Thursday, 20 August 2026

Associate Professor Rhiyaad Mohamed of the University of Cape Town has secured an EQT Foundation grant to develop ultra-low-iridium anodes for proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysers, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

The award is the EQT Foundation Critical Minerals Science Grant, directed at ultra-low-iridium anode catalysts for proton exchange membrane water electrolysers, Hydrogen Fuel News reported.

Iridium sits on the anode side of PEM cells, where it drives the oxygen evolution reaction. The work aims to cut catalyst costs and support scalable green hydrogen production, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

PX Group and SoHHytec have started a pilot project in Switzerland producing green hydrogen onsite with a proprietary solar-to-hydrogen system, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

The demonstration sits at a PX Group plant in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel, Hydrogen Fuel News reported.

At the centre of the installation is SoHHytec's Arb photoelectrochemical platform, which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using concentrated sunlight, according to the same report. The design keeps hydrogen production at the point of consumption rather than trucking supply to the site.

Sunlight availability is the obvious constraint on that approach. Hydrogen Fuel News reported that the system falls back on renewable electricity when cloud cover or unfavourable weather cuts the solar input. That backup path keeps the unit operating outside clear-sky conditions rather than idling until direct sunlight returns.

A Chinese solar businessman who packed AUD 20,000 into a bag of tea and pushed it on a Clean Energy Council manager in Australia has lost his business visa and will fly out once released, RenewEconomy reported.

Zhu Guoxin, 40, would not let the manager refuse the tea when the two met at Camp Hill, a Brisbane suburb, on July 9, calling it "a cultural gift", according to RenewEconomy.

Zhu hid the cash in the tea after the Clean Energy Council turned down further payments to "hurry up" sign-off on Growatt New Energy products, an account he later admitted to, RenewEconomy reported.

Five Growatt applications were in play, all of them aimed at qualifying the products for clean energy subsidies in Australia, prosecutor Bimal Raut told the court.

Police caught Zhu at Sydney International Airport on July 24 at the boarding gate, and Queensland took custody of him under extradition a day later, per RenewEconomy.

The magistrate was told Zhu intends to buy his own ticket and depart Australia as soon as he walks free, with the business visa already cancelled.

Module manufacturers in the United States are assessing steel in place of aluminum for solar module frames, according to pv magazine. The publication attributes the shift in evaluation to domestic content requirements alongside quality concerns tied to bigger modules and thinner aluminum frames.

One product in that category is the Nextpower NX CoreFrame. Per pv magazine, the frames are roll formed from steel coils and require more than 50 bending steps to produce.

The design targets factory compatibility. According to pv magazine, the steel frames are intended as a drop-in replacement that requires no process changes at plants currently building modules with aluminum frames.

That compatibility claim matters for the domestic content calculation described by pv magazine, since a frame swap that leaves existing lines untouched avoids retooling for manufacturers responding to those requirements. The same reporting links the material question to module format, with thinner aluminum frames on larger modules cited among the quality concerns pushing manufacturers to look at steel.

Armidale mayor Sam Coupland says the New England Renewable Energy Zone will only proceed if the NSW state government commits about AUD 500 million to upgrade water security in his region, according to RenewEconomy.

The demand follows a resolution passed by the Armidale Regional Council in June, summarised by RenewEconomy as "no water, no REZ".

Coupland frames the funding as a precondition rather than a preference, tying the transmission and generation zone's progress directly to the water upgrade, per RenewEconomy. The council resolution set out the same position in four words before the mayor attached a figure to it.

Eric Sprott has committed C$10 million to MAX Power Mining's Lawson natural hydrogen project in Saskatchewan, according to Hydrogen Fuel News. The money funds commercial validation drilling and seismic mapping at the site.

Hydrogen Fuel News reported that the investment runs through 2176423 Ontario Ltd., described as Sprott's private investment arm. The vehicle's backing is directed at drilling and seismic studies at the Lawson Complex in Saskatchewan.

The stated aim of the work, per the same report, is to establish whether a new clean hydrogen source can be confirmed in western Canada. Natural hydrogen refers to hydrogen occurring in the subsurface rather than produced through electrolysis or from natural gas.

Seismic mapping typically precedes drilling in subsurface exploration, defining targets before capital is spent on wells. Commercial validation drilling, the second workstream named in the financing, tests whether measured volumes support a commercial case rather than a geological indication alone.

Paradip Port Authority has opened a tender for project management consultancy services covering the installation of a 1 MW electrolyser for green hydrogen production and the purchase of eight hydrogen fuel cell buses, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

The consultancy scope pairs on-site hydrogen production with a captive transport fleet. Hydrogen Fuel News reported that the tender covers procuring, commissioning, and maintaining eight 32-seater hydrogen fuel cell electric buses, which will carry employees and visitors within the port's grounds.

The port authority frames the package as reinforcement of its Green Hydrogen Hub status, complementing an approved green fuel jetty, per the same report.

The design keeps supply and demand on the same site: a single megawatt of electrolysis feeding a defined internal bus route, rather than hydrogen sold into an external offtake market. That structure removes the distribution question that has stalled larger fuel cell fleet plans, since the buses refuel where the hydrogen is made.

Solar installers and business owners in Mexico are reporting kidnappings, extortion, equipment theft, and other security incidents across several states, according to pv magazine, citing CPEF, an association representing PV integrators.

CPEF President Aldo Diaz Nuno described one case in which several installers traveling to Tabasco for an inspection were seized after leaving their hotel, with their captors demanding a ransom, pv magazine reported.

Diaz Nuno said comparable incidents have taken place in Chihuahua, Guerrero, and Sinaloa, according to pv magazine.

The association is preparing a document on the security situation. Per pv magazine, it is expected to be addressed to officials including President Claudia Sheinbaum and CFE Director General Emilia Esther Calleja Alor.

Tyczka Hydrogen GmbH has acquired an operational 5 MW green hydrogen hub certified as a renewable fuel of non-biological origin (RFNBO) in Hesse, Germany, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

The plant sits in the Hessisches Kegelspiel logistics park at Hünfeld-Michelsrombach, Hydrogen Fuel News reported.

The outlet said the site links a 4.8 MW wind turbine and future solar arrays to a 5 MW proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyser system supplied by Fest GmbH, through a partnership with ABO Energy. Direct coupling of the electrolyser to on-site renewable generation is the structural condition behind the RFNBO certification the hub already carries.

Output is intended for buses and long-haul trucks, with Tyczka Hydrogen targeting supply of certified green hydrogen to those fleets, per Hydrogen Fuel News. The outlet framed the purchase as aligned with Germany's drive to decarbonize heavy-duty transport.

Alongside heavy-duty refuelling capacity, Hydrogen Fuel News said the acquisition is intended to cut emissions and create local jobs.

Korea South-East Power (KOEN) and the Saemangeum Development Agency have signed a memorandum of understanding to build an integrated green hydrogen and renewable power complex at Saemangeum in Buan, North Jeolla Province, South Korea, according to Hydrogen Fuel News.

The project pairs generation, conversion, and reconversion on one site. Hydrogen Fuel News reports the plan covers 1 GW of onshore solar capacity, 320 MW of water electrolysis, and 100 MW of hydrogen power generation.

That configuration puts electrolysis at roughly a third of the solar capacity feeding it, a sizing choice that reflects the intermittent duty cycle of photovoltaic output rather than continuous operation. The 100 MW hydrogen power block sits downstream, converting stored hydrogen back to electricity.

The agreement is between a state-owned generator and the development agency responsible for the Saemangeum site, according to Hydrogen Fuel News. An MoU sets the terms of cooperation; it is not a final investment decision.

A rooftop solar array sitting within 10 meters of a household raises that household's chance of installing photovoltaics (PV) by 20% and its chance of buying an electric vehicle by 23%, according to pv magazine.

The underlying sample is large. Researchers worked from geocoded records for 260,000 households in the canton of Bern in Switzerland, tracked across 2008 to 2019, pv magazine reported.

A modelled scenario put a number on the knock-on effect of a single install. One extra solar PV system yields, at the median, 0.07 further PV systems and 0.05 further EVs among neighbours, plus 3.7 MWh in annual electricity savings attributed to peer effects, according to pv magazine.

Benedikt Janzen of Germany's University of Passau and Patrick Bigler of Switzerland's University of Lausanne wrote the paper, "Green spills: Peer effects in pro-environmental behaviors," which appears in the Journal of Public Economics, pv magazine reported.

The cross-category result is the sharper finding: the EV figure of 23% sits above the 20% recorded for copycat rooftop installations at the same 10-meter band. The 3.7 MWh estimate converts the spillover from a count of hardware into a consumption effect.

Hydro generation across ten systems with complete records reached 31.65 TWh between June 1 and August 15, 2026, the weakest of seven summers and 6.0% below the 33.69 TWh recorded over the same calendar window in the drought summer of 2022, according to pv magazine.

The shortfall was concentrated in reservoir plants. Measured against each system's own 2020 to 2025 average, reservoir output over the same period fell 42.7% in Austria, 37.9% in Italy, 29.1% in Romania and 25.9% in France, pv magazine reported.

Solar filled the gap. Across fifteen systems in the sample, summer solar generation climbed from 34.1 TWh in 2020 to 88.7 TWh in 2026, per pv magazine.

The growth in daytime photovoltaic supply also rewrote pumped-storage operating patterns. The peak charging hour moved from around 04:00 to between 13:00 and 14:00, and the correlation between hourly solar output and hourly pumping rose from zero to 0.86 over six summers, according to pv magazine. Pumps that once drew cheap overnight power now run on midday surplus.

That re-timing matters because reservoir hydro and pumped storage are the flexible resources systems lean on when thermal margins tighten in summer. With reservoir output down by more than a quarter in four of the countries measured, the stored-energy buffer available for evening peaks is smaller than in any of the prior six summers in the dataset.

The solar figure is the counterweight: 88.7 TWh in 2026 is more than two and a half times the 34.1 TWh delivered across the same fifteen systems in 2020, pv magazine reported. The pumping correlation of 0.86 indicates how tightly the charging cycle now tracks that midday output.

Solar policy support in China coincided with measurable declines in bird diversity across 2,344 counties tracked monthly from 2014 to 2023, according to Inside Climate News, reporting on a new study that paired policy assessment with biodiversity monitoring.

The researchers treated bird diversity as an indicator of ecosystem health and matched it against county-level policies promoting solar power over the ten-year window, Inside Climate News reported.

The effect was uneven. Inside Climate News reported that the authors found the decrease most pronounced in wealthier, non-arid counties and in areas with high numbers of birds that nest in vegetation. In desert regions and in poverty-designated counties, the authors reported no significant negative effect.

Satellite imagery complicated the picture further. Plant cover increased at solar project sites, according to Inside Climate News, a result the authors labelled "inferior greening". The term separates raw vegetation gain from habitat quality: more green pixels did not translate into more birds in the counties where diversity fell.

The scale of the deployment is the reason the finding carries weight beyond one country. China has installed nearly as many solar panels as the rest of the world combined, according to Inside Climate News.

The study's design ties the biodiversity signal to policy instruments rather than to individual projects, since the researchers assessed the policies promoting solar power alongside the monthly bird counts. Where those policies landed in arid or lower-income counties, the measured penalty did not appear.