Mini-grids offer a quick route to electrification in parts of the world where grid extensions are unfeasible. Baptiste Possémé looks at the some of the technological and regulatory trends influencing the deployment of mini-grids in Africa and Asia.
Targeting a national economic goal in mind of making hydrogen competitive with natural gas, Australia’s government has put AU$70 million (US$44.3 million) into a “deployment funding round” for renewable hydrogen.
“The elimination of solar energy’s intermittency and ensuring its 24-hour availability at grid-competitive cost is the holy grail and RayGen has found it”.
Australian state governments of Western Australia and the Northern Territory have budgeted for measures to support renewables in the past few days, primarily through supporting batteries at large-scale, residential and community level.
Home batteries in a South Australia delivered significant revenues from their first six months of participation in a virtual power plant to help balance the grid, even with only an initial 1MW – 2MW of aggregated customer systems participating.
“The bottom line is that this is a good business decision. We will get back our money in eight to 10 years at the current price of power. As the price of energy goes up, we’ll pay it back even quicker.”
In the past couple of weeks, national and state government organisations in Australia have announced various stages of development for solar projects with a range of advanced and innovative storage solutions attached.
AutoGrid has been developing “co-optimisation” capabilities that will allow residential battery storage deployed to mitigate power outages to continue participating in market opportunities.
Developers of two significant solar-plus-storage projects in the Australian state of New South Wales have been given the go-ahead, with only minor conditions added to their proposals.
