California Proposes Major Policy Shift in Support of Energy Resilience
Battery storage has become a key resilience technology in California, reflected in a major policy shift on the use of state incentives.
Samantha serves as a Research and Communications Specialist for Clean Energy Group and Clean Energy States Alliance. She assists on communications and research. She also coordinates social media and serves as the webmaster for both organizations. Samantha previously worked as an administrator at Fairewinds Energy Education, a nuclear safety advocacy non-profit in Burlington, Vermont. She has also worked as a research assistant in the environmental studies department at Brown University, where she researched fisheries projects in West Africa and compiled historic climate and fisheries data from southern New England. Samantha graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College with a B.A. in Environmental Studies and a minor in French.
Battery storage has become a key resilience technology in California, reflected in a major policy shift on the use of state incentives.
If you live in New Orleans, you know how often the electricity goes out. Advisers hired by the New Orleans City Council found that, between June 2016 and May 2017, there were a total of 2,599 outages and roughly half lasted two hours or more.
California’s energy storage incentive program has been a great success, with more than 11,000 battery storage systems installed to-date. The problem is, it’s not reaching the state’s most vulnerable communities.
A memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development fixes a long-standing issue preventing hundreds of thousands of low-income households from realizing the financial benefits of solar.
From Florida to Nevada to California, big battery projects have been making headlines lately. But a more groundbreaking movement has received far less media attention – hundreds, in some cases thousands, of small distributed solar and battery systems working together to tackle power plant-sized problems.
FERC voted this week to uphold its landmark Order 841, which states that the nation’s electric grid operators (RTOs and ISOs) must allow energy storage resources fair and equal access to provide services in regional wholesale energy markets.
Southeastern utilities have made headlines recently with plans to incorporate battery storage at solar installations across their service territories. It turns out that the communities they serve could greatly benefit from installing solar+storage as well.
When Massachusetts took the nation-leading step of integrating energy storage into its energy efficiency plan this year, it didn’t just add a new technology. It consummated a decade-long, slow-motion embrace of an important new form of efficiency.
As more people opt to receive medical care at home, access to resilient emergency backup power will need to be prioritized and made more accessible, especially to low-income households.
Energy storage has been the coming thing for years. Now, it’s arrived – as an efficiency measure.
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