Hawaii has been namechecked as a ‘test bed’ for how grids can migrate to higher levels of PV penetration so often it has become something of a cliché. Stem’s VP for Hawaii operations, Tad Glauthier tells ESN about the projects that are going on, which lessons might be transferable to other regions – and which might not.
Tesla executives were unwilling to publicly put figures on expected sales for the company’s stationary storage products or for near-term cost reduction objectives, but said that production is on track.
AGL Energy has invested US$20 million in energy storage manufacturer Sunverge, as Australia’s biggest utility set up a fund worth ten times that to help meet its climate change commitments.
Energy Storage News spoke to UK veteran PV installer Martin Cotterell about selling energy storage systems responsibly, and making customers at commercial and industrial (C&I) and domestic level aware of the options available to them.
Hawaii’s electricity regulator and main utility have recognised that customer-sited distributed energy resources (DERs), including rooftop PV and energy storage, can provide essential grid services and better visbility for network operators, the VP of Stem Inc’s Hawaii operations has told Energy Storage News.
The organisation responsible for overseeing California’s bulk electric power system has approved proposals to accommodate more distributed energy resources, including rooftop solar, energy storage, advanced inverters and demand response, onto the state’s grid.
A spokesman for Solar Frontier has said that a retrofit market for up to half a million home energy storage systems could open up in Japan from the year 2019, as agreements made under a subsidy scheme for solar in existence before the current feed-in tariff begin to reach the end of their terms.
A new project could make power-to-gas “commercially viable” by exploiting links with the automotive industry, according to Germany’s Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW).
Secure financing for energy storage is likely to be the main driver for its deployment, the chief of the UK’s biggest solar developer has said, echoing views given to Energy Storage News by analysis firm Lux Research.
News in brief: A battery park in Germany will be capable of restarting the local grid in the event of a blackout, a public square in Haiti will be lit at night with solar energy, and a revived Solarmax will target its new range of storage and inverter solutions at several European markets this year.
