Dive Brief:
- Solar developer SunEdison acquired Solar Grid Storage (SGS), a supplier of lithium-ion battery storage for solar and wind projects, GigaOm reports. Financial terms were not disclosed. SGS has four projects in place and a pipeline of nearly 100 MWs.
- SGS created a successful business model by offering a plug-and-play storage product to solar projects for free and using its advanced inverter technology to sell the project’s stored power into the PJM frequency regulation market.
- SunEdison’s 2015 development portfolio of between 1.6 GW and 2.3 GW and its international project pipeline of 8 GW offers a broad marketplace for battery storage where SGS can find comparable revenue opportunities.
Dive Insight:
SGS CEO Tom Leyden, who once described his start-up as a SunEdison of storage, told Utility Dive that he is now working on creating a PPA-like certainty of financial return on systems comprised of SGS battery storage and utility-scale renewables generation. If there is a bankable guarantee of return, the projects can be incorporated into SunEdison subsidiary Terraform Power’s YeildCo to recirculate the revenues into new development.
Leyden also said the first two opportunities he will attack are more projects in PJM and the California market, where a 1325 MW storage mandate for the state's IOUs has already begun to drive growth. Leyden also sees opportunities comparable to the one in PJM in MISO, ERCOT, ISO-NE, and NYISO
Other leading storage providers include Aquion Energy, Stem, EnerVault, Sunverge Energy, Ice Energy, and Advanced Microgrid Systems.
The SunEdison-SGS partnership matches SolarCity’s partnership with Tesla, in which the rooftop solar installer is marketing batteries and is expected to break open the solar plus storage market when the electric carmaker’s gigafactory starts mass producing batteries at lower costs created by unprecedented economies of scale.
