Saba Electric Company, sole supplier of electricity to the Dutch Caribbean island of Saba, celebrated as the island ran on 100% solar for the first time ever this month, with the switch-on of a solar-plus-storage microgrid.
In the hierarchy of grid needs, peaking power is often a priority in terms of providing resiliency and balance to the network. This is usually provided by natural gas turbines, which come at a high environmental and economic cost. Andy Colthorpe charts the rise of the solar-plus-storage peaker plant.
Perhaps the biggest indicator of the recognition of behind-the-meter storage so far this year has been the acquisition of Sonnen by oil major Shell. CEO Christoph Ostermann spoke to Andy Colthorpe about why home storage uptake could be on a worldwide series of inflection points.
Energy storage enjoyed another record-breaking year of deployments in the US in 2018, while the residential segment is now “moving beyond early adopters” and into commercial viability, a report from Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables claims.
NEC Energy Solutions, the distributed energy division of Japanese information tech company NEC, has commissioned a 2MW / 2MWh battery energy storage system in Chile.
Revisions aimed at enabling energy storage’s participation in wholesale markets, proposed by New England’s Independent System Operator (ISO) have been accepted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), effective 1 April this year.
Legislators in Minnesota have begun the first steps to establishing fair or optimal market conditions for the deployment of energy storage, setting out rules for determining the value of storage to the network.
Arizona Public Service (APS) has announced a plan to make solar energy dispatchable into the evening using batteries, calling for the deployment of 850MW of energy storage by 2025.
The installation will be used to provide “critical peaking capacity” and “increased” grid reliability. AES will provide a system with a four-hour duration based on Fluence’s Advancion platform. It will be leased under a 20-year contract with AES the owner and operator of the project.
Flow battery maker Avalon has initiated a novel business model aimed at lowering the cost of deployment of its energy storage units, effectively ‘renting’ the electrolytes in the devices to a customer in California.
