The government of South Korea has unveiled new plans for the country to boost its solar energy generation 5 times over by 2030, as revealed by the country’s Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy.

The news follows on earlier campaign promises by the relatively new President, Moon Jae-in — campaign promises to cease support for new nuclear energy projects and to embrace “eco friendly” energy modalities. The new president has more or less kept his word, as the government has now cancelled plans for 6 new nuclear reactors.

That said, South Korea still represents the 5th largest nuclear energy user in the world — with a total of 24 nuclear reactors now active in the country, altogether meeting around a third of its electricity demand.

Commenting on the plans, the Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy, Paik Un-gyu, stated: “We will fundamentally change the way renewable energy is developed by creating an environment where the public can easily participate in the renewable energy business.”

Reuters provides more: “South Korea plans to provide a fifth of the country’s total amount of electricity from renewable energy by 2030, up from 7% in 2016. To meet that goal, it plans to add 30.8 gigawatts (GW) of solar power generating capacity and 16.5 GW of wind power capacity by 2030. As of 2017, South Korea has 5.7 GW of generating capacity from solar power and 1.2 GW from wind power.

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Tesla continues to build its energy storage deployments, though the company is intentionally shrinking its solar business it acquired from SolarCity.

Tesla reported 110 MWh of energy storage system deployments in its third quarter, up 12 percent from the previous quarter and 138 percent year-over-year. Currently, its single biggest energy storage project is a 100 MW system being constructed in South Australia.

Solar deployments reached 109 MW, down from the 189 MW SolarCity reported in its third quarter last year before it was acquired by Tesla.

In a report to investors, Tesla said the company is deliberately deemphasizing commercial and industrial solar energy projects with low profit and limited cash generation. Going forward, Tesla expects roof installations will ramp slowly in the fourth quarter as production moves from SolarCity’s facility Fremont, California to Tesla’s own Gigafacctory 2 in Buffalo, New York.

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Six key markers of market disruption hint that the energy sector might be the next industry in line for upheaval, according to a recent paper from Wood Mackenzie.

In the past century, the rapid uptake of new technologies has completely remade certain markets. Take the conversion from horses to cars for example; just over a century ago, a car would stick out on a crowded street. Thirteen years later, though, a horse-drawn carriage became the outlier. 

According to Wood Mackenzie, the energy industry presents all the signs of an industry on the cusp of disruption. Positioned at the center of the shift is the “drive for deep carbonization and the falling cost of renewables,” according to the report. Essentially, the sharp drop in prices, as well as technological advancements, have created a perfect storm to upend energy normalcy. 

“This is not just about decarbonization,” said Prajit Ghosh, head of power and renewables research at Wood Mackenzie. “It’s about rewriting the whole economy.”

The first qualifying marker is a vehicle — such as the smartphone — that can change how customers utilize services.

In the energy sector, the vehicle is less tangible than something you can hold in your hand: it’s the electrons shuttling through your wires to power everything you do. Natural gas has already overtaken coal as the largest source of power in the United States — a phenomenon the Trump administration sees as a significant disruption. Now renewables are encroaching on gas, and energy-efficiency gains have decreased demand for electricity. 

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A not-for-profit utility cooperative from Texas has been awarded a contract to electrify a community in Liberia with a solar-plus-storage microgrid, to benefit around 400 homes and businesses.

Bandera Electric Cooperative, based around 50km from San Antonio, has been awarded the project in Totota in eastern Liberia by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA). NRECA is the overseeing body for all of the US’ not-for-profit utility cooperatives, which are generally run at community level.

In addition to the 42 million cooperative customers across 47 states of the US, the association is involved with programmes to develop better access to electricity for rural communities in emerging economies around the world. Claiming to have already helped 110 million people across 43 countries, NRECA has worked in countries including Bangladesh, Ghana, Guatemala, Philippines, Bolivia, Uganda and South Sudan.

NRECA International has been involved in programmes in Liberia since 2014, when the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) began supporting the country’s Rural and Renewable Energy Agency (RREA) through a US$178 million investment programme for off-grid projects, Beyond the Grid. This has led to the development of a small (24kW) pilot PV project in 2015, a biomass project a year later and an ongoing 1MW run-of-river hydroelectric project.

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With so few utility-scale solar-plus-storage projects actually built, we don’t have much data on how their economics work.

Now those companies considering it — a group that includes all major solar developers — have a bit more insight, thanks to Paul Denholm and his colleagues at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Their new analysis models the benefit-cost ratio of several solar and storage configurations under present circumstances and projected cases in 2020.

In today’s market, under the assumptions of the model, standalone PV beats any of the hybrid combinations. Fast-forward to 2020 with an assumed 15 percent solar penetration, and DC-coupled PV-plus-storage with the federal Investment Tax Credit takes the lead.

In a 2020 scenario with 24 percent solar penetration, standalone PV plummets in value and all types of solar-plus-storage take the lead.

The real-world economics will change from place to place, but the trend here is clear: As the share of variable solar generation increases, so will the payoff for siting storage in the same place.

That evidence suggests the data is catching up to the aspirations of the storage industry, which Denholm has been tracking for the last 15 years.

“The hype might actually be real,” he said. “If these somewhat conservative projections do come true, then yes, by 2020 solar-plus-storage will be a cost-competitive source of dispatchable energy.”

Not just cost

It’s easy enough to calculate levelized cost of energy for a solar-plus-storage system, and it will always be more expensive than standalone solar. But that metric fails to capture the additional value that can be gained by adding storage.

If the developer needs to deliver power for the evening peak, a storage-assisted PV plant will be significantly more valuable than the alternative.

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India’s first grid-scale solar-plus-storage tender has been held up by the extreme drop in the country’s solar PV prices this year, according to Rahul Walawalkar, executive director of the Indian Energy Storage Alliance.

Although not officially announced by Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), which released the tender, the process has clearly faced delay after attracting strong levels of interest from 13 bidders in late 2016.

The tender is for 5MW/2.5MWh battery energy storage systems added to two separate solar projects of 50MW each in the Kadapa Solar Park, Andhra Pradesh. When the tender was released, SECI expected solar tariffs to still be around the previous INR4.50 (US$0.07) benchmark level. The corporation also expected bids to require viability gap funding (VGF), an upfront government grant, for the energy storage side.

However, Walawalkar told Energy-Storage.News that since the release, “solar prices have crashed” down to INR2.44/kWh. This has introduced various financial issues with the solar-plus-storage tender, and SECI is still working out how to address this.

Walawalkar added: “They definitely don’t want to now go release some tender at a higher price than [the] prices they have already got for the new tenders.”

This approach echoes that of multiple solar procurers across India who have gone back to the drawing board to try and emulate the success of the auction for 750MW solar at Rewa in Madhya Pradesh. The Rewa tender included various special parameters such as an offtake guarantee that helped pushed the tariffs down.

Walawalkar said: “This is creating a serious concern amongst global developers as there are multiple opportunities for deploying grid scale storage in US, Canada, Australia and Europe, where these companies see timely response from the authorities.”

At Intersolar Europe in Munich last week, Ashvini Kumar, managing director of SECI, said that India was seeing a shift towards hybridisation of solar being coupled with both wind and energy storage. While he praised India’s policy making, which had led to almost all bids for solar no longer requiring VGF funding, he did not note the recent lull in tenders across the country. Analysts have reported that this lull was the result of Indian states reworking their tenders to match the record low prices seen at Rewa and more recently at Bhadla in Rajasthan.

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