lead acid

Governments should focus on mini-grids as a means to enabling access to reliable electricity for hundreds of millions of people that don’t yet have it and mini-grids using solar and batteries have matured as a technology class, but financing such projects remains problematic, a new report has found.

Energy giant marks largest PV project to date with two plants set to power facilities of Exide, which in turn will manufacture the batteries used by the installations.

A veteran of Kenya’s renewable energy industry has argued strongly in favour of lead acid batteries over lithium-ion, in response to a recent Energy-Storage.news article on off-grid solar PV in Africa.

Providers of solar-plus-storage into the continent of Africa have said that it is a misconception that lead acid batteries used in off-grid systems are recycled efficiently back into the supply chain.

Singapore-based clean energy provider Sunseap Group has contracted German energy storage firm Hoppecke Asia Pacific to bring storage to Sunseap’s hybrid off-grid solar system at Tanglin Academy, the largest tennis academy in Singapore.

The complexities of combining batteries and solar microgrids are explained by Sam Duby, co-founder and director of research and development at mini-grid technologies company SteamaCo Ltd and project leader at TFE Consulting. TFE Consulting is a strategy consulting firm focusing on accelerating the energy transition in emerging markets and is active in Africa, India, Southeast Asia and Latin America.