Nigeria

State-owned China Xinhua Power Development has booked a $53 million discount on seven solar farms as developer Kongsun seeks to pay down debts, and Canadian Solar has landed a 45 MWh energy storage contract in Colombia.

With ‘shovel-ready’ projects across India, Africa and Latin America in line for a mix of grants, cheap loans, equity investment and financial guarantees from this year, the two bodies hope to trigger $20 billion in total funding and bring reliable power to a billion people.

An international research team has designed a residential solar-plus-storage system based on gravity. The system was built with a solar power generator, a bulk booster charge controller, an inverter, a solenoid device, a deep cycle battery, a pulley block, a geared motor, a microcontroller, and wire ropes. Its creators said the system is ideal for regions with high solar radiation. They found that, due to its high electrical requirements, the system needs to rely on high-power solar modules with an output of over 500 W.

Energy efficiency, electrification of heating and transport, and the provision of clean cooking facilities are all going in the wrong direction as the Covid crisis deprived millions in sub-Saharan Africa of electricity use, according to a report by the IEA, IRENA, WHO, World Bank and UN Statistics Division.

The global off-grid solar appliance market began an uneven recovery from the worst ravages of the global pandemic in the second half of last year, according to market body GOGLA, but more finance and policy support must be made available to have any chance of achieving universal electricity access this decade.

With Chinese manufacturers having warned they will pass on escalating component costs, and shipping expenses soaring since last summer, the rising price of solar is forcing some installers to redraft quotes, pv magazine has discovered.

The former need not necessarily relate to conventional lithium-ion batteries, however, as a recent webinar staged by Solarpower Europe and EU body GET.invest discovered.

The private-sector arm of the World Bank, which claims to leverage $3 of its own capital and $8 from third parties for every dollar invested in its blended finance funds, has attempted to quantify what devoting Covid recovery funds to green investment would mean for emerging economies.

The Kenyan financial services business has been developing rural mini grids across Africa and has announced plans to show its rivals how such networks can thrive, in a bid to accelerate access to electricity on the continent.

Covid-19 rescue measures such as delaying electricity bill payments pile added pressure onto energy companies already hit by pandemic-related falls in demand in a continent which a new study suggests is too dependent on donor aid for the development of renewables.