When Wim Coekaerts bought a hillside lot to build his California dream house, there was an old horse barn, a grove of olive trees and lovely views of Silicon Valley. But there was no electricity, and the nearest utility pole to his bucolic acre was 550 feet away. The town of Woodside requires new homes […]
California Sets $200M Budget for ‘Complex, Multi-Property Microgrid’ Projects
Utility funding for community resilience against fire-prevention outages doesn’t go far enough, microgrid groups argue. California regulators have approved a microgrid plan directing $200 million to help communities build networks that can supply power through the state’s extended wildfire-prevention blackouts, a task expected to take years to move from planning to completing its first projects. […]
Abengoa to Build Microgrid with Vanadium Flow Batteries at South African Mine
Bushveld Energy, a vanadium energy storage solutions provider, has selected Abengoa to construct Africa’s first megawatt scale hybrid microgrid with flow batteries for the Vametco mine in South Africa. Abengoa, a Spanish multinational company in the infrastructure, energy and water sectors, will engineer, supply and construct a 3.5 MW solar PV plant and a 1 […]
Broken Hill to replace gas turbines with massive microgrid for back-up supply
The NSW country town of Broken Hill is set to host one of the world’s largest microgrids supplied by solar, wind and grid-scale storage. The homes and businesses of Broken Hill’s 17,000 strong-population are set to be powered by renewables to ensure reliable and back-up supply going forward. Under the proposal coming from transmission company […]
Ameresco Plots Larger Role for Solar and Storage
The microgrids and energy-efficiency specialist says the number of viable markets for on-site solar and storage is growing. Ameresco is best known as a commercial and industrial energy services company, or ESCO, competing against giants like Honeywell, Siemens, Johnson Controls and a host of other national and regional providers on HVAC retrofits, LED lighting upgrades, […]
World Bank: Cost declines in solar-plus-storage could see 490 million relying on microgrids by 2030
Plummeting solar-plus-storage costs could help electrify millions worldwide by facilitating a ten-fold explosion of mini-grid systems, a new report from the World Bank has said. The 19,000 mostly hydro- and diesel-based mini-grids that power 47 million people today could boom to 210,000 systems powering 490 million by 2030, according to the institution. Its report said […]
Saft Battery Acquires Go Electric
Saft acquired 100% of the shares of Go Electric Inc., a US-based developer of distributed energy resiliency solutions for microgrids and commercial & industrial customers. Go Electric’s microgrid power controller technology, combined with energy storage, can enable customer sites by islanding them from the grid should a power outage occur. The technology also helps to […]
Salmon fishing in Alaska gets a battery-powered renewable boost
Cordova, Alaska, is isolated from the grid, but fortunate to be blessed with hydropower resources – and now a 1MWh battery storage system will help this coastal Arctic community increase its self-reliance in a “harsh and unforgiving climate”. Technology provider Saft announced today that it delivered a turnkey energy storage system (ESS), which is being […]
Schneider Buys Stake in AutoGrid to Tap Its Software for Distributed Energy and Microgrids
Investment in the Silicon Valley startup could boost French electric tech giant’s distributed energy integration capabilities, from design to operations. Schneider Electric has invested in Silicon Valley startup AutoGrid, with plans to put its data analytics and machine learning to use in managing distributed energy resources and microgrids for industrial and commercial customers. Wednesday’s investment […]
Solar-Plus-Storage is Critical to Microgrid Development
This is the latest in a series of articles on ideas that emerged from Microgrid 2019, held in San Diego May 14-16. Here we focus on a discussion about energy storage from the panel “Beyond Islanding: The Well-Connected Microgrid.” Microgrids increasingly depend on solar-plus-storage — or the ability to generate solar power on site and […]