Roundup: Activist-entrepreneur Danny Kennedy seeks innovative solutions for international showcase, Statoil and Scotland look at batteries for offshore wind, Tesla stops selling 10kWh Powerwall.
For over a decade, net metering has been a crucial component of the economic puzzle for renewable energy, allowing both residential and commercial rooftop PV owners to realise favourable returns on their solar equipment investment. John Merritt of Ideal Power Conversion looks at some of the arguments and counter-arguments and says solar-plus-storage could be the natural successor to the policy – starting at commercial and industrial (C&I) level.
Two initiatives have got underway in Europe, one in Germany and the other in Britain, aimed at accelerating battery development for electric vehicles and stationary storage respectively, while vacuum cleaner company Dyson has pledged a US$1.44 billion commitment to batteries – for cordless cleaning devices.
Puerto Rico’s financially troubled electric power authority PREPA will install a large-scale battery park at a 10MW PV farm, to help integrate the farm’s output and other renewables.
Energy Storage News visited the offices and production facilities of Sunamp, a maker of heat batteries, in East Lothian, Scotland to hear how the systems are made and how they were developed.
Germany-based inverter firm SMA Solar technology has qualified lithium-based energy storage systems from commercial battery system provider Tesvolt for use with SMA’s Sunny Island battery inverter.
Energy storage solutions combined with hybrid solar PV plants and diesel generators will soon benefit communities in two starkly contrasting locations – in a luxury Maldives resort and in Australia’s Aboriginal community.
Recharge A/S, an investment fund specialising in renewables, will take a 50.1% stake in a €24 million (US$26.7 million) micro grid on a remote Portuguese island that could prove the validity of such projects as an asset class.
German utility E.On recently joined forces with German PV module and storage manufacturer Solarwatt. Energy Storage News catches up with Felix Brauer, training coordinator at SolarWatt, to discuss the partnership in detail and the benefits of a DC-coupled battery system.
Energy storage could have a ‘highly critical’ role to play in emerging economies, Aloke Gupta of Imergy Power Systems says. Gupta, who was previously with California’s Public Utilities’ Commission, the state’s regulator, talks about the uses and applications of micro-grids, from his vantage point of view as a flow battery and storage system maker.
