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Energy co-operatives offer great opportunities for communities to forward green ambitions and benefit from low cost energy, but the challenges they face in the energy sector has meant that they are still few and far between.
Egni Co-op was set up in 2013 to develop and install renewable energy, as well as provide energy efficiency measures and assistance to local communities. As the first Solar PV Co-op in the country it has grown from strength to strength, installing solar PV on 40 schools and over 40 other buildings.
This includes completing installations on twenty Newport City Council schools, six Pembrokeshire Council schools and five schools owned by the Archdiocese of Cardiff in the first half of 2020, and seven schools in Swansea from August 2020.
Author: Lauren Cook
In this blog, analyst for Solar Media s in-house market research Lauren Cook detailed how 1.3GW of battery storage were at the ready-to-build stage and could come to fruition in 2020 and 2021, with nearly 300MW of utility scale battery storage deployed in 2019. The blog shows how the average size for projects at the ready-to-build stage was 26MW, up from 20MW for projects completed in 2019. This, Cook said, reflected a large number of projects of 49.9MW that were being proposed, in addition to a wide range of smaller project sizes and batteries co-located with renewables.
The blog also details the impacts of changes such as battery storage being able to participate in the Balancing Mechanism for the first time, opening up new revenue streams for projects and bringing new companies into the market.
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Image: Getty.
Despite the challenges faced by the solar sector in 2020, it has progressed at pace throughout the year with significant capacity additions, key policy decisions and new players entering the market. The past few months have been particularly significant in terms of policy, with important documents such as the Ten Point Plan and the energy white paper released, helping to set out the roadmap for the sectors development in coming years.
Of the news stories released on Solar Power Portal throughout 2020, these are the top five most read:
Published: 2 Jan 2020
The introduction of the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG) tariffs way back in January unsurprisingly has grabbed first place, as suppliers laid out the price consumers with solar panels can expect to receive from exports. Social Energy s 5.6p per kWh took the top spot, but the level varied dramatically, including the barely-compliant 0.001p per kWh that Shell Energy offered before later upping its offerin
Already, this has allowed the nation s biggest ever site to be announced, with InterGen set to build a 320MW asset in Essex, and an increasing number of storage projects to have been announced by major players like Gore Street and Gresham House.
Speaking to
Solar Power Portal recently, Peter Kavanagh, CEO of battery energy storage and solar company Harmony Energy, said the changes to legislation will “definitely” lead to more 50MW-plus scale projects.
“We definitely see that the main investor appetite is for 50MW and above projects, because I think National Grid wants to see more of those assets on the larger scale as well. I think it s an exciting development, including for Harmony and we will be looking at one or two of the larger scale sites.