Phase-out plans of US utility giants underscore money-saving potential of cleaner alternatives, says think tank.

Japanese conglomerate Marubeni Corporation has invested in US-based company, GridMarket, which is focused on distributed generation projects using battery storage, solar PV, fuel cells, and combined heat and power.

Volume 19 of PV Tech Power has just hit the (digital) shelves and once again the quarterly technical journal from our publisher Solar Media includes ‘Storage & Smart Power’, the dedicated section created and curated by Energy-Storage.news.

Having bested coal generation and gas peaker plants, solar-plus-storage is now competing with gas in other parts of the generation mix.

Southern California Edison, one of the US’ top-ranking utilities for energy storage capacity already deployed, has signed contracts for seven more projects, totalling 195MW in its California service area.

US$400 million of funding pledged by New York’s state Governor Andrew Cuomo last week towards his “comprehensive climate agenda” will include US$280 million in support for energy storage.

In the latest release, Sandia has emphasised the growth in interest in behind-the-meter (BTM), customer-sited energy storage systems.

A large-scale energy storage project to be built in Texas will take advantage of the system’s flexibility to deliver multiple services, as opportunities grow in the state’s Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) market.

The ‘world’s first dedicated energy storage infrastructure fund’ will invest in California battery energy storage projects, with Macquarie set to sell 50% of a 340MWh tranche to the fund’s owner, SUSI Partners.

Many of the most polluting thermal power plants on the US grid today are also the most lucrative to run, but the service they provide could already be done twice as cheaply using solar and storage, developer 8minutenergy has claimed.