Grids & Integration

A €15.2 million power-to-X-to-power hydrogen storage facility is being planned in Saillat-sur-Vienne, in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. The project partners want to use renewable energy from the grid and water to produce and store electrolyzed hydrogen. It would then be mixed with natural gas to power an upgraded, 12 MW Siemens SGT-400 industrial gas turbine which previously generated steam for local manufacturing and would be able to return power to the grid to meet demand.

The coal era could be said to be officially over in the United States.

Minister of economic affairs and climate change, Eric Wiebes, has written to parliament to confirm grid companies do not have to pay PV system owners when their installations are disconnected from the network due to capacity issues or poor-quality voltage.

U.K.-based Power Transition today launched a crowdfunding exercise to raise the £300,000 it says it needs to scale up its blockchain-based, peer-to-peer energy trading platform beyond a 47-home demonstration project.

U.S. thinktank the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says the nation should reorder its power network to harness cheap, modular renewables after existing power station overcapacity was worsened by plunging electricity demand during the Covid-19 shutdown.

MIT scientists have suggested used electric vehicle batteries could offer a more viable business case than purpose-built systems for the storage of grid scale solar power in California. Such ‘second life’ EV batteries, may cost only 60% of their original purchase price to deploy and can be effectively aggregated for industrial scale storage even if they have declined to 80% of their original capacity.

Inverter maker Sungrow is supplying the inverters and storage system for China’s largest, 202.8 MW/MWh solar-plus-storage facility. The plant will be connected to a new, 800 kV ultra-high voltage power line.

The world’s solar superpower saw the amount of new capacity added in the first three months of the year fall 24% from the same period of 2019 as 1.75 TWh of solar electricity was curtailed, but the National Energy Administration expects both statistics to improve as China exits the public health crisis.

The effect the coronavirus pandemic is having on energy systems and environmental policy in Europe was discussed at a recent machine learning and climate change workshop, along with the help artificial intelligence can offer to those planning electricity access in Africa.

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) claims that the country already has the technical ability to safely operate a system in which three-quarters of the electricity comes from wind and solar. However, it needs to get the regulations right in order to do so.