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Shell, which has just participated in an investment round for sonnen, is one of the big players in the incumbent energy industry that “really acts” on clean energy, rather than just talking about it, sonnen’s CEO has said.
Shell has continued to scale-up its interest in distributed energy by participating in a €60 million (US$70.23 million) investment round by German battery storage firm sonnen.
Simply Energy, the Australian retail arm for ENGIE, will aggregate 6MW of Tesla household batteries together with 2MW of demand response at commercial premises in Adelaide in a project supported by the government-backed Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).
Germany’s sonnen introduced a scheme a while back in which customers pay a flat, reduced rate for their electricity each month while the company aggregate their batteries together to benefit the grid – and now the offer has been extended to electric vehicle owners.
Ahead of a March election, the South Australian Labor government has said it will increase its renewable energy target to 75% by 2025 and implement 750MW of “renewable storage” if re-elected.
The CEO of ‘intelligent energy storage’ provider Stem Inc, has said a recently-awarded project in Japan will lean on business models the company has used in the US, while artificial intelligence (AI) technology makes that same transference possible.
News in brief from around the world of energy storage.
Members of the public in South Australia are being given the chance to participate in creating the biggest ‘virtual power plant’ of solar PV and batteries the world has ever seen.
Japanese trading house Itochu has invested £5 million (US$7.04 million) into UK-based energy storage and related services provider Moixa, which will enable Itochu to add Moixa’s ‘GridShare’ aggregation platform to its own suite of battery storage solutions.
Stem Inc, self-described as a supplier of “artificial intelligence-powered” energy storage, which deployed a system on average every two days last year, has closed a US$80 million Series D financing round.
Well, we seem to say it at the end of every year, but 2017 seemed a lot busier than 2016, 2016 was busier and more exciting than the year before that, and so on! There have been some hints already on what the industry and its observers expect to see in 2018 and we do not doubt energy storage will continue in its rise to become a flexible cornerstone of the world’s electricity infrastructure. In the meantime, let’s reflect on the top news stories of last year, as reported by Energy-Storage.News and based on readership statistics from you:
A 250-home ‘virtual big battery’ was switched on in Canberra, Australia last week, allowing residents to sell solar-generated power at a significantly higher price than available to them through feed-in tariff (FiT) policies.
We often hear about California's leading position in solar and latterly in energy storage. Perhaps lesser known than direct policy support for energy storage and renewable technologies is the way California's network operator (CAISO) is starting to reconfigure how it procures demand response, with a positive impact for energy storage - and particularly behind-the-meter assets, as Ted Ko, policy director of Stem, explains.
Residential energy storage system developer Sunverge Energy has appointed Martin Milani to the role of chief executive officer.
In its home territory of Germany, energy storage provider Sonnen is making a play to replace utilities, but its business models in the US will instead emphasise cooperation with existing energy suppliers.
Energy storage services provider Peak Power will supply control platforms to 6MWh of energy storage projects in Ontario and New York, some of which will be funded by Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC).
On the back of rapidly decreasing costs for energy storage and solar photovoltaics (PV), consumers wishing to achieve a low-cost and reliable supply of power are considering grid defection—or at least, partial grid-defection—as an increasingly attractive alternative. Julian Jansen, analyst at IHS looks at the economics of grid defection in Europe today and in the future - and how its proliferation could impact the energy industry as a whole.
Sonnen is looking to sign up 2,000 Australian customers this year for SonnenFlat, where households sign up to pay a monthly ‘flat rate’ for power while their batteries are used to benefit the local grid.
Stem Inc. will build a 4.2MWh energy storage project on the California State University (CSU) Dominguez Hills campus to help the institution save on energy costs.
Tesla has announced the first programme to aggregate the capabilities of hundreds of its residential and commercial stationary storage systems in a partnership with Vermont utility Green Mountain Power.
Energy efficiency solutions provider and energy storage developer Anesco is to partner with "technology-driven utility" Limejump to deliver 185MW of energy storage capability in the UK into August’s capacity market, with plans for the units to be brought online by the end of 2018.
AGL has commissioned the first phase of what it claims is the world’s largest virtual power plant (VPP).
A 1MW ‘virtual power plant’ part-funded by the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research (PICHTR), utilising energy storage across 29 customer sites, has been connected in O’ahu, Hawaii, by Stem.
A plan by utility Con Edison to save US$1 billion on infrastructure spending in New York’s Brooklyn and Queens neighbourhoods will get 13MWh of energy storage from Green Charge.
Australian power company AGL is to install the largest ‘virtual power plant’ in the world in Adelaide, South Australia, using batteries from energy storage firm Sunverge Energy.
What is thought to be Canada’s first virtual power plant (VPP), aggregating the capabilities of a small fleet of solar PV-plus-storage systems with energy management software, has been deployed in Ontario.
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.
PV Tech Storage attended the late November launch of sonnenCommunity, a new energy trading platform launched on a limited basis in Germany based on Sonnen’s residential energy storage systems. Andy Colthorpe spoke to two key members of the Sonnen team at the event, CEO Christoph Ostermann and sales director Philipp Schröder.
A US company which analyses Big Data for energy applications has claimed a world first with its involvement in a Dutch project to integrate multiple distributed energy resources into a single system.
Battery-based energy storage could provide up to 13 different services to the US electricity grid, while the usefulness of the technology increases the more ‘distributed’ it is along the system, according to a new report.