Oceania

A recent Australian National University study shows that newly developed geographic information system algorithms can identify prospective sites for off-river pumped hydro projects throughout the world. The researchers, who identified around 530,000 potential sites, said pumped-hydro installations could enable large-scale energy time-shifting, as well as a range of ancillary services such as frequency regulation, which could help to integrate high levels of PV and wind into electricity systems.

Things are hotting up in the tracker world as the desire to squeeze down the price per Watt of solar power intensifies. And the rise of the trackers is attracting some well-known businesses to buy their way into the field.

Distributed energy management systems can capture added value from solar and storage by shaving peak loads, providing grid services, and deferring grid investments. Utilities testing such systems have shared their lessons learned, while Western Australia leapfrogs ahead.

A new analysis by Credit Suisse forecasts that installed residential solar capacity could grow more than 3x to reach 41 GW by 2025, and shows that there is plenty of space on rooftops to do this.

The French Environment & Energy Management Agency has published a report in which analyzes the dynamics of lithium supply and demand in different scenarios of global electrification by 2050. The agency experts are convinced that only with a 75% penetration of electric vehicles there is the real risk of a marked decrease in the safety margin of lithium supply.

The Canadian battery storage company has hired Marcus Brunner and Dr. Andreas Rueckemann, both formerly of Mercedes-Benz Energy.

The battery integrator has already began to draw on the funds as it continues to expand its market presence in the United States and in Australia. Shell Ventures is now a major sonnen investor and and the companies have agreed to future cooperation.

And inaugural global energy storage report by GTM Research finds that while the United States remains the world’s leading market with newly installed capacity of 431 MWh, China is poised to rise to second place globally in 2019.

An academic event held last week in the U.K. presenting the results of two major research projects on energy storage provided an update on the current and future directions of battery storage technology and development.

The International Energy Agency has released a manual for policy makers on the issues involved in the large scale integration of solar and wind power into power grids.