Renewable Energy News

First, there was last month’s historic COP 21 Paris climate agreement, forged by 195 countries, which eclipsed most people’s expectations in its breadth and scope toward achieving a low-carbon economy. Then, the U.S. Congress approved a five-year extension of wind and solar federal tax credits — a step that Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates will spur an additional US$73 billion in investment and nearly 40,000 megawatts of new wind and solar projects by 2020. And recently, BNEF issued promising year-end clean energy investment figures for 2015 — a record US$329 billion, up sixfold from just a decade ago.

SMA and SolarEdge gear up for the storage boom, GoodWe launches a new range of residential inverters, and Yingli makes a strategic play in Thailand.

The Tesla Powerwall has officially arrived in the Australian market, with at least one installation being completed in Sydney this week. The first commercial installation of the much-hyped 7 kWh battery was undertaken by Natural Solar on a family home in Kellyville Ridge, in Sydney’s northwest. The unit was mounted on an outside wall and integrated with an existing 5 kW rooftop PV system, according to a report in the Australian.

Testing of the Zhangbei National Wind and Solar Energy Storage and Transmission Demonstration Project’s 8 megawatt-hour vanadium flow battery system was successfully completed last weekend.

According to Sparton Resources Inc., the battery was continuously operated at full design capacity for ten days and exceeded specifications by 10%. Smoothing tests using State Grid North China Company Limited’s software were also satisfactorily completed.

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