Israel

The three Mediterranean countries of Greece, Cyprus and Israel signed this week an agreement to develop a subsea cable that links their electricity grids. Upon completion, the so-called EuroAsia Interconnector will be the world’s longest subsea power cable and could boost solar PV development in all three countries substantially.

How do you know when an inverter or module is under-performing? Monitoring services should shed light on problems but AI-driven digital asset manager Raycatch says much information is hidden behind a wall of “noise.” Breaking that wall with advanced data analysis could unlock billions of cost savings.

Full-year revenues nudged up despite tough comparisons with the end of 2019 for the final quarter of last year. The inverter maker expects to log revenues of $385-405 million in the current three-month window.

The Israeli authorities have selected 24 bidders for the tender’s final phase. Construction of the solar-plus-storage facility is planned for late 2021, and completion in 2023.

Augwind CEO Or Yogev recently spoke to pv magazine about the Israeli company’s new storage solution for the renewables sector. The underground compressed-air storage specialist recently secured 166 MWh of capacity in Israel’s latest solar+storage tender, and plans to take equity stakes in all five projects.

The Israel Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Agriculture have decided to implement a pilot research program to assess the feasibility of agrivoltaic projects in the country. The possibility of combining PV and agriculture in a land with limited land availability and increasing energy demand is considered a win-win solution by the government.

Solar-linked projects will be developed by domestic firm Augwind and will feature underground storage tanks. One of the systems will be built by French energy giant EDF and will feature a 20 MWh compressed air storage system and 5 MW solar array.

Scientists from Israel and France have proposed a PV-plus-thermal-storage (PV-TS) concept that may be applied in regions with low direct solar beam radiation and high levels of global solar radiation. They estimated that the grid penetration rate of a large scale PV plant, when combined with molten salt storage, may rise from around 30% to up to 95%.

The Israeli government assigned 608.9 MW of PV capacity through the tender and selected seven developers for 33 projects. A storage capacity of around 2,400 MWh will be linked to the selected solar power projects.

The latest edition of the accountant’s renewables attractiveness index has placed the nation in top spot for photovoltaics, helping it to fourth spot for overall clean energy investment. Mexico has been hammered by the government’s attitude to clean power and France has also slipped, four places.