SolarCity has chosen Tesla to supply a 52MWh utility-scale energy storage system, which will make the output of a solar farm in Hawaii dispatchable.
The UK looks set for the arrival of energy storage in a big way this year. While these companies and their battery chemistries are fighting it out for both market share and brand awareness, several energy storage systems have been deployed already on a commercial basis using a more novel storage technology – the saltwater battery.
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).
