After reporting last week on the findings from EMMES, the European Market Monitor on Energy Storage from Delta-ee and trade association EASE, which demonstrated a big rise in installations by MWh in 2017 across the continent, we delved further behind another record-breaking year with the report’s lead author, Valts Grintals of Delta-ee.
At this year’s Intersolar Europe/ees Europe event, Ron Shen of GoodWe spoke on camera with our sister site PV Tech. The China headquartered inverter manufacturer, which has recently diversified into adding capabilities such as module-level monitoring and optimisation to its range and launched products specifically aimed at the growing market for bi-facial (two-sided) solar panels, sees energy storage as a critical component of a successful future PV business.
Australia’s energy and environment minister has hailed the country’s accelerating residential energy storage sales as a report has emerged from Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel which says the “financial equation is straightforward” for adding batteries to home PV systems.
Europe’s installed base of electrical energy storage leaped by almost 50% during 2017 but perhaps the bigger takeaway is the growing share of battery systems installed behind-the-meter, an analyst has said.
Despite the growing interest and deployment figures for lithium-ion batteries for stationary energy storage, its ‘predecessor’ lead acid still has a strong role to play in enabling more and more people to go solar, a representative of Trojan Battery has argued.
California utility PG&E is seeking approval for four large-scale battery energy storage projects it has selected from a competitive solicitation, including two systems which would be over 1GWh each.
BYD has just opened a gigawatt-scale lithium battery factory in Qinghai Province, a few days after a senior company representative told Energy-Storage.news that, like electric vehicles (EVs), it is only a matter of time before lithium batteries for stationary storage reach mainstream acceptance.
‘Batwind’, a much-talked about battery storage project due to being the first grid storage system connected to an offshore floating wind farm 25km off the Scottish coast, is now online.
Leclanché and VRB Energy, two providers in very different areas of energy storage, have struck up joint ventures (JVs) intended to assist them in scaling up and hitting new markets, while Ice Energy has netted fresh funding.
Home storage systems have been considered an ‘early adopter’ market in many parts of the world, perhaps more important as a way that individuals can control their own green energy use and save energy than as a means of generating big money returns.
