SunEdison has made a significant first step into the grid-scale energy storage market, with the acquisition of US startup Solar Grid Storage.
The company, which recently disclosed that it had reached its 2014 solar installation target of 1GW, was reported by Reuters and others to have closed the deal in January, with the news agency quoting an interview with the company’s vice president of energy storage deployment, Tom Leyden. The company has since confirmed the reports.
Leyden was previously Solar Grid Storage’s chief executive officer, still listed as such on the storage company’s website, and according to Reuters said that in his new role his “mandate at SunEdison” is nationwide energy storage deployment in the US.
Solar Grid Storage produces the PowerFactor250 and PowerFactor500 combined inverter and battery product, which is designed to be co-located with large-scale PV systems. Solar Grid Storage continues to own and operate the battery. To date the company has deployed a handful of its systems in the PJM utility service area, which covers 61 million customers mainly in the US Midwest. The utility provides payments for grid-balancing services that have been described by analyst Dean Frankel at Lux Research as among the most “robustly priced” in the States. Financial terms of the SunEdison deal have not been disclosed.
SunEdison, which hit its 2014 install target of 1GW, recently said revealed it expected solar in the US to continue to grow strongly even after the end of the Investment Tax Credit support scheme.