The West Australian town of Kalbarri is set to install a $10 million microgrid, which will integrate distributed solar, a 1.7MW wind farm, and 2MWh battery system, to increase the reliability of electricity supply to the holiday location.

Almost 2.5 GW of solar projects have been submitted to the Netherland’s autumn SDE+ tender round. The SDE+ autumn round has a budget of €5 billion available to renewable energy projects, with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs announcing last week that 2.439 GW of solar projects, worth €11.5 billion, had applied for the SDE+ subsidy in the latest tender round.

IBC Solar has completed 23.5 MW of projects across eight sites in Germany. The PV power plants were developed under Germany’s large-scale solar tender program and will receive the full FIT awarded under the tender process, as they have been completed within 18 months of having been awarded.

Swiss PV technology provider Meyer Burger has announced a recapitalization program that will see the company issue CHF160 million in new shares to ensure the repayment of a CHF130 million bond due in 2017, adjust the conditions of a second CHF100 million bond, proposing a 2018 put option be removed, and increase a borrowing provision on its headquarters from CHF30 million to CHF60 million.

German wet chemistry specialist RENA has picked up a double-digit million euro order from Chinese monocrystalline wafer, cell and module producer Lerri Solar. The production equipment will be for 2 GW of mono cell production.

Turkey will tender for up to 1 GW of PV to be developed in the central region of Konya. Turkish press is reporting that the tender will be for a 1 GW array, titled the Karapinar solar project, and that a 2,000 hectare site has been selected for development.

A utility scale segment bursting to life, battery storage providers of all sizes moving in amongst the backdrop of a fierce political debate about the role of renewables in a historic blackout: This week’s All Energy trade show and conference was anything but boring.

While the political storm rages over this week’s state-wide South Australian power outage, the Lyon Group has announced a partnership with Mitsubishi Corporation which it says will seek to roll out 1GW of solar + 500MWh of battery storage by 2020.

Scientists from three research groups in Germany and Belgium have produced a perovskite/CIGS PV mini module with a conversion efficiency of 17.8%. The result marks the first time that the efficiency of a perovskite/CIGS stack PV module has surpassed that of perovskite and CIGS semiconductors. The researchers note that the technology could achieve efficiencies exceeding 25%, “in the next years.”