A California Utility Just Bought a Record Amount of Battery Storage

We need somewhere to put the energy solar generates once the sun goes down. The U.S. just saw its biggest purchase of energy storage ever. California utility Southern California Edison signed seven contracts last week to launch several energy storage projects totaling 770 megawatts to come online in 2021. It’s a huge step, one that dwarfs all the storage purchased last year across the entire country. This piece in the renewable energy puzzle is critical to successfully transitioning to a clean energy economy. Solar and wind can only provide power during specific times of the day when the sun shines or the wind blows. But they often create more energy than we need during those periods. To help reduce intermittency—and thus the need for fossil fuels—that energy needs to be stored so we can use it at all times of the day. The new round of projects the SCE is buying will change the face of battery storage in the U.S. California leads the nation in battery storage, but this will triple the storage capacity the state had as of March 2019 . The storage projects are also larger than the 523 megawatts of storage deployed across the U.S. […]

Click here to view original web page at A California Utility Just Bought a Record Amount of Battery Storage