Foresight Solar Fund, a UK-based investment company with over a gigawatt of solar PV assets in its portfolio, has made its first move into the battery storage space.

Google will procure energy from a US$600 million portfolio of renewables and energy storage assets specially-designed to enable the search engine company’s data centres in Virginia to run on 90% carbon-free electricity.

With batteries today finally reaching the size and capacity that enables renewables to replace medium-sized natural gas generators, a future ruled by solar and storage is just around the corner, writes Radoslav Stompf, CEO of FUERGY.

The April 2021 episode of the Solar Media Podcast, sponsored by Honeywell, is now available to stream. We discuss everything from long-duration energy storage and floating solar technologies to the UK’s greenest weekend ever and Vietnam’s solar rush.

California’s goal of reaching 100% emissions-free retail electricity by 2045 is achievable, but will require huge deployments of long-duration energy storage, especially from 2030 onwards.

While interconnection queues for America’s electric transmission and distribution operators are “swelling up” with growing numbers of energy storage projects, some of the big challenges ahead include enabling fair market participation for both standalone storage and storage paired with generation.

Construction has started on what claims to be Australia’s largest hybrid solar and battery energy storage facility.

US community solar provider Nexamp has closed a US$440 million credit facility for a 380MW portfolio of PV and energy storage assets.

Stem Inc has completed a front-of-the-meter solar-plus-storage project in Massachusetts that will participate in New England’s wholesale markets run by system operator New England ISO.

Co-located battery storage’s ability to help mitigate risk and counter renewable yield compression has been hailed as a “fantastic opportunity” by renewables investor Bluefield Partners’ investment director Jan Libicek.