Google will procure energy from a US$600 million portfolio of renewables and energy storage assets specially-designed to enable the search engine company’s data centres in Virginia to run on 90% carbon-free electricity.
Barriers to financing for energy storage could hold back the growth of solar in the US, while an Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for standalone energy storage should be introduced, the audience heard as our publisher Solar Media hosted the Solar and Storage Finance USA event last week.
Utility company RWE has begun marketing a tech solution through which data centres, which already integrate batteries for uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, can use their UPS to “help stabilise the grid”.
ZAF Energy Systems, a maker of nickel-zinc (NiZn) batteries which in 2019 claimed a “breakthrough in cycle life” has netted a contract to outfit a data centre in the Southern US for integrator Capitol Power Group (CPG).
Automotive giant Nissan and power electronics and engineering group Eaton have installed an energy storage system at a data centre run by IT and cloud computing firm Webaxys in Normandy, France.
