Hawaii’s electricity regulator and main utility have recognised that customer-sited distributed energy resources (DERs), including rooftop PV and energy storage, can provide essential grid services and better visibility for network operators, the VP of Stem Inc's Hawaii operations has told Energy Storage News.
SolarEdge has again reported record quarterly revenues, bringing in US$125 million in the fiscal second quarter and guiding third quarter revenues to a similar level.
SMA is aiming to tackle the market for retrofitting energy storage systems in to existing home PV installations, with a new AC-coupled version of its Sunny Boy inverter suitable for high voltage batteries.
Corporations and utilities are already interested in energy storage but must collaborate to advance deployment and lower costs, avoiding some of the past mistakes of the PV industry, according to the heads of one California-based industry group.
Solar developer SPI Energy has invested around US$4.6 million in an electric vehicle rental service in China, with the company expected to build branded charging stations and leverage its PV business to finance its growth.
A team of teachers volunteering to educate refugees and displaced peoples among the camps of Calais in northern France, will power a mobile school with a solar-plus-storage system.
Valentin Software will launch the next generation of its design software PV*SOL premium at the end of 2015. New features are designed to make the process of designing a PV system easier and faster. The shading analysis of roof and ground-mounted systems in 3D mode remains the central feature as it calculates how often the modules are covered by shade, and how this affects the system yield, presenting the results graphically. All shading objects can be freely selected and placed anywhere on the ground or building.
The former VP of Solar Grid Storage has predicted average Balance of Systems (BoS) costs for energy storage will drop from around US$670 to less than US$400 per kilowatt in the next five years.
