While energy storage is still a small part of their respective businesses overall, recent quarterly financial reports from US-based geothermal company Ormat and standby generator maker Generac emphasised expectations of market growth going forwards.
AES Corporation reaffirmed its 2020 financial guidance in presenting its latest quarterly results, which showed a total backlog of renewables and energy storage contracts of 6.2GW, while the company said it will reduce generation from coal to less than 30% of its total capacity by the end of this year.
“Preventing a service event from becoming a catastrophic one,” is how Cadenza Innovation CEO Christina Lampe-Önnerud describes the way her company’s lithium-ion ‘Supercell’ battery architecture reacts to thermal runaway.
The first grid-scale battery energy storage project in the Canadian province of Alberta is on-track to go into operation this month, while TransAlta, the company behind the project, has expedited plans to retire a coal plant citing “future market conditions”.
A “first-in-the-nation” policy called the Clean Peak Standard has been launched in Massachusetts, US, whereby a proportion of electricity used on the grid at times of highest demand must be considered ‘clean’.
The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) hosted a technical conference on hybrid resources – pairing storage with generation – examining in order to overcome barriers that exist to the otherwise fastest-growing phenomenon of the grid.
More up-to-date training could have prevented severe injuries sustained by four firefighters in the April 2019 fire and explosion at battery storage facility in Arizona, according to a report into the incident from UL Firefighter Safety Research Institute (UL FSRI).
There’s a race to develop new technologies – and adapt existing ones – that can either be complementary to lithium batteries, or even compete with them. Representatives from three technology providers offer up some case studies, data, insights and opinions on where they think the market could go.
Independent power producer EDF Renewables North America has signed a 22-year power purchase agreement with NV Energy for a 200MWac solar project coupled with a 180MW, four-hour battery storage system.
