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/daily ·18 AUG 2026 ·TUESDAY ·2 MIN READ ·7 STORIES

Tuesday: the cheap-cell era, revised

Storage system prices stopped falling in China, an Australian battery threw out its inverter, and an Indian developer put $816M behind the wafer step the country kept skipping.

01 / The Day

TUESDAY 18 AUG 2026, ranked

07

China's storage tenders grew two-thirds — and prices turned up

A report compiled under the guidance of the China Industrial Association of Power Sources tallied 142.3GW/477.3GWh of storage tendered in 2025. The more interesting number is that the long price slide reversed from September 2025.

  • 2025 tenders: 142.3GW/477.3GWh, up 65.7% on power and 67.8% on capacity
  • Lowest four-hour bids bottomed near RMB0.4/Wh in July-August 2025; system prices averaged RMB0.5937/Wh in May 2026
  • Report credits rising lithium carbonate prices, tightening cell supply and growing overseas orders
Why it mattersThe cheapest cells in history may already be behind us, which reprices every storage project still sitting on a spreadsheet.
01 energy-storage.news↗

Relectrify switches on a battery with no inverter

A 250kVA/1,089kWh system at Renmark, South Australia makes grid-compliant AC straight from the cells, using switching electronics spread across roughly 4,000 of them instead of a central inverter.

  • CellSwitch monitors and controls nearly 4,000 cells individually per unit
  • Certified to IEC standards and Australia's AS/NZS 4777 grid connection standard
  • Relectrify claims 40% more retained capacity after 20 years of daily cycling than conventional systems
Why it mattersDeleting the inverter moves the hard engineering into the pack, which changes who owns the margin in a BESS.
02 energy-storage.news↗

Agastya commits $816M to 12GW of ingots and wafers

Agastya Green Energy plans an integrated ingot, wafer, cell and module plant at Orvakal, Kurnool, in Andhra Pradesh — the upstream step Indian solar manufacturing has mostly skipped.

  • INR78 billion ($815.8M) for 12GW each of ingot and wafer capacity, plus 5GW of cells and modules
  • Phase 1 is 2GW of cells and modules; the company will review the rest against demand
  • MNRE is extending ALMM to ingots and wafers, with the wafer requirement effective 1 June 2028
Why it mattersWafers are where China's cost advantage actually lives, so putting a dated ALMM requirement on the upstream step gives Indian makers a reason to build it.
03 pv-magazine.com↗

Perovskite tandems keep their edge, but not everywhere

A team from Southwest Petroleum University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tongwei tested two-terminal perovskite-silicon cells under varied spectra, and found current mismatch eats enough yield to erase the cost case in one of four locations.

  • Champion cell hit 32.85%; current mismatch reached 4.98% under blue-rich light
  • Spectral losses cut annual yield 0.77% at Yancheng but 3.25% at Albuquerque
  • LCOE came out 0.87% worse at Albuquerque, better at Haikou, Yancheng and Daqing
Why it mattersA series-connected tandem is a bet on the local sky, and that bet decides where a fab's output can command a premium.
04 pv-magazine.com↗

AU$6.52M on the grid-forming fault-current question

ARENA is funding a three-and-a-half-year UNSW project, PROFILES, on how inverter-based resources interact with grid protection — because grid-forming BESS has not yet been shown to deliver protection-quality fault current.

  • Grid-forming features in 74% of Australia's 33.2GW NEM battery pipeline
  • Runs to November 2030 with Transgrid, AEMO and ElectraNet as partners
  • Tesla, SMA, Siemens and Power Electronics named as equipment partners
Why it mattersThree-quarters of a 33.2GW pipeline is riding on a fault-current claim nobody has yet demonstrated at the required standard.
05 energy-storage.news↗

Australia installed half a million home batteries in a year

The Cheaper Home Batteries rebate passed 507,000 installations just over a year after launch, roughly 14GWh of distributed storage, on a budget that more than tripled its original estimate.

  • 507,000+ installs since the July 2025 launch; average system around 28kWh
  • 30% off upfront cost, on an AU$7.2bn four-year budget against AU$2.3bn projected
  • About half of installs came alongside new or upgraded solar
Why it mattersA 14GWh fleet of 28kWh boxes is simultaneously a manufacturing order book and a virtual power plant waiting for a dispatcher.
06 energy-storage.news↗

The third terawatt of solar took under two years

BloombergNEF puts global installed solar past 3TW, with each terawatt arriving faster than the last, though deployment remains concentrated in a relatively small number of markets.

  • First TW took about a decade; the second under three years, the third under two
  • Countries with 1GW+ installed went from 42 in 2020 to 74 in 2025
  • BNEF expects global capacity to exceed 9TW by 2036
Why it mattersEach terawatt lands faster than the last, which moves the binding constraint off the panel and onto grid, storage and flexible demand.
07 pv-magazine.com↗
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Past days

The Daily Archive

/TUE 18 AUGTuesday: the cheap-cell era, revised/MON 17 AUGCells Back Online/SAT 15 AUGScale, tangibly/FRI 14 AUGThe Quarter the Consumer Took Over/THU 13 AUGScotland gets a big battery, China gets the biggest/WED 12 AUGThe grid doubles, the river runs hot, and Amazon builds America's biggest gas plant/TUE 11 AUGMaking It Here/MON 10 AUGA gigawatt-hour in Rajasthan, a Joby milestone, and the cheddar test/SUN 09 AUG12.8 GWh in China, solar tariff shock, and RWE's billion-dollar exit/FRI 07 AUGUS hits polysilicon; Ørsted stacks 500 MWh in Texas/THU 06 AUGGrid delays, grid storage, and grid-scale bets/WED 05 AUGHome batteries scale up, microreactors raise $1B, and China ends the solar price war/MON 03 AUGFusion gets its billion; perovskite breaks 28%/SUN 02 AUGSurplus signals/SAT 01 AUGThe Heat Is the Story/FRI 31 JULCalifornia hits 51% monthly solar; China sets record targets/THU 30 JULThe Billion-Dollar Build Edition/WED 29 JULWednesday, 29 July — Sodium-ion arrives; Australia breaks records/TUE 28 JULMalaysia orders the grid; Australia scales the cell/MON 27 JULA Solar Farm Becomes a Data Centre, Wisconsin Campaigns Against Solar, and LONGi Breaks the Tandem Efficiency Record/SUN 26 JULThe Build-Out Accelerates