Lewis Milford
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 new research project in Puerto Rico demonstrates that the home health care industry is potentially a new market for solar and battery storage.
How storage will power a low carbon energy transformation has begun to emerge across the country – surprisingly led by utilities in the Midwest and West as they pursue an economic mix of renewables and battery storage to shut down and replace existing fossil-fuel plants.
In its extraordinary drive to rebound from a historic storm, Puerto Rico’s policymakers have staked a new resilient future that their mainland colleagues would do well to follow.
After a hundred years of technology improvement, an old enabling technology — battery storage — has emerged anew.
It’s rare to have an opportunity to shape an energy technology market as it emerges. Today, battery storage is that energy technology.
Just this past week, Puerto Rico suffered another setback in its effort to restore power to the island. One of its 400 megawatt power plants caught fire, plunging people back into the darkness.
Any investigation into the massive power outage at Atlanta’s international airport last month should not only look back to see what went wrong. Rather, it should look forward to how the airport could use new technologies like solar and battery storage to prevent such disasters from happening again.
Disasters often lead to unexpected and swift technology innovation. The calamitous collapse of Puerto Rico’s electricity system might be the next example of that phenomenon.
Providing perhaps the hint of a political inflection point, the legislative body’s resurgence of flexed congressional power was striking.