Markets

The Netherlands Authority for Consumers & Markets has established that the first-come, first-served principle applied by grid operators is the correct approach to manage current grid congestion. The decision was taken to resolve a legal dispute between Liander and an agricultural entrepreneur that was denied grid access for a PV project.

Gambia’s national utility is seeking proposals for an energy and water audit of its water operations. Selected consultants will assess the possibility of using solar to improve energy efficiency. The utility will consider floating PV, rooftop arrays, and solar pumps.

Renewable energy production increased by 31% and now represents 18.6% of the country’s electricity mix. Its cumulative PV capacity increased from 3,887 MW at the end of 2019 to 4,788 MW at the end of December.

Power purchase agreements will be allowed between renewable energy producers owning plants with a capacity of more than 1 MW and electricity consumers. Local utility Kepco, however, will keep serving as an intermediary.

Polycrystalline PV technology, which is seeing its market share tumble on the global stage, still dominates India’s small solar manufacturing base and is emblematic of the R&D shortfalls in the sector, according to a survey of the state of the industry.

A new fund established by the African Development Bank could attract $650 million of private money into the sector, according to the lender.

The French government allocated 57 MW of PV capacity across 47 projects through the tender. Réunion and Guadeloupe were the territories with the largest allocated capacities.

The state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation has reportedly ended its involvement with the gigawatt scale Dabdaba solar field and asked the national body responsible for drumming up private sector investment to merge it with the 2 GW Shagaya renewables development.

Brazil may see the deployment of 4 GW of new distributed generation solar capacity this year and another 5 GW next year, according to Aldo Pereira Teixeira, the CEO of Brazil’s largest PV product distributor and system integrator. In an interview with pv magazine, he explains why and how this huge growth could materialize.

A European research team has investigated the implications of renewable energy intermittency on capital utilization across a future electricity-hydrogen system, including transmission and storage infrastructure. According to its findings, idle capacity substantially increases the system costs and limits wind and solar development.