Vertically integrated solar PV company SunPower and residential battery storage provider sonnen have each started up programmes to deploy solar-plus-storage for communities in California and New York respectively.
California’s second-largest investor-owned utility Pacific Gas & Electric has warned customers of a challenging summer ahead, beginning with a record-breaking heatwave expected in some parts of the state this week.
Battery storage systems have been proven to be “extremely lucrative” for commercial and industrial (C&I) customers in the US, but a lack of customer knowledge of regulations and supply shortages of battery cells could yet stymie the market’s growth.
While interconnection queues for America’s electric transmission and distribution operators are “swelling up” with growing numbers of energy storage projects, some of the big challenges ahead include enabling fair market participation for both standalone storage and storage paired with generation.
A lithium-ion battery energy storage system that has been switched on in Rani Bagh, Delhi, will serve multiple applications and could pave the way for adoption of smarter energy networks based on renewable energy across India.
News in brief from around the world in energy storage.
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), one of California’s three main investor-owned utilities, has said that 1,400MW of battery storage is to be deployed in its service area by the end of 2023 will keep the company on-track to meet statewide renewable energy goals “while ensuring grid reliability”.
The repercussions of Texas' Winter Storm events in February, may be felt for years. Scott Burger, Annie Baldwin, Jason Houck and Marco Ferrara at long-duration energy storage start-up Form Energy discuss how in-depth system modelling of current and future grids offers some early takeaways which might help prevent the next crisis and how multi-day energy storage could play a leading role.
Texas’ grid and the idiosyncrasies of its electricity planning system regime made global headlines in February following a harsh winter storm and subsequent blackouts that affected millions of people and businesses for almost an entire week. It may be a unique market with unique characteristics, but what wider role can batteries — and other energy storage technologies — play in assisting the grid to remain stable and prevent a situation like this from happening again?
Dozens of zinc-bromine flow battery units will be deployed at 56 remote telecommunications stations in Australia, supplied by manufacturer Redflow.
SimpliPhi Power has made some bold choices in the decade that the company has been active, leveraging key technologies to “satisfy different pain points around energy". Andy Colthorpe hears from CEO Catherine Von Burg about why chemistry matters in the push for clean energy.
While it might be more than 200 times smaller than the world’s biggest battery energy storage system so far, a 1MW / 5.1MWh project awarded to technology provider FlexGen is expected to be the biggest of its kind in the US state of Kansas.
Google is investing in battery energy storage to serve as a backup power solution at one of its data centres, in a project described as a first step in changing data centres “from climate change problems to critical components in carbon-free systems”.
News in brief from around the world in energy storage.
While planning a better future for California’s energy system will take time and lies in the hands of many, many stakeholders from regulators to government to citizens and corporations, here are a few more of the recent moves forwards in clean energy in the state.
News in brief from around the world in energy storage.
New software solutions aimed at streamlining the process of deploying commercial and industrial (C&I) energy storage and for correctly sizing energy storage for distributed solar have been launched in the US.
A solar-plus-storage project in New York which has just been completed is the first community project of its type and should help lower electricity costs for participants by 10% for the next 25 years.
“Solar-charged batteries” can help solve California’s energy shortage, with energy storage already playing a small but active role in mitigating the struggle to meet peak energy demand, according to the leadership of two trade associations based in the US state.
A project demonstrating aggregated solar-plus-storage in Louisiana involving energy storage company SimpliPhi Power, technology partner Heila and local utility SWEPCO has started off small, but is “expected to transition into a larger network of distributed systems, soon”.
“The bottom line is that this is a good business decision. We will get back our money in eight to 10 years at the current price of power. As the price of energy goes up, we’ll pay it back even quicker.”
Islands are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of natural disasters such as hurricanes. John Merritt of Ideal Power looks at some of the emerging solutions to building more resilient energy systems through the deployment of microgrids that combine multiple energy generation and storage technologies.
Ideal Power, the US company best known for its power conversion systems for energy storage, has announced two recent project orders totalling 1.6MW in northern Texas and in California.
A programme to modernise New York’s energy system will lead to the state’s biggest ‘virtual power plant’, with PV system owners invited to join a pilot of aggregated solar-plus-storage systems.