A proposed “sun tax” on use of batteries for residential self-consumption of solar energy in Spain could increase payback time from around 16 years to 31 years under a new draft Law put forward by the Spanish Government. Hefty fines for infringement, capped at €60 million (US$67.7 million), have also been proposed.
There is a greatly expanded amount of energy storage on offer at the European edition of the Intersolar trade exhibition and conferences this year, including the Electrical Energy Storage (EES) Europe show hosting its own conference for the first time. Andy Colthorpe took the opportunity to canvas opinions on the big trends and topics from a number of industry figures.
The International Renewable Energy Agency has published a technology roadmap aimed at accelerating the deployment of electrical storage for renewable energy.
Renewables-powered energy systems that work independently of the grid at warehouse locations in India will be provided with flow battery-based energy storage solutions by US company Imergy.
Energy storage system installer Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) has chosen Tesla to provide up to 500MWh of batteries for its utility-scale energy storage projects.
Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and renewable energy developer Gaelectric have announced a joint test project to evaluate utility-scale storage to facilitate the integration of renewables onto the grid.
A small number of regional markets are leading the way for energy storage deployment in the US, but this is likely to change in the near future, an analyst from GTM Research has said.
We often hear about the so-called ‘synergy’ between EVs and energy storage in the home. Not merely the fact that the majority of both applications for storage tend to have a lithium-ion battery-driven heartbeat at their core, but a lot has been made of the fact that the two industries could spur each other on to both lower costs and increased adoption. One company in the UK has taken on some of the challenges involved in integrating these and other related technologies.
US utility Duke Energy has teamed up with battery provider LG Chem and storage software provider Greensmith to build a 2MW lithium-ion battery-based energy storage system in Ohio.
Lessons learned from solar could help develop financing solutions for energy storage that could be “key” to unlocking the potential of the technology, strongly benefiting PV in the process, Jigar Shah has said.
