French power giant EDF has acquired a 50% stake in the Togo-focused unit of off-grid renewable energy specialist BBOXX, with EDF adding its financial clout to speed up solar home system deployments and its technical expertise to improve the energy storage offering.
The UK’s second subsidy-free solar farm, and the first by a local authority using battery storage, has been completed by West Sussex County Council in a project that ticked “every box” and will generate significant income over the next 25 years.
South Africa’s state-owned utility Eskom has unveiled its Distributed Battery Storage Programme at an event this week, committing to solar-plus-storage and energy storage projects totalling 1400MWh.
It’s likely a strong indication of the way the world is adopting renewable energy rapidly that just under a month ago, one of the best-established trade shows for solar in the US featured what seemed like almost as much space dedicated to national and international energy storage companies and technologies, as it did for solar.
The UK’s government has shied away from supporting large volumes of solar and other distributed energy technologies through subsidies, but commercial and industrial energy storage and solar-plus-storage could be a huge market opportunity in Britain and abroad.
An agreement to buy 75% of Korean battery manufacturer Kokam gives SolarEdge a level of vertical integration that could make the PV company a ‘one-stop-shop’ for customers, while SolarEdge could diversify into areas outside solar energy.
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has partnered with Monash University and technology provider Indra Australia to trial a microgrid as a first step to powering Monash’s Clayton campus entirely with renewable energy by 2030.
New York plans to incentivise commercial and industrial (C&I) solar-plus-storage projects, kicking off by making $40 million funding available to support 50MW of storage paired with solar from early November.
Lithium-ion battery energy storage will be deployed at a 10MW solar farm in a remote part of Siberia, as a pilot to investigate the potential for the technologies to combine in the region.
