Behind-the-meter battery storage projects announced last week in California and Ontario will cut electricity costs and carbon emissions for a variety of commercial and industrial (C&I) businesses.
Clean Power Alliance, a community energy provider in California, has signed a 15-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with EDF Renewables for a large-scale solar-plus-storage project’s output.
After the expansion of the biggest battery project in world, milestones have been recorded for three more major solar-plus-storage and standalone battery storage projects in California, Hawaii and Florida.
Community Choice Aggregators (CCA) Central Coast Community Energy (CCCE) and Silicon Valley Clean Energy (SVCE) have signed contracts for 778MW of renewable energy generation and 118.75MW of energy storage in California.
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.
A company that pairs available energy capacity with the needs of electric utilities is preparing to put 288MW of flexible power onto the California grid in time for the summer peak in electricity demand that threatens energy security across the state each year.
A long-term power purchase agreement has been signed for the output of a 50MW solar farm with 200MWh of battery storage, by Desert Community Energy, one of several Community Choice Aggregator (CCA) energy suppliers in California.
Mitsubishi Power Americas and Powin Energy have been appointed to retrofit 640MWh of batteries to solar PV plants in California, while a community energy group in the state has just signed a power purchase agreement for a 100MW solar plant with 150MW / 600MWh of storage.
The energy storage market is poised for strong growth over the next decade and opportunities are likely to emerge for alternatives to lithium-ion that offer longer durations of storage, but three key challenges remain for those technologies.