Annual battery storage installations will exceed 10 GW/28 GWh in 2021, following a particularly strong year in 2020, despite the challenges created by the global pandemic, writes IHS Markit analyst Mike Longson. Combined solar and storage will be a core focus for new deployment in 2021, as the front-of-the-meter and behind-the-meter energy storage markets are both expected to grow significantly in the months ahead.

It’s come to this. The Australian Energy Markets Commission has produced a draft decision that will make households and small business with solar panels pay to inject their surplus production into the grid.

840 million people still don’t have access to electricity today, according to the World Bank. But the radical decrease in the cost of the green technologies of solar and battery storage provides an unparalleled opportunity to close this gap and achieve universal electricity access by 2030.

Over 2,000 MW – or around 55% – of South Australia’s firm supply capacity was unavailable on March 12, 2021, along with virtually all of its large-scale renewable supply (a further 1,800 MW or so) but the lights stayed on – just.

It has now been over a year since City of Newcastle made the switch to a 100% renewable electricity supply contract, as one of the first Local Governments in Australia to do so. For those that love energy data, it tells an interesting tale.

Queensland’s government will install five community batteries at regional substations across the state in a bid to time-shift its abundant solar resources.

Canadian Solar is pivoting towards energy storage and is preparing to IPO its manufacturing and Chinese solar project activity in China, under the CSI Solar operation, by July.

“Unprecedented” was a term widely used in 2020, as the world grappled with the Covid-19 pandemic. The same word can be similarly applied to the plans and investments in production capacity announced by Chinese PV manufacturers right across the supply chain. But what shape are these expansions taking and what is driving this renewed confidence? Vincent Shaw reports from Shanghai.

BHP has started the year by signing a PPA that will halve emissions at its Nickel West Kwinana refinery and double its green cred as a supplier to environmentally conscious lithium-ion battery manufacturers.

Soon 2020 will only be a worry to future high-school history students. But when they ask us if anything good at all happened in 2020, remember this review and tell them that solar PV shone in the darkness. Despite the mess of it all, 2020 has been another good year for Australian solar. The industry has demonstrated resilience, and significant progress has been made in the fields of energy storage, green hydrogen and others.

South Australia’s electricity distributor SA Power Networks has announced plans to introduce new ‘flexible’ export limits for rooftop solar PV in some areas of the state in a bid to manage the growing amount of distributed energy resources and associated network congestion.

Jordanian government officials have met with a delegation from Fortescue Metals Group to discuss investment opportunities in green hydrogen and ammonia, although details of the meeting remain scant.

Greek energy company Mytilineos and its subsidiary Metka EGN continue to put down roots in the Australian market, signing a Power Purchasing Agreement which will allow construction to commence on its 23 MW extension to Wagga Wagga North Solar Farm. The extension comes after the company was fined in January for breaching its Aboriginal Heritage Impact Permit by commencing works without first notifying Heritage NSW, leading to the destruction of Indigenous artefacts.

A new study from the Lappeenranta University of Technology predicts solar may even achieve a 69% share for total primary energy supply by the end of the first half of the century. In terms of price, solar PV is expected to achieve a capex of €246/kW-installed (AU$385/kW-installed) for utility scale projects, and of €537/kW (AU$840/kW) for residential arrays by 2050. The levelised cost of energy (LCOE), however, is expected to remain constant over the next three decades, as the energy transition will also be implemented with storage technologies, increased flexibility and the production of synthetic fuels.

In a strange synchronicity, two of Australia’s major aspiring vanadium producers have today come out with announcements. TNG Limited has solidified a deal to commercialise vanadium redox flow batteries using output from its Mount Peake project, while competitor Australian Vanadium has filed a patent application for its vanadium processing route.

Australia’s transition to renewable energy continues with developer ARP Australian Solar pushing ahead with plans to establish a 70 MW solar PV and battery energy storage project on the outskirts of Morwell in the heart of Victoria’s coal country.

Construction is set to commence on the 250 MW Kidston Pumped Hydro Storage Project later this month after developer Genex Power announced it had secured all the financing required to progress the $775 million project.

Greater dispatchability will be required from solar as it becomes increasingly mainstream worldwide, or investors could experience diminishing returns as a victim of the technology’s success at bearing down on electricity prices.

Energy giant AGL has signed a memorandum of understanding with Finnish technology company Wärtsilä, to develop large-scale hybrid energy systems for AGL’s commercial and industrial customers.

India had installed 6.8 GW of cumulative rooftop PV capacity by the end of 2020, with consumer-owned systems accounting for about 72% of the total, according to Bridge to India.

The cell reached 26.0% efficiency and showed open-circuit voltage values of up to 732 mV. It was fabricated with a back junction (BJ) design with a full-area p-n-junction at the back surface.

U.S. company Group 14 Technologies has announced it will launch factory capable of producing 120 tons per year of its innovative silicon-carbon-based anode material for lithium-ion batteries. The factory is located at Group 14’s headquarters in Washington and is the first of several planned by the company.

The contest is over. Faster, cheaper, more flexible than gas turbines … battery energy storage must be the future peaking energy service provider of choice says the hard evidence exposed in a new paper by the Clean Energy Council.

A human hair derivative has been found to protect, stabilise and enhance the performance of perovskite solar cells.

A homegrown technology developed by the University of Newcastle and Southern Green Gas has seen the development of a novel green hydrogen fuel and carbon neutral green methane. The fuel was demonstrated in Hyundai’s Nexo hydrogen fuel cell SUV in Sydney.

Chinese module manufacturer Jolywood is preparing to invest in a joint venture with state-controlled local partner PT Len Agra Energy to set up 1 GW of annual cell and panel capacity.

Pandemic uncertainties have concentrated key solar players and “heightened competition for ‘survival of the fittest'”, says JinkoSolar Chairman and CEO Xiande Li. The company’s latest figures show it is well placed in Australia and in the global arena.

French scientists have proposed the use of radiative sky cooling as a passive cooling technique to cut PV module temperatures by 10 C. They claim the method could improve performance by more than 5 W/m2.

The Chinese manufacturer has unveiled a low-voltage battery with a modular design and a high-voltage storage system which is claimed to have a one-hour, ultra-rapid charge rate.

Having picked up GBP 5.8 million ($8 million) in a series of investments, U.K.-based Power Roll is pushing ahead with pilot production of an innovative new thin film with which it can manufacture both solar modules and capacitors. In the future, the design could also bring the potential for solar generation and energy storage within a single lightweight device.

Call it “latent energy” – Australia’s renewable resources are expected to help some of the world’s greatest polluters to reach their net-zero emissions targets, writes Natalie Filatoff, senior editor at pv magazine Australia.

Queensland-based community group Solar Citizens has described as long overdue reports the State Government is considering a new pumped hydro facility near Gympie which would generate renewable energy to service the burgeoning Sunshine Coast region.

Concerned that a lack of understanding in the community is hindering the uptake of rooftop solar, a New South Wales local council has struck an agreement with the Australian Energy Foundation in a bid to demystify solar PV and battery energy storage systems.

Taiwan Cement is planning to build a US$352 million EV battery factory in southern Taiwan. The 1.8 GW facility will produce high-charge-discharge nickel ternary batteries.

Vattenfall, SSAB and LKAB are building a rock cavern storage facility in a coastal city in northern Sweden. The 100-cubic-meter facility will be built 30 meters below ground and will begin storing green hydrogen next year.