of the year. Across April to August, RenewEconomy said, output from a vertical or near-vertical array oriented anywhere between north-east and north-west matches what a rooftop array delivers. Outside that window the comparison is not made.

Two routes are open to apartment residents and owners: a panel clipped to a balcony by a single household, or photovoltaics built into the structure of the building itself.

China Huadian is set to finish a 195-kilometer high-pressure pure hydrogen transmission line this summer, connecting the Bayan Obo wind-solar hydrogen production hub to industrial demand in Baotou, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

The line will carry 100,000 metric tons of green hydrogen a year, Hydrogen Fuel News reported. It is engineered for a hydrogen pressure of about 6.3 MPa, per the same report.

On the supply side sits a wind-solar electrolysis base; on the demand side, steel and chemical plants in Baotou, according to Hydrogen Fuel News. That pairing puts electrolytic hydrogen directly into heavy industrial offtake rather than into blending or road transport.

Hydrogen Fuel News describes the project as one of China's first cross-regional pure hydrogen pipelines. Pure hydrogen service, as opposed to hydrogen blended into natural gas infrastructure, requires dedicated metallurgy and pressure management, and the stated 6.3 MPa design point places the line in high-pressure transmission territory.

The Inner Mongolia route matters because it separates the location of cheap wind and solar generation from the location of hydrogen consumption. Electrolysis sited at the renewable resource, with molecules moved 195 kilometers to steel and chemical users, is an alternative to building electrolyzers next to the factories and importing electricity instead.

LANXESS AG has converted the spray dryer at its Krefeld-Uerdingen iron oxide pigment plant to run on hydrogen instead of natural gas, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

The switch is expected to cut around 6,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, Hydrogen Fuel News reported.

Rather than build its own electrolysis capacity, LANXESS is taking co-product hydrogen from a chlor-alkali electrolysis facility operated by Covestro AG next door, the outlet said, which avoids the cost of adding new electrolyser capacity.

Hydrogen Fuel News describes the converted dryer as one of the first continuous, large-scale applications of hydrogen combustion in industry in Germany.

Spray drying is a heat-intensive step in iron oxide pigment production, and the fuel switch keeps the same process unit while changing what burns in it. Sourcing hydrogen that already exists as a by-product of an adjacent chemical process sidesteps the capital question that has slowed many industrial hydrogen projects: who pays for the electrolysers.

UNIDO has published a financing map setting out national, regional and international instruments, from grants to green bonds, to bankroll Morocco's industrial green hydrogen rollout, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

The document carries the title Financing Programmes for Green Hydrogen Application in Moroccan Industry and surveys national, regional and international funding options for green hydrogen production. Hydrogen Fuel News reports it was produced in partnership with the Green Climate Fund and Morocco's Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development.

The target sectors are named. Per Hydrogen Fuel News, the map is aimed at greening Morocco's fertilizer, steel and cement industries, three of the industrial branches where hydrogen substitution reaches process emissions that electrification alone does not cover.

The emphasis on instruments rather than projects matters for how Moroccan industrial offtakers approach capital structure. Grants and green bonds sit at opposite ends of the cost-of-capital range, and the map places both inside a single reference frame alongside regional and international channels. The involvement of the Green Climate Fund puts a multilateral climate financier next to the ministry responsible for energy transition policy in the same document.

Hydrogen Fuel News describes the survey as comprehensive across the three funding tiers it covers. For fertilizer, steel and cement producers weighing electrolyzer-linked investment, the practical question the map addresses is which of those tiers a given project can access.

Researchers at KIT have built a hybrid collector that pairs photovoltaics with passive radiative cooling, producing electricity, heat and cooling from a single surface at the same time, according to pv magazine.

The reported prototype results cover all three outputs. Per pv magazine, it delivered cooling of up to 6.5 C below ambient temperature, an electrical power density of 60.6 W/m², and heat at temperatures of up to 110.8 C.

The optical design splits the job between two elements. A transparent silicon dioxide plate coated with the silicone polymer polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) acts as the cooling layer, while a Fresnel lens concentrates sunlight onto a smaller photovoltaic-thermal collector behind it, pv magazine reported.

That geometry is what allows the same aperture to serve two opposing thermal functions: the PDMS-coated layer radiates heat away, and the concentrated beam raises the working temperature of the collector underneath.

The team set out its results in a study titled "Co-harvesting universe coldness and solar energy for tri-generation of cooling, electricity and heating," published in Cell Reports Physical Science, according to pv magazine.

The tri-generation framing matters for siting economics, because a single surface producing power, process-grade heat and sub-ambient cooling competes for roof or ground area only once rather than three times.

Neom Green Hydrogen Company (NGHC) has begun commissioning its 2.2 GW green hydrogen and ammonia project in Saudi Arabia, according to pv magazine.

The plant is designed to produce up to 600 tonnes per day of green hydrogen, pv magazine reported, drawing power from dedicated solar and wind generation.

That generation base totals 4 GW, and NGHC expects the solar and wind sites to be completed by mid-2026, followed by commissioning of the electrolysers, with product availability expected in 2027. The company said the plant "remains on track".

Ownership sits with a joint venture formed by Acwa, Air Products and Neom, according to pv magazine.