The Sierra Club, an environmental group with a focus on reducing fossil fuel pollution, has graded 75 American utilities on their resource plans through 2035. The average grade was a “D.”

Firebrick heat storage technology, not batteries, will be used to store energy for industrial process heat in a 100% renewable energy system, says a study out of Stanford University.

A new U.S. Department of Energy loan guarantee will help finance 200 MW of solar and 285 MW of grid-scale storage on the island.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has flagged a cybersecurity risk for smart inverters, and is developing guidelines to prevent cyberattacks.

Pennsylvania and Minnesota have joined six other states in requiring smart inverters for distributed solar and storage. Certain utilities in 13 states and Puerto Rico also require smart inverters, while six states are considering the requirement. Smart inverters enable more solar on distribution circuits.

Eight of the 10 transmission corridors proposed by the US Department of Energy (DoE) could facilitate transmission between grid regions. One would expand transmission within the Mid-Atlantic’s PJM grid region, and one would expand transmission in the Northern Plains.

A new US Department of Energy (DoE) roadmap outlines 35 ways to allow solar developers to expedite the interconnection of utility-scale renewables and storage projects. The roadmap, developed through a DoE stakeholder process known as i2X, proposes actions to implement these solutions.

The US Department of Energy is funding a pilot project to demonstrate the commercial viability of storing energy in heated sand, which is capable of producing 135 MW of power for five days.

Adding residential solar or commercial-scale electric vehicle chargers on a utility’s distribution feeder may require the utility to conduct power flow calculations. Duke Energy can now complete those studies in hours, an Amazon executive said at a policy forum held by ACORE.

While distributed solar and storage are advancing quickly in Puerto Rico, utility-scale solar and storage procurements ordered by regulators in 2020 have made little progress.