Contract for Difference

Electricity market liberalization and private sector development of solar and energy storage in Cyprus continue to be delayed. pv magazine’s Ilias Tsagas looks at why independent power producers are frustrated by electricity curtailment and a lack of market reform.

The Serbian government plans to launch its second renewables auction this year in a bid to procure at least 400 MW of wind and solar power.

BASF has signed virtual power purchase agreements for 250 MW of solar and wind power in the United States.

With the Japanese conglomerate this week walking away from two new nuclear plants in the United Kingdom, project developer Horizon Nuclear Power has confirmed all activities at both sites will cease. The facilities had struggled to secure funding despite offers from government. Horizon said it will ‘keep lines of communication open’ regarding the future of the sites.

The Portuguese government has revealed some of the preliminary results of the national solar auction which closed on Tuesday. Antonio Delgado Rigal, chief executive of energy forecasting service Aleasoft, said that the 15-year contracts awarded in the auction were the key to understanding the reason of such a low price. This, combined with the rights for land and grid connection guaranteed by the auction, makes attractive bidding at low prices.

French thinktank the Institut Montaigne says Africa is absent from the global solar revolution for several reasons including a lack of suitable financing tools, the small size of projects and a systematic recourse to tendering. Removing artificial price signals set by ever more competitive tenders could be a step towards a more mature market, ready for large scale solar tenders.

With Theresa May’s government in full scale revolt this week over Brexit, the ECJ’s ruling that the European Commission wrongly failed to find fault with the UK capacity market mechanism four years ago, is likely to have Brexiteers on both sides of parliament frothing at the mouth with indignation.

The Sequoia Economic Infrastructure Income Fund has extended a loan to ReneSola Ltd to €36 million for the implementation of 55 MW of solar PV projects in Poland.