Distributed Storage

After earmarking €3 million last year and €4 million in 2017, the Italian region of Lombardy has decided to further support residential and commercial storage projects linked to renewables.

The Nasdaq-listed game developer will offer shares in return for a 9.9% stake in the Chinese mono solar manufacturer’s Kexin electric vehicle and storage business.

The new government’s chief policy thinktank has suggested banning sales of non-electric two and three wheelers in 2025 and cars, trucks and buses five years later as well as forcing public fleets and the cars used by ride hailing apps to be electric.

The world’s biggest solar market is on track for an unsubsidized future but policymakers continue to grapple with grid planning. A report by the German Energy Agency has offered suggestions on how China’s approach to grid design could be tweaked to ensure priority dispatch for PV while slashing administrative costs and reining in renewable energy losses.

This year’s New Energy Outlook report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts renewables can keep us on track for less than two degrees of global heating for the next decade. But after that, other technologies will have to do their bit.

The Trump administration is acknowledging global demand for clean energy and energy storage with the US State Department’s new strategy.

Initially, the company will construct a 16 GWh factory plus a joint venture fab with Volkswagen in Germany, which will also have a throughput of 16 GWh. Both factories could be extended to tap further into the large market for battery cells in Europe.

Representatives of the UK solar industry have praised prime minister Theresa May’s plan to amend the 2008 Climate Change Act with a 2050 net zero emissions target while urging the government to articulate how it will achieve its goal. In particular, the industry has pointed to the need to eliminate barriers that continue to hinder deployment of solar and battery storage systems.

A report on the prospects for a mooted $2.6tn electric vehicle market over the next decade says PHEVs – part electric, part gas-guzzling – are already losing market share rapidly to pure electric rivals, and will be extinct by 2030.

The launch of the U.K. Smart Export Guarantee regime today failed to include a price floor – as predicted by trade body the STA – but the government did not rule out future intervention. Commercial customers, however, still have no way of securing payment for their excess power.