Canadian Solar has signed a new partnership with UK-headquartered energy storage optimisation specialist Habitat Energy.
The company will offer Habitat Energy’s optimisation services for grid-scale battery storage assets, including its trading platform with route-to-market capabilities for wholesale and balancing markets to developers and battery storage owners.
Habitat Energy’s services are based on its proprietary software PowerIQ, which combines and AI. It has been used in the UK to bring Gresham House's storage assets into the Balancing Mechanism for example. Habitat has latterly also established a presence in Australia.
“Storage-enabled renewables are critical to the energy transition and require continued innovation and collaboration across the entire value chain to achieve their full potential,” said Andrew Luers, co-founder and CEO of Habitat Energy.
“We share Canadian Solar’s mission to work toward a cleaner earth for future generations and look forward to working together on storage and solar plus storage projects around the world.”
Working with Canadian Solar will help Habitat expand beyond the UK and Australian markets it currently operates in. The integrated solar PV company has increasingly targeted battery energy storage, including winning nearly 1GWh of battery storage contracts in 2020 and setting its sights on 10% of the US market.
Dr. Shawn Qu, chairman and chief executive officer of Canadian Solar said, “The power grid of tomorrow is not only built by renewable energy and battery storage, but crucially driven by artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, cloud computing and many more technologies.
“Habitat Energy is the proven leader in AI-enabled battery optimisation and dispatch services. We strongly share Habitat Energy’s belief that making merchant battery storage investable at scale is a vital step towards delivering a low carbon future and the preservation of our habitat for generations to come.