The Texas energy system is having a wintry moment of reckoning.
The past 48 hours of record-cold temperatures have forced much of the state’s thermal generation fleet offline, requiring grid operator ERCOT to institute widespread blackouts to prevent the risk of a further grid collapse.
About 4.3 million utility customers, approximately one-third of the state’s electric customers, were without power in Texas as of Tuesday morning, up from about 2.5 million on Monday morning, according to data from PowerOutage.US. What started as rotating blackouts meant to last no more than an hour at a time have expanded to outages of 24 hours or longer for some customers.
Published: 17 Feb 2021, 14:30
By:
Editor
A 20MW / 18MWh containerised battery energy storage solution in Switzerland, which went online late last year. IHS Markit predicts that while the US will dominate this year and the Asia-Pacific region will rapidly grow market share in the coming years, Europe will see a growth in installations year-on-year of about 70% in 2021. Image: MW Storage AG.
Analysis and research firm IHS Markit has predicted that over 10GW of new energy storage will be deployed during this year, with around half of those additions in the US market.
The company said in a new report that this would be more than double the 4.5GW of global capacity additions in 2020. Meanwhile the US’ strong lead will continue with the market gaining in share until 2023, when IHS Markit senior analyst for clean technology George Hilton said the pipeline in the country reduces.
Published: 26 Jan 2021, 04:52
By:
Edith Hancock
BNEF s report showed that energy storage investment was driven by growth in Asia Pacific and American markets, while EMEA funding slowed down. Image: BNEF
Despite the fall in unit prices for energy storage, a total of US$3.6 billion of investment was committed to energy storage projects in 2020, around the same amount as in 2019.
A new report from BloombergNEF looking at investment trends in the global energy transition found that solar PV lead a jump in energy transition investments throughout 2020. Investments in solar rose by 12% year-on-year to US$148.6 billion despite the economic slowdown induced by COVID-19. As much as 194GW of solar PV could be deployed this year, the firm predicted.
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