Energy Storage

Solar in Japan: As Japan continues to wean itself off nuclear power, solar PV has assumed a vital role in aiding the transition to renewable energy. In Fukushima, a series of solar plants have already been installed, but one new addition to the region – a module fab – poses an altogether different set of challenges and opportunities, as pv magazine’s managing editor Ian Clover found out.

Overall, 24 exhibitors from the upcoming Energy Storage Europe event in Germany’s Düsseldorf submitted proposals to the pv magazine Storage Highlights’ jury. They were ranked in the following categories: Relevance to industry; USP; Market impact; Contribution to the energy transition; and Innovation. Read on to discover how they fared.

French firm Neoen has begun development on a hydrogen electrolyser to be colocated alongside a 150 MW wind project and 150 MW solar farm. The project has been awarded a grant of AU$1 million by the South Australian Renewable Technology fund, with more funding yet to be approved.

The Chinese power electronics company will ship its turnkey energy systems comprising storage inverters, NCM lithium batteries and an energy management system to a 30 MWh storage project being built in Hokkaido, Japan.

As Energy Storage Europe approaches, pv magazine counts down the highest-ranked energy storage highlights, selected by our independent jury, that visitors to the exhibition can lay their eyes on. In first-place was Younicos’ combined gas and battery grid services power plant.

Researchers in the U.S. have confirmed the existence of a novel state of the element manganese, first proposed in a journal dating from 1928, which could allow for the development of low-cost, high performance batteries for grid level and other energy storage applications.

Despite a lackluster Q4, GTM Research predicts that the U.S. energy storage market is going to boom in 2018, driven by both policy support and falling prices.

The Jamaica Public Service Company (JPSCO) has announced the start of construction on a new hybrid storage facility set to provide spinning reserve power to the country’s grid. The project, according to JPSCO, is the first of its kind in the Caribbean and will be completed by April 2019.

Germany-based distributed battery storage provider, Senec has been acquired by a major German utility.

A year of transition is perhaps the best way to characterize 2018’s PV Expo show in Tokyo, as Japanese module, inverter and storage firms hedge their bets while foreign innovation takes center stage.