Thursday, 27 August 2026

Offshore wind projects in Australia's Gippsland zone are sizing turbines at around 15 MW, and at that scale only 750 MW of the pipeline risks failing to secure a suitable installation vessel, Jernetz told RenewEconomy. Turbine sizes are plateauing there because ever-larger machines strain ports and boats, and manufacturers cannot find economies of scale above that point.

The vessel market is already tight. UK research house Westwood puts utilisation rates for offshore wind vessels in the 70 per cents, and that is before a swathe of major projects in Asia and Europe start construction, according to RenewEconomy.

BNEF estimates the current wait to attract offshore wind vessels at four to five years, and RenewEconomy reported that drawing boats to a small industry in the far southern hemisphere may cost more and take longer than that.

One workaround on the table is Feederdock, a floating offshore rig designed by German maritime company ONP. The main jacket vessel never enters port under the design. Instead, feeder vessels with a 6.2m draft carry components out from shore, and a 3,200 tonne crane assembles the turbine at sea.

Build times are not short. Energy Estate commercial director Mark Richards said the jack-up vessel would take four years to construct, with each feeder boat requiring two years, according to RenewEconomy.

The supply squeeze extends beyond Australia. New Zealand revived its offshore wind industry in July through regulatory legislation, RenewEconomy reported, adding another southern-hemisphere claimant to the same constrained pool of installation assets.

Engie's Assú Sol complex in northeastern Brazil holds 752 MW (AC) of capacity and ranks as the largest operational PV project in the company's global portfolio, according to pv magazine.

The site is not a single plant. Assú Sol groups 16 integrated solar plants, pv magazine reported.

Those plants occupy 2,344 hectares in the state of Rio Grande do Norte in northeast Brazil, per the same report.

Nearly 172,000 solar installations have been fitted across the United Kingdom since the start of 2026, according to UK DESNZ. July alone accounted for close to 28,000 completions across homes, businesses and larger-scale projects, behind only March and June this year.

Rooftop systems drove the monthly total. More than 19,800 rooftop solar panels were installed in July, which UK DESNZ described as equivalent to one installation every two minutes. Rooftop accounted for more than 7 in 10 installations during the month.

The South East ranked as the top region for deployment, with 22,628 installations this year, taking its cumulative total to 305,101, a 14% increase since last July, according to the same release.

Growth was broader than the South East. Wales recorded an 18% rise in installations over the last 12 months, Scotland grew by 14%, and the North East increased by 11%.

UK DESNZ said major retailers including Currys, B&Q, Screwfix and Amazon are preparing to offer plug-in solar panels following changes introduced by government.

Energy Minister Michael Shanks said households across Britain are embracing solar power and installing record numbers of solar panels to generate clean, homegrown power, helping them cut their energy bills.

Ireland has passed 3 GW of installed solar capacity, according to Irish PV association Solar Ireland, reported by pv magazine. The last official government statement on installation numbers, issued in June, put the figure at 2.6 GW.

The milestone comes four years after the country's first utility-scale solar farm was connected to the grid in 2022, per pv magazine.

Rooftop systems account for a large share of the deployment. "Four years later, we have more than 200,000 homes with solar on their roofs," said Solar Ireland CEO Ronan Power, as quoted by pv magazine.

On the grid-scale side, solar farms generated 1.1 GWh of Ireland's electricity in 2025, according to Central Statistics Office figures cited by pv magazine. That output was 51% higher than the 2024 total.

The Irish solar industry remains set on a 2030 target of 8 GW of installed capacity, pv magazine reported.

Developers are preparing for the country's sixth renewable energy auction, RESS 6, which is due in December. It will be the first Irish auction to incorporate the European Union's new rules on non-price criteria under the Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA). Those criteria shift auction scoring away from price alone, changing how bids are ranked in a market where the installed base has roughly tripled since its first utility-scale connection.

The gap between the 3 GW figure reported by Solar Ireland and the 2.6 GW in the June government statement reflects deployment added since that count. Reaching 8 GW by 2030 requires more than doubling the current installed base.

New US residential solar generating capacity will fall 21% this year against 2025, according to a Wood Mackenzie projection cited by Inside Climate News.

The contraction has already claimed one of the sector's largest installers. Freedom Forever of California, which was active in about 30 states, filed for bankruptcy in April and is now selling off assets, Inside Climate News reported.

The downturn arrives after a long decline in system costs. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory data cited by Inside Climate News put the median installed rooftop solar price at USD 3.62 per watt in 2025, down from USD 15.72 per watt in 2001 in inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars. The outlet attributed the drop to production efficiency and other factors.

Employment gives a sense of what is exposed. Solar installation companies employed about 178,713 people in 2024, according to the latest Solar Jobs Census from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.

American K-12 schools now host 2.4 GW of solar capacity, enough to power more than 450,000 homes, according to a Generation180 report covered by Solar Builder.

The report finds that nearly one in seven American K-12 students attends a school that uses solar energy. Generation180 puts the installed base at about 9% of K-12 schools nationwide, or 10,840 schools, with an average system size of 225 kW.

School solar capacity has tripled since 2016, according to the study.

California holds the largest fleet, with roughly 895.3 MW spread across 2,921 schools, Solar Builder reported. The state also led five-year cumulative capacity growth, adding 273.7 MW of school solar from 2021 to 2025.

EKPO Fuel Cell and Akkodis, a Swiss digital engineering specialist, will integrate and test an EKPO fuel cell stack in a 40-tonne hydrogen truck delivering system output of up to 360 kW, according to electrive.

The stack in question is the NM20, EKPO's most powerful unit, rated at up to 400 kW and designed for a service life of over 25,000 operating hours, electrive reported.

The demonstration vehicle follows a one-stack-one-system layout: a single NM20 supplies the full 360 kW system output, at efficiencies of up to 61%, per electrive. That configuration removes the need to combine multiple stacks to reach heavy-duty power levels.

EKPO is a joint venture between automotive suppliers ElringKlinger and OPmobility. Akkodis brings the digital engineering side of the integration and test work.

Development and commercialisation of the NM20 stack are backed under IPCEI, the European Important Project of Common European Interest funding programme, according to electrive.

A mine in Australia described as Gina Rinehart's flagship operation supplying electric vehicle materials has run on an average of 93% renewables so far this year, RenewEconomy reported.

The figure is an average across the year to date rather than a single-period reading, according to the same report. Wind turbines serving the site are at the Mt Weld mine, per a photograph credited to Lynas Rare Earths that accompanied the RenewEconomy article.

The renewables share places the mine's electricity supply well above conventional diesel-dependent remote mining operations, though RenewEconomy did not break the 93% figure into wind, solar, or storage components.