Distributed Storage

In December, pv magazine met SolaX Power president Li Xinfu and his team at the company’s headquarters in sprawling Hangzhou, in Zhejiang province. The region is a hotspot for the Chinese PV industry and SolaX belongs to the cutting edge of Chinese inverter and residential battery manufacturers.

Aiming to localize production across the electric vehicle value chain, the government wants to support battery manufacturing at a gigawatt-scale. The initial focus will be on large-scale module and pack assembly plants in the new fiscal year, followed by integrated cell manufacturing by 2021-22.

The electric carmaker has signed 12-month credit agreements with three of China’s ‘Big Four’ lenders as well as the development bank for Shanghai as it aims to get its lower-priced Model 3s rolling off the production line by the end of the year.

In the run-up to the Energy Storage Europe conference pv magazine is featuring the top ten developments in the field as our Energy Storage Highlights, selected by an independent jury. Having recently covered a full range of storage products for residential, commercial and utility-scale applications, today we are finally going to announce the winner of the ranking.

Western Australia’s state-owned utility Horizon Power is preparing to roll out 13 solar and battery technology units at 14 far-flung farms in the Esperance region.

Though we’re unlikely to see a return to the days of double-figure GW annual installation levels, Japan will stay at the top table of solar. Last week, pv magazine visited PV Expo Japan, part of Tokyo’s World Smart Energy Week, and found plenty of market developments to discuss, along with healthy interest from major players.

The Northwest Territories of Canada are going to host a solar-plus-storage project that will be the first of its kind in the region. The facility will power three businesses and 32 residential units in Inuvik and Iqaluit.

Spain’s most important renewable energy fair is becoming increasingly about solar. After a decade of slim pickings, last year’s event promised better times and, if this year’s show didn’t completely deliver, that’s because elections loom large.

A 60 kW floating array was deployed by New Southern Energy at the reservoir of a fruit farm near Franschhoek, in the Western Cape Province. A second phase of the project will also include storage.

According to solar body the PPLSA, around 300 PV system owners have already gone off-grid as the tariff granted for surplus power under net metering was not attractive enough. Several barriers are preventing net metering taking hold, including an obligation to either use locally made equipment or pay more to re-certify imported modules and inverters.