Here’s a fun fact about Russia: it gets a fifth of its energy from hydropower. This might sound shocking for a country whose image is so tightly linked to oil and gas, but Russia has a lot of big rivers and it’s putting them to good use. Now, Moscow is moving into other renewables and, more interestingly, energy storage as well. Energy Minister Alexander Novak said earlier this week that Russia could find a place among the world’s leaders in solar power generation and energy storage. Russian solar panel makers, the minister added, can already produce an efficiency factor per panel on par with global leaders, at around 20 percent, although some of the world’s leading producers have already exceeded that figure. Renewables news stories from Russia are not a frequent occurrence, and that’s understandable: there are too many oil headlines and there have not been indications from Moscow […]