Utility Scale Storage

The solar manufacturer and developer has joined forces with Singapore’s ISDN and plans to expand its battery operations in the region. Elsewhere though, Longitech’s latest fundraising exercise has fallen flat.

Federal Labor leader Bill Shorten announced the party’s ‘all of the above’ plan for Australia’s energy sector. A ramped-up National Energy Guarantee, project auctions under a CfD structure, grid infrastructure investment, energy efficiency and a boost to battery storage all feature.

Two new reports from BloombergNEF recommend that the two northern European countries should implement policies to accelerate the adoption of energy storage and smart electric vehicle charging, while also improving demand response and interconnection to Nordic hydropower reservoirs. All of these actions are expected to further reduce fossil fuel dependence and add flexibility to their respective energy markets.

With declining costs, and increasing amounts of solar+storage added to electrical grids across the globe, there is a growing need to understand how to build bankable projects. In a recent pv magazine webinar, we discussed just this.

Wirsol Energy Ltd and Hive Energy Ltd are developing an over 50 MW solar + storage project which, when completed, will represent the United Kingdom’s first Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP).

The battery will be made by assembling 78 second life battery packs from Nissan’s electric Leaf vehicles. The project is expected to help resolve imbalances in the electrical system of the autonomous city and improve quality of supply.

The Federal Ministry of Economics has published further details of possible battery cell production on a gigawatt scale. At the Networking Conference Electromobility 2018 in Berlin this week, Minister Peter Altmaier stressed the urgency of the project, for Germany and Europe to be independent of Asia and the US in storage technology.

The Italian power provider has implemented its first pilot storage projects linked to solar. The system can provide grid services such as primary and secondary frequency regulation and tertiary and voltage regulation.

The impressive growth is unlikely to replace coal-fired power generation as it will only be sufficient to cover the predicted increase in demand for electricity. The electrification of heating, manufacturing and transportation offer room for further development.

Even in its low ball scenario, the International Energy Agency (IEA) imagines that installed solar PV capacity will overtake that of all other forms of energy apart from gas by 2040. Overall, it presents four scenarios in its 2018 World Energy Outlook, which show a changing energy landscape. While it finds that CO2 levels are, perversely, on the rise, and that many energy efforts in all but the most whimsical of its forecasts are far behind those needed to seriously address global warming, it still imagines coal, oil and gas playing a leading role in our energy mix going forward. It also sees “dramatic” transformation in the electricity sector. Long story short: Read something else if you want to take real climate action. We suggest The Drawdown.