Gone are Europe’s weekly FCR auctions, replaced by daily auctions in a move designed to create greater flexibility and improve international co-operation in these markets in Europe, writes Jean-Paul Harreman of EnAppSys.

Perth-based Hybrid Systems and BayWa r.e. have reaped the lion’s share of the first round of a programme to roll out ‘standalone power systems’ (SPS) across Western Australia.

Lebanon could reconfigure its laws and regulations to allow private sector actors to generate renewable energy for sale to the grid, it emerged as the Middle Eastern country opened up its first solar-plus-storage tender process.

Dr Rahul Walawalkar is president and MD of Customized Energy Solutions and an executive director of the India Energy Storage Alliance. A proud evangelist for renewables and advanced energy storage technologies, Andy Colthorpe asked him about what 2017 meant for India’s storage industry and what’s getting him enthused – or apprehensive – about 2018.

Madagascar’s Ministry of Water, Energy and Hydrocarbons (MEEH) has released a list of six pre-qualified bidders for the country’s 25MW(AC) Scaling Solar tender, which is the first to include energy storage in its remit.

The winner of India’s first major solar-plus-storage auction, which has subsequently been scrapped for retendering, has said that despite being an unfortunate development, the firm is still keen to work closely with government on this technology for which the economics are continuously and rapidly improving.

Plans are in place for a combined 160MW solar and wind project with up to 40MWh of energy storage in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, while a smaller scale demonstration project experimenting with multiple technologies is being developed for Kerala.

The government of the state of South Australia has named four utility-scale energy storage projects which it will support with grants toward the total cost of development.