This Friday Briefing focuses on New York’s fight to get rid of dangerous peaker plants, and getting battery storage manufacturing right.

Battery storage is playing an active role in helping New York City retire its fleet of peaker power plants, with around 700MW of its most polluting power generation assets already fully retired.

A new roadmap outlining how New York can meet ambitious energy storage targets has been welcomed as “comprehensive and thoughtful”.

California’s rapid transition to renewables presents challenges that energy storage can solve, write the team from Form Energy.

New York Power Authority has started a process of adapting fossil fuel peaker plant sites to host battery storage which could replace them. 

Energy storage will play an important role in US power systems between now and 2050, offering the opportunity to displace fossil fuels with low-cost renewable energy and balancing supply and demand across multiple regions. 

After local opposition to the construction of a new gas peaker plant in Oxnard, California, a battery storage plant that was chosen instead has gone online just nine months after construction began.

For the US to thrive while achieving its decarbonisation goals, it needs a robust clean energy economy, creating well-paid jobs and a strong trajectory for technical innovation, argues Philip Brennan, CEO of Echogen, an Ohio-based provider of waste-heat recovery systems and electro-thermal energy storage solutions.

The India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA) has welcomed provisions in finance minister Nirmala Sitharam’s Union Budget 2020-2021 to support renewables and prioritise climate change policy, although the group hopes more will be done to support in-country manufacturing of batteries for applications including ESS.

Democratic presidential hopefuls discussed their environment and energy priorities during a televised town hall meeting in New York City earlier this week.