DERs interconnected with the grid position a utility to better manage peak demand, avoid transmission overloads and keep electricity flowing, but interconnection of battery, solar and other DERs is not without its challenges. Jason Allnutt from IEEE Standards Association discusses a standard that has become an “essential resource” for stakeholders.

Independent power producer (IPP) Broad Reach Power has made the first of “several planned expansions” into California’s market for energy storage, acquiring the 25MW / 100MWh Cascade Energy Storage project.

While redesigning California’s energy system will take some time, in the past couple of weeks alone, Energy-Storage.news has become aware of numerous initiatives and projects, both publicly and privately-driven, that are seeking to modernise, add resilience to and lower the emissions of the California grid.

A multi-gigawatt co-location market looks set to take off within the next five years, however uncertainty over DC coupling, the need for costly symmetric grid connections and outdated regulatory frameworks risk stymying the market’s growth.

Within the US, different jurisdictions are at different points of DER adoption and interconnection: Ravi Subramaniam at IEEE asks commissioners from across the country about the different drivers and dynamics they see.

Goldman Sachs Renewable Power has acquired a 100MW solar PV plant with a 50MW battery storage facility currently under development in San Bernadino, California.

A newly released standard creates nationally applicable guidance for DER manufacturers on how grid support functions in their products will be tested. Brian Lydic, chief regulatory engineer at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC), talks about what this means for enabling the grid modernisation that will be needed to support high levels of renewable energy and energy storage.

The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) hosted a technical conference on hybrid resources – pairing storage with generation – examining in order to overcome barriers that exist to the otherwise fastest-growing phenomenon of the grid.

A new project is underway in the US to tear down a significant barrier for “realising the full benefits” of energy storage: the complexity and lack of clarity over interconnection rules across the country.

With a quarter of all solar project proposals in the US including batteries, transmission grid operators across the country are taking a variety of steps to evaluate the role that can be played in wholesale electricity markets by hybrid power plants – defined as generation coupled with energy storage.