A new project is underway in the US to tear down a significant barrier for “realising the full benefits” of energy storage: the complexity and lack of clarity over interconnection rules across the country.
A subcommittee of the US House Committee on Appropriations has approved more than a billion dollars in support for developing energy storage deployment, research and manufacturing in a funding bill for the 2021 Fiscal Year.
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.
The US national Energy Storage Association’s policy director, Jason Burwen, spoke with Andy Colthorpe about the seven early adopter states of energy storage targets and whether this is likely to be a spreading pattern across the country.
Vectren, owner of utility firms in the US states of Indiana and Ohio, has unveiled plans to ditch more than 700MW of coal generation and partly replace it with up to 1GW of solar PV.
Analysis firm Wood Mackenzie has held onto its forecast that the US will deploy around 7GW of energy storage annually by 2025 and found that 97.5MW / 208MWh of storage was installed during the first quarter of this year.
While utility Hawaiian Electric (HECO) stands poised to announce the finalists of its recent massive procurement of solar-plus-storage and standalone energy storage projects, developers with winning bids seem determined to steal the utility’s thunder.
The number of sites pairing renewable energy with energy storage in the US more than doubled from 2016 to 2019 and the trend is expected to continue, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Long duration energy storage is an “essential” technology to help accelerate renewable deployment, according to the US Department of Energy’s Dr Imre Gyuk, but will require “appropriate regulatory frameworks”.
Residential energy storage provider Sunverge has won out in a competitive bidding process to provide systems and software for a proposed virtual power plant (VPP) project in Maryland in the US.
