Policy

The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy is eager to ramp up deployment of solar-powered dryers, cold storage and charkhas across the nation’s 600,000 villages.

The Western Australian government has given environmental approval to the first stage of the Asian Renewable Energy Hub, a 15 GW hybrid solar and wind plant. The approval is a massive step forward for the project, which will eventually reach 26 GW, and an even larger step forward for green hydrogen development in Australia for domestic use and export.

Falling solar prices are leading to a new energy strategy for the United Arab Emirates as local energy companies offer unbeatable prices that make green hydrogen increasingly affordable.

Last Friday, the German development agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) officially released its “RTS – Technical and Administrative Guidelines for Commercial and Industrial Projects” to further support the development of rooftop solar (RTS) in Vietnam. Earlier in the week in a JinkoSolar-organized webinar, Tuan A. Nguyen of the Ministry of Industry and Trade’s (MOIT) Institute of Energy provided an update on Vietnam’s growing PV market and especially the RTS segment. Mr. Tuan also coauthored the RTS Guidelines for C&I Projects.

The most ambitious scenario fleshed out in a draft National Solar Energy Action Plan includes 16 GW of project capacity at large scale ‘solar hubs’ but actions will speak louder than words in a nation set to fall short of its current clean energy target.

The latest edition of the Global Off-grid Solar Market Report by the World Bank and GOGLA has called for regulatory and financial support to help off-grid distributors create jobs lost to the Covid-19 pandemic.

State-run hydropower company NHDC is targeting 340-350 MW of generation capacity in a 1.5 GW tender being held in the state of Madhya Pradesh and needs panels to meet any award it secures.

The renewables business is set to acquire the SN Power hydropower operator belonging to Norwegian state-owned private equity business Norfund, with the $1.17 billion deal expected to go through in the first half of the new year. Scatec said the transaction could offer floating solar opportunities.

Global Energy Ventures has revealed new designs for the H2 Ship, a compressed hydrogen ship capable of transporting 2,000 tons of hydrogen from green hydrogen hubs in northern Australia to trading partners such as Singapore, South Korea, China, and Japan.

The proportion of clean energy consumed in the EU continues to rise but the European Commission’s State of the Energy Union report is critical of failings in energy efficiency, low-carbon-R&D spending, and the removal of fossil fuel subsidies.