The Southern California Public Power Authority (SCPPA), an organisation comprising the municipal utilities of 10 cities and one irrigation district, has ordered a potential 1MW of ice battery storage systems from Ice Energy.
The participation of venture capital (VC) investors seems to have cooled, while project funding has conversely seen a sharp rise, in the latest quarterly report into funding and mergers and acquisitions from Mercom Capital.
New York utility Con Edison is offering local businesses incentives to install over US$5 million of thermal energy storage systems that kick in during peak hours, and can be controlled remotely.
Mercom Capital Group’s latest report showed how energy storage companies brought in US$125 million in venture capital (VC) funding in Q2 2016, double that of the previous quarter. Year-over-year funding this second quarter roughly matched last year’s Q2 output, which had US$126 million in 13 deals.
Glen Dimplex, by some estimates the world’s biggest maker of domestic heating appliances, is due to start recruiting households to participate in the latest phase of an EU trial of energy storage technologies.
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.
Energy storage technologies are not the “silver bullet” they have sometimes been hyped as, but nonetheless have a crucial role to play in a decarbonised electricity system, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
