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.
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.
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.
The potential for integrating energy storage, wind and solar energy in India is to be investigated under a new US-backed study, which will help India design its future grid.
The Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) has invited expressions of interest for what may be India’s first utility-scale energy storage project to be combined with a solar and wind hybrid project at Rangreek in the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh.
German solar integration specialist Belectric has begun serial production of its ‘Energy Buffer Unit’ (EBU) battery system.
In the simplest terms, if 2014 was the year of test deployments and proving storage can work, 2015 was a year of getting things done. But what are the big trends likely to drive the space on in 2016? Lux Research closely tracks the energy storage industry, in combination with solar, in terms of its synergy with EVs and in its own right. Andy Colthorpe spoke with Lux analyst Cosmin Laslau to get his views and predictions on what we can expect to see this year.
Efforts to modernise New York’s grid would be best served by adding 2GW of multi-hour energy storage by 2025 and 4GW by 2030, and enable the achievement of renewable energy targets, according to NY BEST.
Holland’s national grid operator has said that batteries will be an “excellent alternative” to conventional power plants in providing balancing services, especially as a complement to increased solar and wind deployment.
Hawaii has been namechecked as a ‘test bed’ for how grids can migrate to higher levels of PV penetration so often it has become something of a cliché. Stem’s VP for Hawaii operations, Tad Glauthier tells ESN about the projects that are going on, which lessons might be transferable to other regions – and which might not.
