Utility Scale PV

The Tunisian government awarded contracts for six 10 MW solar projects in the country’s second solar tender. The tender process was launched last August.

North Macedonia’s state-owned electric utility, ELEM, is tendering a 10 MW project which is being partly financed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The facility will be adjacent to Macedonia’s second thermal power plant, which produces around 10% of the country’s electricity.

With solar panels already installed on dozens of its buildings, the city of Sydney has upped the ante by vowing to source 100% of its electricity needs from solar PV and wind. The commitment was endorsed by city council last week, with a new 100% renewable electricity contract to be negotiated in the coming months.

The acquired company owns more than 1 GW of solar capacity, including operational large-scale plants and projects still under development. The financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

A recent Australian National University study shows that newly developed geographic information system algorithms can identify prospective sites for off-river pumped hydro projects throughout the world. The researchers, who identified around 530,000 potential sites, said pumped-hydro installations could enable large-scale energy time-shifting, as well as a range of ancillary services such as frequency regulation, which could help to integrate high levels of PV and wind into electricity systems.

Gridserve has revealed plans to install more than 100 electric-vehicle charging stations throughout the U.K. It will start building the first of these facilities later this year, backed by a £1 billion ($1.7 billion) investment.

Chinese polysilicon giant GCL-Poly Energy today posted its financial results for the full year 2018. The company saw a loss of RMB 458.4 million ($68.3 million), which it attributes primarily to China’s 31/5 policy.

Germany’s Federal Network Agency awarded 121 contracts and 505 MW of PV capacity in the auction. The bidding round was clearly oversubscribed, but 17 bids with a total output of almost 200 MW had to be ruled out due to formal errors.

Enel acquired developer Tradewind Energy’s 13 GW portfolio of wind and solar+storage projects in the United States, and then immediately sold the 6 GW solar+storage portion to Macquarie.

The announcement was given by Manuel Bartlett, the general director of state-owned utility CFE. He also said the current prices of renewables are a lie, while also stressing that their development is a factor determining higher electricity prices.