Bay Area Energy Agencies Launch Storage Solicitation Amid PG&E Power Shutoffs

Four local energy agencies in the San Francisco Bay area announced a joint solicitation today for the installation of more than 30 MW of energy storage for residential and business customers across three counties. The storage may be combined with new or existing solar systems and comes as utility customers look to other energy options, including distributed solar and storage, amid planned power shutoffs. The groups expect to choose partner vendor(s) in early 2020 with program details released in spring 2020 and projects “underway soon after with the inte​nt of preempting the next fire season.”

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RWE Inks Solar Plus Storage PPA with Georgia Power

The renewables subsidiary of energy giant RWE has signed a 30-year power purchase agreement (PPA) to provide solar power in the US. It has inked the deal with Georgia Power Company to supply electricity from its 195.5MW Broken Spoke Solar plant, coupled with a 40MW battery storage unit, from late 2021. The solar plant, located in Mitchell County, will consist of more than 650,000 panels. Christoph Hunfeld, Head of Asset Commercialisation North America at RWE said: “Broken Spoke Solar will include a 40 MW 2-hour Energy Storage System, enabling firm delivery of energy from the facility.”

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Webinar: New York’s Energy Storage Outlook: Gigawatts, Targets and Incentives

This webinar is free for members of ESA and NY-BEST, and $75 for non-members. Register here.

Please join us November 22, 2pm EST, for a webinar with the top experts on the New York storage landscape from the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST) to discuss what the latest policy activity means for the outlook for energy storage in New York. Some key questions include: Will New York take resource adequacy from the New York Independent System Operator or will the wholesale market rules adapt to support the State’s climate and energy goals? What will happen with the natural gas peaker plants in New York City?

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Webinar: Long Duration Storage: Where are We Now and Where are We Headed?

This webinar is free for ESA members; $75 for non-members. The slides and recording will be available to all registrants. Register here.

Join us November 20 at 2pm EST for a webinar that will review the several energy storage technologies that can provide reliable energy beyond the durations that are presently commonplace. These technologies meet many existing needs, from power during grid outages to helping utilities and large users meet peak demand by using storage to shave peak load, thus reducing or eliminating the need for power from fossil-fuel peaker generation. They also represent foundation technologies for developing future, longer-duration storage solutions.

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Stem Joins Forces with NEC Energy Solutions to Deliver Turnkey Offering for Solar + Storage Optimization

Stem, Inc., the global leader in artificial intelligence (AI)-driven energy storage services, announced today that it is partnering with NEC Energy Solutions, headquartered in Westborough, MA, to simplify and optimize the deployment and operation of solar + storage projects. Stem will resell and integrate its Athena AI platform with NEC’s GSS^® end-to-end grid storage solution. The agreement will result in a powerful solar + storage solution for large-scale projects, leveraging NEC’s AEROS^® proprietary energy storage controls and Stem’s sophisticated Athena™ AI platform to perform solar and storage optimization, wholesale market participation services, solar charging compliance and reporting, and warranty compliance and administration.

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Bulking Up: Storage Heads for Center Stage

Until recently, battery energy storage has largely served markets at the margin, offering short bursts of frequency regulation or light pricing arbitrage. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), however, utility-scale storage is about to leap forward in the U.S. The growth is being driven not just by falling storage costs, but also continuous price drops for clean generation. Forecasters largely missed this emerging dynamic. Although storage’s progress down the cost curve has historically been slower, whole system costs have continued to fall as wind and solar became the cheapest form of generation.

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Breakthrough Batteries

Rapid advancements in battery technology are poised to accelerate the pace of the global energy transition and play a major role in addressing the climate crisis. With more than $1.4 billion invested in battery technologies in the first half of 2019 alone, massive investments in battery manufacturing and steady advances in technology have set in motion a seismic shift in how we will organize energy systems as early as 2030.

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Interior Gives VI Energy Office $625000 to Support Energy Resilience at Hurricane Shelters

The Virgin Islands Energy Office (VIEO) was chosen as a recipient of $625,000 in Fiscal Year 2019 funding under the Energizing Insular Communities (EIC) grant program, funded and administered through the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Insular Affairs. The VIEO will utilize the grant to develop a Solar Plus Storage Micro-Grid pilot project that will be integrated at the St. Croix Educational Complex’s emergency hurricane shelter. The micro-grid will enable the emergency shelter to function reliably during extended grid outages and significantly reduce the use of fossil fuel generators that have proven difficult to maintain and costly to fuel.

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One Gigawatt Down, Portfolio of Gigawatts Next

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Empower Energies and Hannon Armstrong Announce Large Investments in C&I Renewable Energy Projects

Empower Energies, a renewable energy development and financing company, and Hannon Armstrong, an investor in climate change solutions, recently announced they will jointly invest in renewable energy projects in the commercial & industrial (C&I) and municipal, university, school, and hospital markets across the United States. The collaboration unites Hannon Armstrong’s extensive experience in providing long term financing with Empower Energies’ existing platform for the development and acquisition of C&I-scale solar rooftop, ground-mount solar and canopy projects, as well as energy storage and related distributed generation technologies.

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