In light of the Paris COP21 climate conference, New York City announced plans to incorporate 2,000 electric vehicles (EVs) into its municipal fleet by 2025. New York City claims this move will make it the largest EV fleet operator in the world. Analyst Dean Frankel of Lux Research takes a dive beyond the headlines.

Lux Research published 2015’s fourth quarter update to its Grid Storage Tracker earlier this month, tracking every stationary deployment of advanced energy storage globally. Dean Frankel, research associate at Lux talks through some of the headline findings and big trends and explains why it has been a “monumental year” for energy storage.

Dean Frankel of Lux Research blogs about utility Southern California Edison’s recent 235MW award of battery-based energy storage projects, a decision which surpassed their 50MW requirement by some distance and was described as “monumental” by one trade advocacy group when it emerged. Frankel examines the procurement in detail and looks at some of the questions that remain as-yet unanswered by the announcement.

One of the U.S.‘s largest investor-owned energy utilities, Consolidated Edison (Con Edison), is planning to spend US$200 million on demand reduction technologies. Con Edison has filed a proposal with the New York Public Utilities Commission for a Brooklyn/Queens Demand Management Program (BQDM) that it hopes can defer the US$1 billion cost of building a new substation and expanding two existing ones.

Hawaii is inviting proposals for up to 200MW of storage in the face of regulatory demands and unprecedented distributed generation challenges. As Dean Frankel writes, the process could offer some answers to the conundrum of integrating higher volumes of renewable energy generation.