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The US Department of the Interior has announced a record return on bids from a solar energy auction conducted on land in the Amargosa desert of Nevada. 

Four land parcels totalling 23,675 acres were auctioned off for a combined $105m. Together, the land could produce up to 3GW of clean solar energy. 

NV Energy was the provisional winner of the two parcels located within the Amargosa Valley solar development zone. The company, which already operates a 25,000kW energy storage project in the state, secured 7,226 acres of land across the two parcels for a combined $81.85m. 

Boulevard Associates, a subsidiary of Floridian energy supplier NextEra Energy, was named as the preferred bidder for one 10,129-acre parcel with the high bid of $21m. For the other, Leeward Renewable Energy subsidiary Silver Star Solar was preferred following a $2.3m bid on a 6,320-acre package.

The European Commission has updated its sustainable finance taxonomy, tightening its criteria for what counts as green investment. 

The new package aims to increase transparency within the EU’s sustainable finance framework by adding new rules for environmental, social, and governance rating providers, the commission announced in a  statement. 

The move comes after original proposals prompted backlash from environmental campaigners and Green MEPs, who sent a letter to the EU in May. It argued that the classification of aviation and maritime sectors as sustainable is out of line with the bloc’s environmental objectives. 

The updated framework states that sustainable aviation fuels must make up 15% of a plane’s fuel mix by 2030 to be considered sustainable, a 5% increase from previous proposals. However, it still makes special allowances for industries that are fossil fuel heavy and considered more difficult to decarbonise at pace, including aviation.

Sweden’s parliament adopted a change to its energy targets on Tuesday, which will see it become 100% fossil fuel-free by 2045.  

The country previously sought to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045.   

The change means that nuclear generation can count towards the government’s energy targets. Sweden’s Government voted to phase-out nuclear power 40 years ago, but in June 2010 parliament voted to repeal the policy. The government elected last year seeks to promote nuclear power. 

Sweden has set a target to become carbon neutral by 2045. Electricity demand in the country is expected to reach 300 terawatt-hours by 2040.  

“This creates the conditions for nuclear power development,” Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said in parliament. “We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity and we need a stable energy system.”  

In 2016, Sweden’s parliament agreed that new nuclear reactors could be built at existing sites. However, without subsidies, this has proven prohibitively expensive.

As the global output of solar panels increases, Australia is set to benefit from an electricity price fall of 10%, a report from the think-tank Climate Energy Finance calculates.   

The Solar Pivot report by analysts Tim Buckley and Xuyang Dong forecasts that “solar costs will halve again before 2030, underpinning an accelerating disruption of world energy markets and driving energy transition momentum”.   

Global installations of solar panels hit a record 268GW in 2022 and are projected to reach 1000GW by 2030. Prices of polysilicon, which is used for making thin panel wafers, have gone down by two-thirds since December 2022. A combination of cost reduction in the raw materials and a rising number of installations is bringing competitive advantages to Australia in the renewables market.

ThyssenKrupp Uhde, Holcim and the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) have announced the first tests of their new carbon capture and storage innovation. 

Testing is underway on the amine gas scrubbing unit, which was installed over the past year at Holcim’s cement plant in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany. Testing will be completed in 2025, at which point the participants will potentially look to apply it further. 

The aim of the project is to use amine gas treating to remove CO₂ emissions from exhaust gas at existing cement plants, storing it before utilising the concentrated CO₂ in other heavy industries. The technique is already used in other industries such as food production but has never been applied to cement production.