Brussels-headquartered consultancy and software service company 3E Data Services has launched a satellite-based solar irradiance mapping service which can be used to assess the likely profitability and performance of planned solar PV projects.
India’s first grid-scale solar-plus-storage tender from Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) has received very strong interest with a total of 13 developers submitting bids.
Tesla and Panasonic’s Gigafactory in the Nevada desert has now started making high performance cylindrical battery cells of the type used in its stationary storage and forthcoming Model 3.
An Arizona scheme to study the use of energy storage and smart inverters in integrating solar to the grid has contracted the deployment of 4MW of AES Energy Storage’s lithium battery systems.
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.
