Texas households in rented accommodation will be able to subscribe to a solar-plus-storage virtual power plant (VPP) equipped with SolarEdge hardware and cloud-based software services.
Approval is being sought for a 400MW advanced compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) project with eight hours of storage to be built in California by technology provider Hydrostor.
SunPower has launched its ConnectedSolutions virtual power plant (VPP), enabling customers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut to earn “hundreds of dollars a year” for allowing utility access to their stored energy during peak demand.
Powin Energy has installed battery energy storage systems (BESS) in Israel and Taiwan which, while small by comparison to some of the company’s recent US projects, mark entry into new territories for the Oregon-headquartered system integrator.
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.
How do electric grids that were state-of-the-art in the 19th Century remain stable and resilient through 21st Century climate disasters and other problems? They don’t, says Catherine Von Burg, CEO and co-founder of distributed battery energy storage company SimpliPhi Power – but giving people the power to be independent can be a solution fit for the future.
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), one of California’s three main investor-owned utilities, has said that 1,400MW of battery storage is to be deployed in its service area by the end of 2023 will keep the company on-track to meet statewide renewable energy goals “while ensuring grid reliability”.
The repercussions of Texas’ Winter Storm events in February, may be felt for years. Scott Burger, Annie Baldwin, Jason Houck and Marco Ferrara at long-duration energy storage start-up Form Energy discuss how in-depth system modelling of current and future grids offers some early takeaways which might help prevent the next crisis and how multi-day energy storage could play a leading role.
Texas’ grid and the idiosyncrasies of its electricity planning system regime made global headlines in February following a harsh winter storm and subsequent blackouts that affected millions of people and businesses for almost an entire week. It may be a unique market with unique characteristics, but what wider role can batteries — and other energy storage technologies — play in assisting the grid to remain stable and prevent a situation like this from happening again?
