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also are growing, as are wind turbines – the average-size turbine
delivered to market in 2015 was 2 MW. 142 The hydropower industry
is using ever-larger units; the single largest hydropower turbine
under development by early 2016 has a capacity of 1 GW. 143
At the same time, there are some markets where distributed,
small-scale generation has taken off, or is starting to do so.
Bangladesh is the world’s largest market for solar home systems,
and other developing countries (e.g., Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania
in Africa; China, India and Nepal in Asia; Brazil and Guyana in Latin
America) are seeing rapid expansion of small-scale renewable
technologies for remote uses. 144 Developed countries and regions –
including Australia, Europe, Japan and North America – have seen
significant growth in numbers of residential electricity customers
who produce their own power. 145
facility (850 MW upon completion). 127 Further, advancements
in inverter technologies are enabling solar and wind power to
provide a range of balancing services. 128
In addition, stationary battery storage continues to advance
and costs are trending downwards. 129 Utility-scale storage in the
power sector, not including pumped storage and lead-acid batteries,
increased by a record 250 MW in 2015 (compared with an
estimated 160 MW in 2014), and projects announced by the year’s
end totalled more than 1.2 GW. 130 Although tiny compared with
up to 145 GW of pumped storage hydropower capacity – which
accounts for about 97% of global storage capacity and continued
to expand in 2015 – the market is growing quickly. 131 Most of the
capacity is being installed in the developed world, but storage
projects also are under way in developing countries, particularly
in conjunction with mini-grids. 132
Industrial auto-producers in developed and developing countries
also generated significant amounts of renewable electricity (and
heat) on site in 2015, particularly with waste biomass associated
with forestry and agriculture. 146 A European Commission-funded
effort was launched in 2015 to develop innovative business models
and regulations to increase the flexibility of electricity demand
by energy-intensive industries in order to facilitate the growth
and integration of variable renewable energy, while reducing
industrial electricity costs. 147
The behind-the-meter storage (batteries) sector also took a great
step forward in 2015 with some high-profile announcements and
a host of companies competing for this small but rapidly growing
market. 133 Such markets are developing in Australia, Germany,
Japan, parts of the United States and elsewhere, particularly in
combination with small-scale solar PV. 134 Innovative business and
deployment models for integrating renewables and on-grid storage
continued to emerge. 135
Even so, in a growing number of regions and countries additional
increases in variable renewable penetration will require changes
to the grid system, regulations and market design. 136 To address
such challenges in the EU, several initiatives are under way to
advance grid integration in the region, including changes in electricity
market designs. 137 In 2015, the German government issued
a “white paper” proposing changes to the national electricity law
and market. 138 In the United States, California continued development
of a flexible ramping product (due to be launched in 2016),
which aims to shift generation as-needed through a new market
mechanism that allocates the extra costs of flexibility. 139
In addition, mini- and micro-grids, increasingly driven by renewable
systems, are being employed in island and other remote
communities to replace diesel generators or to provide electricity
access for the first time (e.g., in the US state of Alaska and
parts of Australia, island communities in Malaysia, remote areas
of India and southern Africa) or to achieve energy independence
and a more-secure and -resilient electricity supply (e.g., in the
US northeast in the wake of natural disasters such as Hurricane
Sandy). 148 These may be isolated or connected to a wider grid.
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Globally, renewable electricity production in 2015 continued to
be dominated by large (e.g., megawatt-scale and up) generators
that are owned by utilities or large investors. 140 Towards the end of
2015, more than half of global solar PV capacity was in projects of
4 MW and larger; the world’s 50 largest solar PV plants in operation
by early 2016 had a combined capacity exceeding 13.5 GW,
and at least 33 of these facilities came online (or achieved full
capacity) in 2015 and early 2016. 141 CSP and wind energy projects
Community and co-operative ownership of renewable power
capacity also expanded in 2015. 149 Japan has seen a significant
increase in community power projects since March 2011, interest
in Australia is patchy but growing rapidly, and, in the United
States, Community Choice Aggregation (which enables communities
to contract with producers to tailor their own energy supply)
is spreading beyond California. 150 In Europe, citizens in Croatia,
France, Greece and Spain have started to invest in renewable
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