The soon-to-be-merged Tesla and SolarCity have completed a solar-plus-storage microgrid on an island in American Samoa that will reduce the local population’s reliance on costly and cumbersome diesel imports.
The participation of venture capital (VC) investors seems to have cooled, while project funding has conversely seen a sharp rise, in the latest quarterly report into funding and mergers and acquisitions from Mercom Capital.
The future for Tesla-SolarCity could lie in aggregating rooftop PV with stationary energy storage, EVs and other distributed energy resources, the head of energy storage market analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has said.
The prospect of the ‘commoditisation’ of lithium-ion batteries is not likely to be as clear-cut as has been seen in the PV industry, one manufacturer has said.
SolarEdge's Lior Handelsman explains some of the thinking and development processes behind HD Wave, which the publicly-listed Israeli company believes represents a significant leap forward for inverter technology. The product was launched at the beginning of the year, when Handelsman said in another interview for PV Tech that inverters can now "evolve at the speed of electronics, not mechanics".
Stringent energy efficiency rules for buildings would make it “almost a no-brainer” to integrate PV at time of construction and would “change the whole cost equation”, solar analyst Finlay Colville has said.
Morgan Stanley has predicted a boom in solar-plus-storage in Australia, calling PV a direct substitute for grid power and warning investors that the incumbent energy industry has been slow to react to trends.
DNV GL is seeking comment and input from stakeholders in the energy storage industry on an update to its GRIDSTOR guidelines for grid-connected storage systems.
A tender for a 200MW BOO (build-own-operate) PV plant project in Egypt has had its deadline extended by six months, in a move that the Middle East Solar Industries Association (MESIA) has said was “widely expected”.
