US electricity provider Direct Energy Business will be using some of the world’s largest battery energy storage systems to help cover its customers’ peak demand for power, signing contracts with project developer and investor LS Power.

While planning a better future for California’s energy system will take time and lies in the hands of many, many stakeholders from regulators to government to citizens and corporations, here are a few more of the recent moves forwards in clean energy in the state.

ENGIE EPS incurred increases in operating expenses and extraordinary costs due to COVID-19 which “more than offset” an increase in revenues that ENGIE’s energy storage subsidiary earned in the first half of this year.

Microgrid projects on three different continents that include multiple megawatts of battery storage alongside renewable energy have been announced in the past few days from well-known industry players.

“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.

A project demonstrating aggregated solar-plus-storage in Louisiana involving energy storage company SimpliPhi Power, technology partner Heila and local utility SWEPCO has started off small, but is “expected to transition into a larger network of distributed systems, soon”.

A 1MW battery storage system with as much as 150 hours of storage duration, using an as-yet unrevealed battery chemistry, is being deployed in a pilot by Minnesota electric utility Great River Energy.

A solar-plus-storage microgrid is powering a mobile intensive care unit (ICU), set up to treat people suffering from COVID-19 symptoms at a migrant camp on the border between Texas and Mexico.

Moving from today’s gas stations to their electrified equivalent can present a challenge so “dramatic” that in some cases, microgrids may be the only viable solution, a representative of Schneider Electric has said.

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.