Sustainability

Looking back on Climate Week NYC 2019: Helping the world move faster toward a zero-carbon footprint

Battery-based energy storage is a proven technology that can enable your schools to use more self-generated solar power and help stabilize the grid, while significantly reducing district energy costs.

All over California, school districts are beginning to install energy storage. Mountain View Los Altos (MVLA) High School District was the first district in the state to combine energy storage with solar power generation and electric vehicle (EV) charging stations.

At ENGIE Storage, we’re committed to our customers’ success, and have people and processes in place to ensure they are taken care of throughout the life of their energy project. One of the key features of an energy storage engagement is the 10-year contract term, which is quite a long time in our fast-changing industry. We sat down with Michael Laine, Client Relationship Director at ENGIE Storage, to explore the questions that commercial and industrial (C&I) facility energy managers might have.

This will be a hot summer for solar and storage developers in Massachusetts as the Commonwealth kicks off its SMART program, providing tiered incentives to promote solar with an additional kicker if there is storage attached. It’s an exciting program—the first of its kind outside of California, and one of the first ever in the U.S. to promote energy storage coupled with community solar (direct contracts between solar arrays and residents).

Green Charge is proud to announce our name change to ENGIE Storage. While our name is changing, our mission to power the world efficiently and sustainably with energy storage is the same, and we think better accomplished as a part of ENGIE.

If your K-12 school district or community college could reduce energy costs and steer those savings to educational improvements, wouldn’t you jump at the chance? California’s Grossmont Union, Poway Unified, Mountain View Los Altos and Visalia Unified are just a few of the districts that have tapped into energy storage to shrink their electrical bills. They are now serving as beacons to others.

ENGIE North America and Holyoke Gas & Electric have just announced a contract for the largest utility-scale energy storage project in Massachusetts at the Mt. Tom Solar facility. What is the significance of this milestone?

ENGIE NA and Holyoke Gas & Electric (HG&E) today announced plans for the largest utility-scale energy storage installation in Massachusetts. Green Charge, an ENGIE NA subsidiary, will operate the three-megawatt energy storage system at Mt. Tom Solar, which began operation in January of this year adjacent to the former Mt. Tom Power Station. The system will be used to optimize intermittent solar energy and reduce utility capacity costs for HG&E, the system’s customer, while reducing stress on the HG&E distribution system. This project will contribute to rate stabilization for HG&E customers over the next 20 years.

In 2017, the energy storage market is expected to double in size in California thanks to more than $448 million in federal and local incentives to pair storage with solar projects. Together, both solar and energy storage work to lower electric bills: solar by overall consumption and storage by spikes in power demand. Variable power generation is a weakness of solar systems that energy storage improves on. Pairing solar and energy storage brings stability, increased reliability and resiliency to the electrical grid.