The Globe and Mail Adam Mayers Published March 5, 2021
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At the age of 58, when most people start looking ahead to retirement, Catherine Wood launched an investment management company in New York to capture the potential of a coming wave of technological change.
Almost seven years later, Ark Investment Management LLC has grown from a US$15-million venture into one in which the flagship exchange-traded fund (ETF) manages about US$18-billion in assets. Ark Innovation ETF ARKK-A is the largest actively managed ETF on any global exchange. It ranked in the first percentile among 604 funds in its class in 2020, according to Morningstar Research, with a 152.8-per-cent return. The ETF has struggled thus far in 2021, up only 0.5 per cent year-to-date.
Image: Uplight.
Uplight, a US energy software company that helps electric utilities reduce their baseload energy use by monitoring and adapting how their networks operate based on consumer behaviour, has reached a valuation of US$1.5 billion following investment from groups including Schneider Electric.
Uplight was formed through the 2019 merger of group of separate start-ups including Simple Energy and Tendril, and already has contracts with 80 different utilities serving more than 100 million customers. When the two companies merged, power project and infrastructure company AES Corporation took a strategic stake in Uplight and this week AES said that following the latest deal, its stake in the company is now worth around US$450 million.
Published: 5 Mar 2021, 13:45
By:
Andy Colthorpe
Another solar-plus-storage project on a former municipal landfill site in Massachusets, executed by Kearsage with NEC. Image: Kearsage.
Stem Inc has completed a front-of-the-meter solar-plus-storage project in Massachusetts that will participate in New England’s wholesale markets run by system operator New England ISO.
The company is better known for deploying behind-the-meter battery storage for commercial and industrial (C&I) customers, using Stem’s proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) platforms and software to coordinate peak shaving to help customers save money on electricity costs while also aggregating the batteries to use in revenue-generating opportunities such as grid services markets.
Image: ScottishPower.
There are numerous benefits from collocating battery energy storage with wind power, including grid availability and planning ease.
Speaking at Solar Media’s Energy Storage Summit 2021, Tony Gannon, head of project management at ScottishPower Renewables explained how the company had chosen to take advantage of a number of these efficiencies for its 539MW Whitelee Wind Farm.
Whitelee is a 50MW/50MWh storage project, which is collocating liquid cooled lithium-ion batteries with the UK’s largest onshore windfarm near Glasgow, Scotland. Plans for the battery were approved by the Scottish government in June 2019, and inverter maker Ingeteam was announced as the power electronics technology provider in July 2020, while the batteries used are lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry cells from Chinese manufacturer CATL.