Archive for category: Resilient Power Project

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.

Energy storage capacity installed this year is expected to top 600 megawatts, more than double the amount of storage deployments in 2018, and annual deployment numbers are forecast to increase another sevenfold over the next five years. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of these storage installations have been developed to the benefit of underserved populations most in need of the economic and resiliency benefits that storage can provide.

The devastating California wildfires and related power outages are already leading to new approaches to energy resiliency that rely on battery storage technologies. This past week, a new model has emerged to accelerate the adoption of solar and storage systems for resilient power.

This month millions of people lost power in California. The blackouts were not due to a natural disaster, but rather the result of utilities, primarily Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), intentionally suspending power to hundreds of thousands of customer accounts in across California. Battery storage and solar PV could provide reliable backup power for those affected by the outages.

Despite not sustaining a direct hit, Hurricane Dorian still left parts of Florida flooded and over 170,000 people without power. In the past, a single extreme weather event has left hundreds of thousands of people in Florida without power, in some cases for more than a week.

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.

Hurricane season is here, and South Carolina is no stranger to the devastating impacts that natural disasters and extreme weather can have on communities.

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.