20 January 2021
Macquarie’s Green Investment Group, the green investment arm of Australian investment banking giant Macquarie Group, announced on Tuesday that it would invest in esVolta, a developer and owner of utility-scale energy storage projects across North America.
The move will enable Macquarie to tap into California’s grid-scale battery boom which, despite the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic, saw record-shattering success through 2020 and built a pipeline expected to continue delivering record figures through 2021.
Macquarie Group acquired the Green Investment Group (GIG) from the UK Government in 2017 in a deal worth £2.3 billion ($A4.2 billion), which had launched the previously-named Green Investment Bank in 2012 as a publicly funded bank designed to mobilise private finance into the green energy sector – serving a similar role to that of the Australian Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
“Big batteries” boost renewables
Hornsdale Battery in South Australia. Note the windmill to the left. Image courtesy of Hornsdale Power Reserve.
Editor’s note: This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360.
It appears here as part of the
collaboration.
The twin smokestacks of the Moss Landing Power Plant tower over Monterey Bay. Visible for miles along this picturesque stretch of the Northern California coast, the 500-foot-tall pillars crown what was once California’s largest electric power station a behemoth natural gas-fired generator. Today, as California steadily moves to decarbonize its economy, those stacks are idle and the plant is largely mothballed. Instead, the site is about to begin a new life as the world’s largest battery, storing excess energy when solar panels and wind farms are producing electricity and feeding it back into the grid when they’re not.
Ten renewable energy trends to watch in 2021 By Brian Eckhouse, Will Mathis and Dan Murtaugh on 1/6/2021
LOS ANGELES (Bloomberg) Even after Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on almost everything else, the new year begins with surging growth for renewable energy. â2020 was the year of positive surprises for the environment in a way that very few saw coming,â says Jeff McDermott, head of Nomura Greentech. âIt was the breakout year in sustainability and infrastructure.â
Growth will likely continue into 2021, fueled in part by last yearâs major turning points. China has now committed to reaching carbon neutrality by 2060, putting the worldâs biggest market for solar and wind power on the path to ramp up installations as it begins its next five-year plan. Some analysts have started predicting that the U.S. power sector is approaching peak natural gas. That would leave room for solar-panel installations to build on the ongoing boo
NGT News
December 23, 2020
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded approximately $6 million to five organizations that will develop training programs for emergency responders, building managers and owners, and other officials interacting with alternative-fuel vehicles and their chargers, solar energy and storage systems, and energy-efficient building technologies.
Led by or working with professional associations, work done through these projects could educate hundreds of thousands of U.S. safety and building workers. These professionals are at the front lines as more solar systems are built, more vehicles run on batteries and nontraditional fuels, and more buildings become “smarter” and more energy-efficient. A well-trained workforce familiar with clean energy will improve safety, expedite permitting, reduce liability and insurance costs, and increase consumer confidence.