June 2020’s episode of the Solar Media Podcast is now available to listen to, and it’s jam packed with insight and discussion around a flurry of activity in the US and Europe.

Fluence’s proposal to use two large-scale battery storage systems to ease electricity transmission issues between the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales has been published by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) this week.

QCELLS has invested AU$5 million (US$3.45 million) in SwitchDin, an Australian distributed energy resources (DERs) software company that offers capabilities including virtual power plant aggregation and microgrid-forming.

The business case for behind-the-meter (BTM) battery storage in Australia appears to be positive, according to a University of Queensland report on the performance of a 1.1MW / 2.15MWh Tesla battery energy storage system (BESS).

An Australian government-backed trial to create “virtual gas wells” using renewable electricity may demonstrate that small-scale, “stackable” units could be viable in making power-to-gas technology work at scale, the company providing electrolysers for the project has said.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has signed a loan deal for its first wind energy-plus-battery storage project in Thailand, which is also the country’s first private sector initiative to combine the two technologies at scale.

A survey of over 2,000 “senior business leaders” in G20 countries has found that electric vehicles and battery storage are the most popular assets to invest in among non-power generation technologies in the energy sector.

The cost of battery energy storage has continued on its trajectory downwards and now stands at US$150 per megawatt-hour for battery storage with four hours’ discharge duration, making it more and more competitive with fossil fuels. Andy Colthorpe spoke to Tifenn Brandily, lead author of BloombergNEF’s latest LCOE report.

Australia’s government-owned green bank, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), has pledged AU$300 million (US$192 million) of existing funding towards “building investor confidence in renewable hydrogen”.

Solar Media’s Liam Stoker and Andy Colthorpe discuss the continuing effects of COVID-19 on worldwide power markets, reflecting on IEA forecasts for historic energy demand lows and what they mean for renewables.