North America

US battery company Powin has agreed to deploy 1.7 GWh of energy storage systems in Australia over the next two years after entering a partnership with Victorian developer Akaysha Energy. The news tops a big month for Akaysha which was acquired by US giant BlackRock two weeks ago.

Hydrostor has selected an engineering company to provide front-end studies for a 500 MW compressed air energy storage project in California.

Germany has launched the world’s first operational hydrogen trains and US researchers have presented a novel design for a tubular PEM fuel cell. ABB and Hydrogen Optimized, meanwhile, have expanded their strategic ties and Slovakia has moved forward with a major gas-blending pilot project.

The electrification of transportation is set to boost the need for solar energy buildout.

The two will study the scaling and integration of fuel cell systems for stationary power generation.

Modelling 5 to 10 GWh electrified containerships, researchers find that 40% of routes today could be electrified in an economically viable manner, before considering environmental costs.

The Energy Information Administration projects renewable energy to reach a record share of generation mix this year.

Combining satellite images of Australian rooftops with those of real-time cloud cover to create accurate forecasts of distributed solar output for suburbs and perhaps even whole regions and states is the focus of a new Australian startup, Solstice AI. “We’re kind of at a point now where there’s so much solar that it’s causing all these issues but, if we can forecast it, many of these issues can be alleviated or managed much better,” the company’s cofounder and CEO, Julian de Hoog, tellspv magazine Australia.

In a study that began in 2016, scientists in the United States purchased 834 PV modules, representing seven manufacturers and 13 module types, and installed them in various climate conditions to observe their performance over time. The results show that, while plenty of opportunities still exist to extend module lifetimes and reduce performance loss in the field, reductions in the manufacturing cost of PV have not come with an increase in their degradation rate.

Sydney-based lithium-ion battery specialist Magnis Energy Technologies has begun commercial production of full-sized cells at its manufacturing plant in the United States with plans to increase production to 38 GWh of battery cell capacity per year by the end of the decade.