Background As the ocean and atmosphere of the tropical Pacific indicate, La Niña has already occurred. And the probability of La Niña this winter is 87%. From historical data, in the winter when most La Niña events reach their peak, and the climate anomalies caused by La Niña, the probability of colder winters is greater. […]
Hawaii Will Power Its Clean Grid With 6,000 Home Batteries Installed by Swell Energy
Swell’s largest contract yet comes after lining up $450 million to aggregate residential solar-battery systems to help the grid. Hawaii’s largest utility enlisted a new tool in its quest for a carbon-free electricity system: thousands of batteries installed in people’s homes. Hawaiian Electric won regulator approval for a $25 million plan to harness solar and […]
Can a Novel Zinc Battery Deliver Clean Multiday Backup Power?
California is testing Canadian startup e-Zinc’s long-duration technology to keep businesses powered through wildfires and outages. California is looking for ways to keep power flowing to customers amid wildfires without burning fossil fuels. A Canadian storage technology startup thinks it has the solution. This summer, Toronto-based e-Zinc won a $1.3 million grant from the California […]
Portland General Electric Jumps Into Virtual Power Plant Business
Oregon’s largest electric utility wants a better understanding of the value of home batteries in grid operation and planning. Portland General Electric, the largest utility in Oregon, is jumping into the cutting-edge business of turning home batteries into grid resources. The company announced this week that it has received approval from regulators to link up […]
Span Raises $10M to Scale Up Deployments of Smart Electrical Panels
Led by a Tesla alum, the California startup looks to tap growing demand for solar and storage in key markets of California and Hawaii. Span.IO, the San Francisco-based startup that makes a smart home electrical panel that can track and control behind-the-meter batteries, rooftop solar inverters, EV chargers and other key household loads via smartphone, […]
Modular Microgrid Startup Raises $300 Million
Private equity firm Warburg Pincus saw an opportunity to tap the commercial resilience market with its investment in Scale Microgrid Solutions. Startup Scale Microgrid Solutions won a $300 million commitment from investment firm Warburg Pincus this week, an unusually robust vote of confidence in the tricky microgrid market. SMS sells modular microgrid products to commercial […]
What a Year! 10 Stories That Propelled Energy Storage in 2019
More batteries installed. More markets opening up. And grid storage making itself indispensable in unanticipated ways. For too long, the rhetoric around what storage can do for the grid vastly outweighed the actual doing. This year, the industry closed that gap more than ever before. Exceedingly few batteries actually live up to the vision of […]
‘Transformative’: Sonnen to Deliver Community Battery Network With Grid Services Contract
“This is what we’ve been working on for years,” says Blake Richetta, CEO of the U.S. business at Shell-owned sonnen. German home energy storage company sonnen fulfilled a long-time dream for its U.S. operation: It will supply battery systems to an entire new residential community, with a contract in place to deliver grid services to […]
Eversource Wants to Back Up an Entire Rural Town With Batteries Large and Small
Can grid resiliency finally pay for itself? New England utility Eversource wants to deploy energy storage to back up an outage-prone New Hampshire town, while saving customers money. The 18,070 residents of Westmoreland rely on a single radial power line to deliver electricity through the forested, rural surroundings. Ice storms and heavy snowfall regularly knock […]