Morning Brief: Loanpal’s record originations means residential solar is going strong, SCE adds 590 MW of energy storage
Also in the brief: The American-made solar prize, and six Clearway Community Solar projects kick off construction across Illinois
SPAC, the final frontier: QuantumScape raises $680M for advanced EV batteries, TJ Rodgers raises $200M in SPAC IPOs, plus EVs galore and Stem
Once sort of disreputable, the SPAC is now a “financial innovation” and a “funding mechanism for ambitious companies who are in the midst of a growth phase-change,” in the eyes of some investors. Here’s a roundup.
Venture capital funding in solar, storage and energy intelligence sees a year-end surge
At least a dozen energy transition startups are getting their start during the pandemic holiday season.
The roadmap to the lowest cost grid is paved with distributed solar and storage
We wanted to know what the grid would look like, and cost, if we stopped ignoring the benefits of DERs and optimized the integration of these resources through a better modeling process. We found that when you use better planning models and scale both local solar and storage, as well as utility-scale solar and wind, you maximize cost savings and unlock the path to the lowest cost grid.
The US energy storage market was redefined in Q3
A record 476 MW/764 MWh were installed in Q3, with California’s deployment figures alone shattering all previous quarterly records.
pv magazine video: US storage market under spotlight
In pv magazine’s second roundtable session, Advanced technologies, the U.S. storage market came under the spotlight – in particular, the lessons that can be learned from solar as the market moves towards greater maturity. Also under discussion was the trend among PV manufacturers to producing ever larger cells and modules in the continuous drive to bring down LCOE. But is big necessarily better?
Update: Form Energy’s stealthy ‘aqueous air battery’ with 150-hour duration lands $76 million funding round
The holy grail of energy storage has always been low-cost and long-duration. Form Energy intends on deploying a 1 MW/150 MWh system with a Minnesota utility before 2023, an unprecedented energy storage duration if successful.
If I were Secretary of Energy
If you recognize that energy is most of the problem with climate change, you’d like the DOE not to be the bastard child of a weapons organization. (Warning/TLDR : You can’t fix the DOE in 1,000 words.)
How does the US retire 236 GW of coal and 1,000 gas peaker plants?
Victory in the economic realm (increasingly the case with solar, solar-plus-storage and wind) is no guarantee of market victory if the regulations are stacked against renewables.
New York is launching a $10 million program to support climate tech startups, following Massachusetts’ lead
“Because economies were shut down, we also had concerns about the companies in which we had investments, and we had to think about how we could help those companies get through the pandemic.”
