Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) recently started the process of shutting down the Diablo Canyon generation facility, the last active nuclear power plant in California. The power plant, located near Avila Beach on the central Californian coast, consists of two 1,100 megawatt (MW) reactors and produces 18,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity a year, about 8.5 percent of California’s electricity consumption in 2015. It has been, up until this point, the single largest electrical generation facility in the state.

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BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–A new report from Navigant Research tracks developments and trends in the advanced batteries market from shipments in 2015, including comprehensive documentation for energy capacity (MWh), power capacity (MW), cells shipped, and revenue, across global regions.

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According to a new report from GTM Research, The German Energy Storage Market: 2016-2021, Germany’s energy storage market will grow elevenfold in megawatt terms between 2015 and 2021 to reach an annual value of $1.03 billion.

Germany is already one of the world’s leading energy storage markets. At the end of 2015, Germany was home to 67 megawatts of energy storage (128 megawatt-hours) with a value of $169 million. Factors including the nation’s declining feed-in tariffs, high retail electricity rates and abundance of installed renewables make it an attractive market for the energy storage value proposition.

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The global energy storage market is expected to double in 2016, growing from 1.4 GWh to 2.9 GWh by the end of the year, before continuing to skyrocket, reaching 21 GWh by 2025.

These are the latest figures from a new report published by information and analysis company IHS Markit, released this week, which investigates the global energy storage market. The authors of the report also concluded that Lithium-ion batteries will become the mainstream energy storage technology, and will account for 80% of all global energy storage installations by 2025.

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It’s easy to focus on states where the burgeoning commercial energy storage markets are already thriving.

“Everyone knows California and New York are ripe,” said Ravi Manghani, GTM Research’s director of energy storage.

But there are some sleeper states where the economics already work, even though rates of adoption are low. A new report from GTM Research, The Economics of Commercial Energy Storage in the U.S, outlines the states where demand charges at the largest utility in each state would create a favorable rate of return for commercial energy storage. Even if the numbers pencil out, however, there can be other factors that help or hinder behind-the-meter energy storage, from fire codes to utility regulation.

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The U.S. commercial energy storage segment is growing faster than both the residential and utility-scale segments. GTM Research’s latest report provides an economic analysis of the U.S. commercial storage market and finds that commercial storage is financially viable in just a handful of markets today. However, the report notes that by 2021, commercial storage will make economic sense in more than a third of U.S. states.

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Ever since electric carmaker Tesla announced plans to build a battery plant outside Reno, Nevada, investors, fans of Elon Musk‘s company and others around the world have started paying attention to the silver state’s large lithium deposits.

Lithium is a key component in the production of batteries used in cell phones and electric vehicles. As sales of electric vehicles, which topped 500,000 worldwide last year, increase, so is demand for lithium.

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SPARKS, Nev.— Tesla Motors Inc. is scrambling to finish building its massive $5 billion battery factory here years ahead of schedule to meet demand for its coming cheaper sedan and provide power for new types of vehicles Chief Executive Elon Musk says are under development.

Tesla has doubled the number of people constructing the “gigafactory,” which sits on more than 3,000 acres near Reno. Now, 1,000 workers build seven days a week on two shifts in an effort to start churning out lithium-ion cells by late 2016.

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Bloomberg New Energy Finance recently compared the growth of lithium-ion energy storage systems to the solar photovoltaic industry; finding that some 12 years will be needed before the total ESS output can meet today’s solar output (provided of course that was the goal of today’s solar industry).

The biggest ally of energy storage, giving the segment enough momentum to narrow the gap with PVs is of course, electric vehicles, which help to drive up the scale of production for lithium-ion batteries, and enables faster cost reductions.

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E.ON Climate & Renewables North America is to build a 10MW battery energy storage facility with a 2MW solar array in collaboration with Arizonan utility Tucson Electric Power (TEP). The Iron Horse Battery Energy Storage Project is expected to be completed in the first half of 2017.

The grid-scale facility will provide frequency response and voltage control, and will be situated adjacent to the University of Arizona’s Science and Technology Park, southeast of Tucson.

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