Philadelphia Solar, a vertically-integrated PV company headquartered in Jordan, said this morning it has reached financial close on a project to bring battery storage to a large-scale solar farm in the Middle East kingdom.
JLM Energy, a US maker of residential ’microstorage’ systems that pair with individual solar panels, is leaning on its US$25 million project finance fund to develop larger storage projects for commercial businesses.
Axiom Exergy, a US manufacturer of energy storage units that use stored energy for cooling buildings and produce, has netted close to US$8 million from investors including Shell’s venture capital unit and Tesla battery guru JB Straubel.
Hawaii’s position as one of the leading US states for energy storage deployment shows no sign of weakening as Hawaiian Electric Co last week announced 120MW of new battery storage across two projects in Oahu.
Convergent Energy + Power, a US-Canadian project developer which has attracted investment from the venture capital arm of Statoil, has acquired 40MW of flywheel energy storage already in operation in grid-balancing markets in New York State and Pennsylvania.
The US government Department of Energy is funding research into storing energy for periods of between 10 and 100 hours, announcing last week that “up to US$30 million” will be available through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).
Israel-headquartered SolarEdge launched a software platform for aggregating household energy storage units – and other distributed energy equipment – into virtual power plants, last week. The company’s solution has already been chosen for a VPP project in Australia by AGL, one of the country’s biggest utilities. The commercial launch of the VPP platform direct to customers is now underway. Andy Colthorpe spoke with Lior Handelsman, one of SolarEdge’s founders and vice president of marketing and product strategy.
Virtual power plants (VPPs) can greatly increase the value of home energy storage systems for a range of stakeholders including grid operators, utilities and their customers, according to SolarEdge, which has just launched a VPP software platform.
The Thailand subsidiary of Delta Electronics, which makes equipment including solar inverters, has confirmed that it is investigating energy storage systems as part of a clean energy drive, following reports in local press.
There will be no benefit to basing home energy storage systems on automotive batteries, in the medium or long term, a representative of Mercedes-Benz Energy has said.
