Susan Kennedy, CEO of Advanced Microgrid Solutions, has observed, “The entire electrical distribution system is designed around a single premise: You cannot store energy.”

The premise of her company: “Equipping a building with the technology to store and manage its own electricity turns that building into a standalone storage unit,” and if you “combine a dozen buildings into a fleet, you have the utility equivalent of a peaker plant.” She told GTM recently, “We’re offering utilities a customized solution using energy storage behind the customer’s meter, harnessing that load to provide specifically what the utility needs in a particular region. It’s a clean, fast, flexible product that doesn’t exist in the utility world today.”

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The energy storage industry enjoyed a moment in the spotlight last week when theWhite House hosted a summit on that topic. Now this burgeoning sector will work to capitalize on this new exposure to get policies in place that allow storage markets to grow.

The core message energy storage companies are trying to send is that their products provide a value to the grid, but it’s a value that the markets currently aren’t designed to compensate. The rules were written before this technology came into its own, and now they’ll need to be amended for storage providers to recoup investments that yield tangible services to the grid. As electric generation shifts away from central, thermal plants to more distributed and variable renewable sources, the ability to flexibly store energy will play an ever more critical role. 

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The energy storage industry enjoyed a moment in the spotlight last week when theWhite House hosted a summit on that topic. Now this burgeoning sector will work to capitalize on this new exposure to get policies in place that allow storage markets to grow.

The core message energy storage companies are trying to send is that their products provide a value to the grid, but it’s a value that the markets currently aren’t designed to compensate. The rules were written before this technology came into its own, and now they’ll need to be amended for storage providers to recoup investments that yield tangible services to the grid. As electric generation shifts away from central, thermal plants to more distributed and variable renewable sources, the ability to flexibly store energy will play an ever more critical role. 

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The American energy storage sector kicked off 2016 with a marked increase in corporate investments, according to GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association’s latest U.S. Energy Storage Monitor. First-quarter investments of $79 million marked an increase of more than double compared to the same period last year. Of that money, $20 million came as project financing.

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Energy Storage News – Many years ago, I was part of a U.S. Air Force program with the goal of reducing the battery weight carried by airmen and soldiers by 25 percent. The Air Force Program Office, after scouring the market for the ideal battery solution, quickly learned that no rechargeable battery could meet the power density, energy density, lifetime, and size/weight requirements.

However, they did not abandon the project — they took a hybrid approach to the problem.

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Energy storage is hitting its stride.

Data from the latest GTM Energy Storage Monitor reveals that the U.S. storage market grew 245 percent in 2015 over 2014 (albeit from a small base). By 2019, America’s storage market could amount to 1.7 gigawatts and be valued at $2.5 billion.

Through my 20-plus years of experience developing storage technology and storage power plants, I believe the best way to understand the future of storage is to view the evolution of the industry through a series of phases.

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Exergonix just acquired “substantially all of the assets of Coda Energy,” a twice-bankrupt California manufacturer of energy storage systems. Exergonix will assume management and operation of all of the already-installed Coda systems operating at customer sites in California, according to a release.

Exergonix, founded in 2010, claims to have “reliably delivered energy projects geared for commercial- or utility-scale applications and has participated in strategic partnerships to win utility grid-level projects.” Peter Nortman, Coda’s founder and CTO, “will join the management team at Exergonix and will help transition all existing [Self-Generation Incentive Program projects] to Exergonix.”

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According to a new report from GTM Research and SoliChamba Consulting, 58 gigawatts of monitored PV will be added to the world’s total in 2016, bringing the cumulative PV monitoring market to 242 gigawatts. In addition to a growing installation base, the PV monitoring landscape is undergoing tremendous change as it integrates into the broader PV software ecosystem, deals with additional regulatory and cybersecurity requirements, and faces challengers from the energy management market.

Now in its fourth edition, the report, Global PV Monitoring 2016-2020: Markets, Trends, and Leading Players, is the industry’s most comprehensive analysis of the global PV monitoring market.

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