In this week's Movers & Shakers, PV Tech reports some recent industry mergers and acquisitions, dramatic UK solar job losses and an equally dramatic opportunity for job growth in the US with Tesla's new Gigafactory in Nevada.
New research predicts the energy storage market in Germany will increase 11-fold in the next five years, with the residential market buoyed by declining feed-in tariffs, high electricity prices and €30 million in subsidies, while the primary reserve market boosts activity within the utilities sector.
Australia-based renewables firm Windlab and Japan’s Eurus energy have received development approval for a hybrid project comprising 20MW solar, 30MW wind and a 2MW lithium-ion battery storage system in Queensland, Australia.
The World Bank's groundbreaking US$1 billion loan for Indian solar will partly focus on improving transmission for solar parks and innovation in wind and energy storage hybrids, according to a senior government official.
This year saw Ghana not only install the largest solar project in East and West Africa, but also a major 30MW module manufacturing facility near its capital, Accra, in what is a major milestone for the upstream solar sector across Africa. PV Tech visited the plant to understand some of developer 3SIL's thinking behind location and business.
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.
