News in brief: A battery park in Germany will be capable of restarting the local grid in the event of a blackout, a public square in Haiti will be lit at night with solar energy, and a revived Solarmax will target its new range of storage and inverter solutions at several European markets this year.
Research firm IHS recently reported that as of the end of 2015, there was a global pipeline of 1.6GW of battery or flywheel-based grid storage projects in place. Andy Colthorpe spoke to principal analyst Marianne Boust, who explained why last year truly saw a “change in stakeholder mentality” in favour of energy storage and why 2016 will be another record-breaking year.
Misconceptions over the true value of energy storage are developing because of a “narrow focus” on the initial costs of the technology, a report has concluded.
As residential storage solutions fast become a staple of energy companies’ product portfolios, many in the market are addressing the growing conundrum of how to sell storage solutions to the residential customer, writes Daniel Roca of Panasonic Eco Solutions Europe.
The US Department of Energy is to fund six projects trialling the combination of solar and energy storage.
Analysis firm IHS has said that as of the end of 2015’s fourth quarter, the pipeline of planned energy storage projects using batteries or flywheels had reached 1.6GW, in a year which had seen a “change in stakeholder mentality” in favour of the technologies.
SMA is aiming to tackle the market for retrofitting energy storage systems in to existing home PV installations, with a new AC-coupled version of its Sunny Boy inverter suitable for high voltage batteries.
News in brief: SolarEdge’s Powerwall-compatible StorEdge self-consumption solution is now available internationally; AES completes another 10MW project in Holland which will provide grid services; and Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation’s Willey Battery Utility is the latest energy storage system to join PJM’s frequency regulation market.
UK solar developers WElink Energy and British Solar Renewables (BSR) have signed a £1.1 billion (US$1.6 billion) deal with China National Building Materials Group (CNBM) to develop solar energy projects and zero-carbon homes in the UK.
California’s CalCharge is a partnership between public and private sector, aiming to accelerate the adoption of energy storage in the state. Andy Colthorpe of Energy Storage News spoke with CalCharge president Danny Kennedy, the Australia-born former chief of US residential PV installer Sungevity who has a colourful background in eco-activism and the programme’s recently appointed manager, Alex Luce.
