Asia

Mobile electricity storage systems (MESS) – batteries that are charged and then transported – could offer one of the best scenarios for electrification across the vast Indonesian archipelago, which spans more than 17,000 islands. A team at the University of Indonesia is working with multiple government agencies to bring the idea to scale and provide affordable electricity to rural Indonesians.

It’s been a busy couple of months in global energy and climate policy. Australia’s largest trading partners – China, South Korea and Japan – have all announced they will reach net-zero emissions by about mid-century. In the United States, the incoming Biden administration has committed to decarbonising its electricity system by 2035.

It remains unclear why Chairman Jin Baofang was detained, but the company said its operations will not be affected. The Paper, a Chinese state-owned media outlet, reported that Jin’s detention might be connected to the fall of Liu Baohua, the formal deputy director of the National Energy Administration, which has also been under investigation by the anti-corruption authorities since mid-October.

Researchers have modeled how the combination of a virtual oscillator control mechanism and a cascaded sliding mode control can help regulate voltage and frequency in a distributed-solar microgrid.

The centralised nature of policymaking in Beijing would enable component standardisation to ease the transition from EV to stationary energy storage use, according to Greenpeace East Asia.

Earlier this year, Singapore surpassed its 2020 target for 350 MW of installed PV, and has set itself a more ambitious goal of 2 GW for the coming decade. pv magazine recently spoke with Thomas Reindl, deputy CEO of the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS) – and also the lead author of a 2020 update to the institute’s PV Roadmap for Singapore report – to catch up on the latest developments in the city-state’s PV market.

Re-elected South Korean president Moon Jae-in today declared he will follow-up on a campaign trail promise to eliminate carbon emissions by mid century. The announcement comes just two days after Japan’s new prime minister said he would accelerate his nation’s emissions target.

An international research team has analyzed all existing cooling technologies for PV panels and has indicated the current best options and future trends of research. According to its findings, active water cooling, although expensive and not particularly practical, is the most effective cooling technique while passive cooling systems, despite being easy to apply, have still limited possibilities.

Could a single installation define a brief but explosive period of ambitious PV deployment? The massive 500 MW Dau Tieng solar array – among Southeast Asia’s largest PV installations – makes a strong case for being the most impressive project of Vietnam’s recent solar boom. But the allure of Dau Tieng is about much more than size – it’s about what’s beneath the PV modules.

Southeast Asia, when taken as a whole, is a global laggard in the uptake of renewable energy, but some countries are leading the way, such as Vietnam, the Philippines, and Myanmar. And as ‘Angry Clean Energy Guy’ Assaad W. Razzouk argues, policymakers in the region cannot hold back the tide of solar and wind for much longer.