California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has approved a 11.5GW procurement of electricity capacity from greenhouse gas-free sources, while also approving a resolution that campaigners said will have severe negative impacts on the state’s residential solar and solar-plus-storage growth.

Approval has been granted — with significant conditions attached — for a large-scale standalone battery storage project designed to help the Hawaiian island of Oahu overcome energy reliability and supply concerns as a coal power plant retires.

PG&E, one of California’s main investor-owned utilities (IoUs) has awarded contracts for more than 1,000MW of battery energy storage projects to be deployed in its service area by the end of 2023, the company’s senior VP for energy policy and procurement has said.

A group of Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs) in California, US, are seeking long-duration energy storage to add resiliency to their electricity networks serving around three million customers.

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.

Another three developers with more than a gigawatt-hour of wins in Hawaiian Electric’s (HECO’s) massive solar-plus-storage and standalone energy storage tenders have gone public with size and location details of their proposed projects.

California, the world’s fifth largest economy and a global innovation engine, is confronting ambitious clean energy and GHG reduction goals. California must achieve 60% renewable energy and 5 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030, and a fully decarbonised power sector by 2045.

Just over one in 10 US states now has a deployment target in place for energy storage, with Nevada now aiming for 1,000MW by 2030.

Nevada utility NV Energy and Google are plotting a major solar-plus-storage facility outside of Las Vegas in a deal being billed as the largest battery-backed solar corporate agreement in the world.

A large tranche of utility-scale solar – and storage – projects in Hawaii has been approved by the state’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC), each quoting a cost per kilowatt hour of US$0.10 or under.