During last week’s power crisis in Texas, prices surged to the market price cap of $9,000 per megawatt-hour for several days, resulting in some huge bills for a lot of homeowners. (To put that in perspective, the state’s seasonal average is $50 per megawatt-hour.) The entire US, not just Texas, has a lot of infrastructure work to do in order to avoid more power crises like this. But in the meantime, how can consumers protect themselves from exorbitant surprise power bills when extreme weather increasingly occurs?

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Energy storage tech solutions company Fluence, a Siemens and AES company based in Arlington, Virginia, today announced that it has acquired San Francisco-based Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS), a provider of AI-powered software for utility-scale storage and generation assets.

Fluence’s acquisition will maximize the value of energy storage and renewables and accelerate grid decarbonization.

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April 2020 was the first month in history that renewables generated more electricity than coal on every day of the month. That’s based on new data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and compiled by the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

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Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial, and political review/analysis of important green energy news.

Today on EGEB, the Chinese company Longi Solar had its record-breaking 60-cell bifacial shingling module certified by the China General Certification Center. Representatives of the European solar industry want the EU to end import duties on Chinese panels. China’s energy regulator want wind farms to get a better access to the electrical grid to curb power waste.

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Electrical grid complexity has increased immensely. Recently, weather damage and intermittent renewable energy production have increased the dynamics that must be managed in a large power grid. In order to address that, the Dutch company Alfen is currently field testing their new ‘cellular smart grid’ solution in Lelystad, the Netherlands.

They have developed a combination of energy storage and finely tuned algorithms to help make electrical grids more resilient and to reduce their downtime.

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The US Department of Energy (DOE) is readying the power grids for solar power to meet 100%, and greater, of local electricity demand as solar peaks mid-day. The DOE is funding a series of projects whose broad goal is to make the power grid more able to be monitored and managed while dealing with less predictable and controllable forms of electricity generation.

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SolarCity, the largest residential solar installer in the US, employs a grid engineering team to integrate its systems and evaluate the impact on the grid. The company decided this week to publish the team’s findings in a white paper titled: “A Pathway to the Distributed Grid”. expand full story

The deal is to supply “Powerpacks”, the commercial and utility scale version of Tesla’s Powerwall, to Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS). The startup, which offers technology-agnostic services to deploy energy storage systems, said the deal was the first battery supply agreement and more will come.

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