The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) predicts South Australia and New South Wales could experience reliability gaps from 2026-27 and 2027-28.
Virtual power plants (VPPs) are networks of small-scale, distributed energy resources, such as solar panels or batteries (and in some instances vehicles) which can together function as a single power plant, providing stability to the electric grid.
Developer-operator GridStor has acquired a battery energy storage system (BESS) project in Oklahoma, US totalling 200MW/800MWh from Black Mountain Energy Storage (BMES).
Amendments to rules for battery storage state-of-charge (SOC) in the ERCOT, Texas, market are ‘an improvement’ to the current ones but will still impact the ability of batteries to provide ancillary services, Gridmatic has said.
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”.
There are 7GW of battery energy storage projects that have either been proposed or are in the planning process in Australia, with the average project in that pipeline sized at around 150MW.
