Energy Storage

India’s Reliance Industries has announced plans to invest $8.1 billion over the next three years to build gigafactories for solar, energy storage, electrolyzers, and fuel cells.

According to a new study from a German-Swedish research group, conventional incentives such as renewable portfolio standards, feed-in tariffs or feed-in premium payments may likely lead to a price cannibalisation scenario for wind and solar. CO2 pricing, instead, is considered an efficient tool to maintain their market value high enough to ensure new investments. However, a total system cost approach, rather than an LCOE perspective, is needed to understand the strong dependence of market value on policy choice.

Moreover, Landsvirkjun, the National Power Company of Iceland, and the Port of Rotterdam have completed a pre-feasability study about exporting green hydrogen from Iceland to Rotterdam and the Swedish Energy Agency has allocated €30 million to Project Air, an industrial concept to produce methanol from a large variety of recovered end-of-life streams and hydrogen from electrolysis.

The 24 MW/48 MWh system is being built by Dutch storage system provider Giga Storage and utility Eneco. The battery will be used by Eneco for forecasting supply-demand errors on the intraday trading market.

Researchers in China have built a PV-powered air conditioner that can store power through ice thermal storage. The performance of the system was evaluated considering operating efficiency and stability and the scientists found that a device relying on a variable-speed compressor and an MPPT controller showed very good ice-making capability.

If the three record-busting low solar price tariffs recorded in the Middle East in the past 18 months are to be believed, renewables-powered hydrogen in prime sites in the region could already compete with gas-plus-CCS production, according to IRENA. Has the Gulf discovered the new petrol?

A 1 MW electrolyzer in the middle of a residential area in Esslingen, southern Germany, is intended to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of its residents. One of the energy sources used in the project is rooftop PV located in the area.

Acciona is testing four second-life batteries with a combined capacity of 130 kWh at its 1.2 MW experimental solar park in Tudela, in the Spanish region of Navarra.

Yotta Energy’s new micro-inverter is claimed to be an ideal solution for commercial rooftop PV systems linked to between 500 kWh and 1 MWh of storage. The device has a peak efficiency of 96.5% and a nominal maximum power point tracking (MPPT) efficiency of 99.5%.

Israel-based GenCell has unveiled an off-grid hydrogen power solution based on alkaline fuel cell (AFC) technology. Italian energy giant Enel and Russian technology company Rusnano want to set up Russia’s first green-hydrogen production project at a wind farm in the Murmansk region.