It would be “feasible and cost-effective” to retire more than a gigawatt (GW) of gas and fuel oil peaker plant capacity on New York’s densely populated Long Island within three years, according to a new study.

South Africa’s Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy is conducting a fairly unique procurement programme for 2GW of energy capacity, to come from a “range of energy source technologies”. Clean Horizon head of market analysis, Corentin Baschet, spoke to Andy Colthorpe about what the “almost technology agnostic” tender aims to do and the type of companies and projects likely to be successful in it.

A preliminary report has been issued by California energy authorities into power outages which occurred in August and among the key recommendations it makes is that generation and energy storage projects proceed without delay.

Texas-based Vistra will develop nearly 1GW of solar and storage projects in the next two years as the utility plans to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Update 24 September 2020: A few hours after the publication of this story, Entergy made public a new pledge to reach carbon neutrality by the year 2050. The company said that while it commits to this goal it will remain committed to “grid reliability and affordability for customers”.

Mitsubishi Power has launched a simplified approach to commercially integrating hydrogen into energy systems either as long or short duration energy storage, or as a means of balancing the grid as higher shares of renewable energy are added.

“Solar-charged batteries” can help solve California’s energy shortage, with energy storage already playing a small but active role in mitigating the struggle to meet peak energy demand, according to the leadership of two trade associations based in the US state.

The 20MW / 80MWh Pomona battery energy storage facility, in operation in California since a fast-track process brought it online in partial response to the 2015 Aliso Canyon gas leak, has been bought by Ormat Technologies.

Wärtsilä has been contracted to deliver a hybrid solution combining battery energy storage with liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and light fuel oil (LFO) engines on the US Virgin Islands.

FlexGen, an energy storage system integrator that counts GE and Caterpillar among its backers, said this week that a lithium-ion battery storage system it was supplied was used by an Indiana utility to black start a 77MW natural gas plant.