Utility Scale Storage

Ministers have reaffirmed plans for a Franco-German battery industry. The project is being supported in principle by the European Commission, which could give its approval by October. Meanwhile, German storage specialist Tesvolt is building a commercial storage system factory in Germany.

Analyst Globaldata says falling system prices, and the need for more resilient grids and favorable policies, continue to fire the energy storage industry around the globe and the Asia-Pacific region is likely to remain the biggest market.

Located in the town of La Paz, in Baja California Sur, the Aura Solar III plant has a generation capacity of 32 MW and includes a lithium-ion battery storage system with a capacity of 10.5 MW/7.0 MWh.

In the latest of a series of interviews about the geopolitics of renewable energy, Indra Overland, head of the Center for Energy Research at the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, explains how storage could change the global energy landscape by eliminating entrenched strategic dependencies. The impact of storage, he says, will be stronger in regions dependent on fossil fuels.

The asset manager has seen good returns on the 70 MW it has already acquired. Despite the U.K. government cutting subsidies for renewable energy, the fund manager believes the country will be a high growth market for storage.

Researchers from the Laboratory of Renewable Energy Science and Engineering at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne have developed a device which they say could “provide a pathway for device scalability aimed towards the large scale deployment of photo-electrochemical hydrogen production”.

Australia’s federal Labor party has pledged to roll out PV generation and batteries at schools across the nation, and to create VPPs supporting up to 365 MW of capacity.

A new project is in line with the target of the Island Council of Tenerife to cover all electricity demand with renewable energy. The development of electromobility and storage is key to the ambition.

Selected projects will be expected to start commercial operations on June 28, 2021. The auction is open to both conventional and renewable energy sources, as well as proposals for hybrid projects or power plants linked to storage.

The government is planning to replace the price offered to PV projects that have a capacity of 3-9 MW with hourly tariffs. Solar association Acesol agrees with some of the suggestions but rejects the proposed tariff change. The current system has been the main market driver for Chilean PV for the last two years.