Distributed Storage

The upper chamber of Congress has called for stable funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in 2019, with an emphasis on electric vehicles as well as increasing the budget for ARPA-E by 6.5%

The German group has joined the project as a technology partner, and brings €10 million. Siemens will conduct digitalization of the value chain for Northvolt production and will be supplied with the factory’s products

British oil giant BP has announced a $20 million investment into battery developer Storedot, whose batteries use chemically synthesized organic molecules to build an organic polymer, in addition to lithium. Storedot says the astonishing properties of the new material enable electric vehicle charging times of just five minutes

The World Energy Council tracks the top concerns of energy leaders and has created a tool with Arup to display its findings. The rise of digitalization issues and the decreasing significance of fossil fuels indicates a strong renewables market ahead and energy start ups are receiving increasing attention from utilities and leaders

With 34 of the 38 key technologies needed to hit the Paris Agreement’s best-case scenario falling short, PV and electric vehicles are keeping hopes alive

SMA says its new product will offer digital services such as monitoring and automatic notifications to perform maintenance as well as offering an emergency supply system. According to analysts, the varied applications of new inverters signal an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Germany-based PV-storage provider sonnen has closed a new funding round from a group of investors led by Shell Ventures. Sonnen has already began to draw on the funds as it continues to expand market shares in the U.S. and in Australia. Shell Ventures is now a major sonnen investor and future cooperation agreement has been agreed to.

Several scientist have joined to rebut an Australian article that questions the feasibility of a global energy transition. For this purpose, they have gathered hundreds of studies on energy systems and conclude, that there are neither fundamental technical nor financial barriers to achieve 100% renewable energy supply.

PV inverter shipment volumes have gone up recently, but an increasingly competitive market has seen declining prices, forcing manufacturers to think out of the box to find new business applications for their products.

To smoothen this transition, the country needs to build fast solar PV-powered charging stations. In 2017, there were only 220-250 operational charging stations in India, compared to 56,000 petrol stations.