When Google first launched a website two years ago that collects data on solar rooftops, called Project Sunroof, it only covered a few cities. But this week, the search engine giant announced the solar site is now crunching data for every single U.S. state, including 60 million rooftops across the country.

The expansion means that Google’s Project Sunroof is starting to get a much clearer picture of how much rooftop solar capacity there actually is in the U.S. Project Sunroof uses data from Google Maps and Google Earth, combined with 3-D modeling and machine learning to determine the solar electricity potential of individual roofs.

Potential solar customers — or just the solar-curious — can enter their addresses into the site and get information about how much a solar system on their roof might cost and how much money they might save over time by going solar.

Google’s product manager Joel Conkling told GTM the goal of Project Sunroof is “to get data into the hands of people thinking about solar, and who are making decisions about solar.” He added that “the hope is [to] help people make more quantitative decisions about solar.”

The large amount of data being collected by Google also means that the internet company’s project could be a helpful tool not only for consumers interested in solar, but also for solar companies looking to bring in new customers, as well as academic researchers and even utilities.

Now that Project Sunroof’s availability is countrywide, Google’s amassed data has started to reveal some interesting trends and information. For one thing, Google says that 79 percent of the rooftops it’s analyzed are viable for solar, which is good news for rooftop solar providers.

That doesn’t mean that 79 percent of rooftops should or will adopt solar, though. Rather, it means that 79 percent technically get enough sun to be able to accommodate solar panels.

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Led by a record-breaking fourth quarter, energy storage deployments in the United States totaled 336 megawatt-hours in 2016, doubling the megawatt-hours deployed in 2015. According to GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association’s U.S Energy Storage Monitor 2016 Year in Review report, 230 megawatt-hours came on-line in the fourth quarter of the year, more than the sum of the previous 12 quarters combined.

The German home battery startup Sonnen is expanding its U.S. footprint with a significant investment in a new North American Innovation Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Sonnen announced today that the InnovationHub will bring all of the company’s U.S. product development and manufacturing capabilities under one roof, allowing for new product innovation and the ability to rapidly scale up production capacity.

“Sonnen U.S. has experienced exponential sales growth over the past year, making the Sonnen InnovationHub a smart investment to capitalize upon the immense potential of the North American energy storage market,” said Christoph Ostermann, Sonnen Group CEO, in a statement. Bringing the company’s U.S. manufacturing and R&D teams into one facility will “enable us to better adapt to the future needs of the high-growth U.S. residential energy storage market.”

In an interview earlier this month, Ostermann said U.S. monthly sales had recently reached triple digits — growing threefold in December alone. Those sales lag well behind Sonnen’s home market in Germany, where the company has sold more than 15,000 battery storage systems to date, but they still position Sonnen as a leading residential storage company in the U.S.

The InnovationHub is no Tesla Gigafactory — but that’s by design, said Blake Richetta, vice president of Sonnen’s North American sales, and former sales manager at Tesla. While Sonnen is focused on scalability, the new factory is part of a concerted strategy to “grow smartly,” he said.

“We’re not going to make [the factory] so that it’s able to build thousands and thousands of units right away,” said Richetta. “It’s going to be what it needs to be to foster innovation and for our current level of production needs, and then we’re going to have an open-ended footprint to be able to grow.”

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In recent months, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has taken several steps toward fully incorporating energy storage in U.S. wholesale energy markets — which, if successful, could be a major boon for the energy storage industry.

These actions reflect the fact that there’s an exponential amount of energy storage slated to come on-line, as well as its “unique abilities to help in different ways,” said Acting FERC Chairman Cheryl LaFleur, speaking this week at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ winter meeting.

“Sometimes it [benefits] transmission, sometimes it’s generation, sometimes it can help with ancillary services, and we’re proposing to require changes in the wholesale market to reflect that,” said the commissioner, who is a Democrat.

In November, FERC issued a proposed rulemaking that would require each regional transmission organization and independent system operator to remove any barriers in their tariff structure that are inhibiting the market participation of storage resources.

“We wanted them to be able to participate to the full extent of their capabilities,” said LaFleur.

The same proposal would also allow distributed energy resources, including but not limited to energy storage, to be aggregated and bid directly into organized wholesale markets. The proposal specifies that resources looking to participate at the wholesale level cannot already be receiving payments through the distribution system, such as net metering.

Commissioner LaFleur has expressed some concerns over opening up market competition and is viewed by some as more friendly to traditional market players. And with three seats currently unfilled on the five-member FERC panel, there’s uncertainty around how, and how quickly, energy storage and other advanced energy technologies will be recognized at the national level. 

Several clean energy stakeholders filed comments on Monday urging FERC to allow advanced energy technologies to compete on providing energy and reliability services.

The proposed rule was just the first step in opening up energy markets. FERC commissioners still have to decide whether to finalize it — which will have to wait until the open seats are filled. Regional markets will then have 18 months to change their tariffs, which is a process that goes through FERC review and is also judicially challengeable.

“These technologies aren’t new,” said Arvin Ganesan, vice president of federal affairs at Advanced Energy Economy. “So it’s not a matter of whether they can technically provide [grid] services, but it becomes a question of whether RTOs will change their tariffs to allow these technologies to compete to provide that service.”

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While Tesla captures more headlines, German residential storage company Sonnen currently leads in global product deployments.

Today, Sonnen has more than 15,000 battery installations around the world, the vast majority of which are located Germany. But the company also has a growing U.S.-based business, with monthly unit sales now in the three digits — just one year after the company’s U.S. market launch.

GTM sat down with CEO Christopher Ostermann and Blake Richetta, vice president of North American sales, to discuss Sonnen’s competitive advantages in the home battery arena and how the company plans to grow in the months ahead. Watch below via Facebook Live.

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If only I were a battery, I could be hanging out in Hawaii right now.

The islands have seen a fair number of batteries deployed in recent years, to help solar households self-consume and to smooth large amounts of solar generation on the grid. What they haven’t seen is a thriving commercial storage market like the one California has seen emerge. That hasn’t changed yet, but Californian commercial storage specialist Stem has deployed a pilot network of 29 business-sited battery systems to show how this model might work with Hawaiian utilities.

“What we’re really trying to do with this first set of customers is help to pave the way for the coming industry, which will include multiple players,” said Tad Glauthier, Stem vice president of Hawaii operations, in an interview at the DistribuTech conference in San Diego. “It’s significant in that this is [Hawaii’s] first aggregation of energy storage systems across diverse commercial sites for the utility, that they can see and use in the management of the grid.”

Stem uses its software to operate batteries on behalf of commercial customers, giving them savings on demand charges, while also aggregating across the network to provide grid services like demand response. In Hawaii, that made for a double challenge: educating customers about why they would want a battery, and convincing Hawaiian Electric Company that the batteries can reliably deliver 1 megawatt of capacity to the grid when called upon.

Some of the participants in the pilot are local branches of chains Stem has worked with, like Whole Foods and Albertsons. For some of the locally based customers, including an auto body shop, a sheet metal company and a florist, Stem had to start from scratch pitching why storage would be useful.

Hawaii has the nation’s highest electricity rates, so saving money on electricity is top of mind for consumers there. Most of the companies that participated already had rooftop solar or were in the process of acquiring it. Often, though, “They don’t think about the peak; they think about using less,” said Tad Glauthier, Stem’s vice president of Hawaii operations. 

The business case for commercial demand management isn’t as strong in Hawaii as it is in a place like California, because the demand charge there is smaller — $11.69 per kilowatt for small commercial customers in Honolulu. The revenue stream for business-sited batteries providing grid services didn’t exist either, because HECO didn’t have a model for it.

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Zen Ecosystems is leveraging its smart thermostat to extend the range of residential batteries for home energy savings.

The nearly four-year-old company sells its signature thermostat individually for homes, as well as in enterprise-wide commercial packages. It saves money by shifting a building’s heating and cooling load to optimize for time-based electricity tariffs or demand response events.

Another trendy technology advertises load-shifting and demand response: energy storage. Customers interested in those functions could pick one or the other, but Zen decided to try pitching both. The company’s smart thermostat will be bundled with batteries from Swell Energy, an L.A.-based storage marketplace turned vendor, in what appears to be the first partnership of its kind. 

“We’re very aware that storage is hot in the market right now, and our ambition is to be a part of that,” said Zen Ecosystems CEO James McPhail, in an interview on the floor of the DistribuTech conference in San Diego. “Having such a fast ROI, we’re able to partner with companies that don’t have that same luxury to help them expedite their ROI and become an even more attractive solution to their customers.”

The pitch goes something like this: Storage and smart temperature controls enable a customer to exert greater control over energy consumption. Storage is more expensive and has a longer payback time; a customer with a limited budget could simply choose a thermostat and start saving in a matter of months. If a battery already pencils out, however, the inclusion of a Zen thermostat will open up deeper savings for a negligible additional cost.

“With the same amount of storage and the same number of customers, a smart thermostat lets us aggregate a larger grid resource,” the folks at Swell tell GTM. “So the synergy is both customer-facing and grid-facing.”

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The Bay State could soon follow the Bay Area as a leading battery boomtown.

The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER) decided, at the close of 2016, that it would set an energy storage target. Now it has six months to figure out what that number should be and how to implement it, following the timeline set by legislation last summer. Once complete, this will be only the third state-level target after California and Oregon.

California’s mandate gave it a decisive lead in attracting storage companies and deploying the technology in homes, businesses and on the grid. Massachusetts currently has very little storage deployed, but it is already home to a cluster of storage startups that spun off from research at MIT. With an effective target, Massachusetts could set itself up as the second hub of the U.S. storage industry, while streamlining the operation of its grid and the integration of new renewable generation.

Finding the right target, though, requires a careful balancing of competing goals.

“DOER should assure the target is large enough that substantial, relevant experience is gained by all, but not so large that it becomes unworkable and a substitute for the fully functioning market,” wrote Phil Giudice, CEO and president of Cambridge-based storage company Ambri, in a letter to DOER Commissioner Judith Judson in December. 

DOER isn’t starting from scratch here. The department had a hand in the State of Charge report from September, which comprehensively analyzed the value of storage for the Massachusetts grid and concluded that up to 1,766 megawatts of storage installed by 2020 would maximize savings for ratepayers. Storage can reduce the state’s system costs like peak capacity, transmission and distribution upgrades, overall energy prices, integration of intermittent renewables, and ancillary grid services that smooth out the momentary differences between supply and demand.

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