Archive for category: Resilient Power Project

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.

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.

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.