Your Car As Backup. Consider me both, unsurprised and pessimistic, to the idea that cars are stationary power loads for your home and grid. Given the decades of work it has taken to connect rooftop solar to the grid, imagine the car based battery to become a connected load to the grid. So assume that bidirectional aspect of EV charging is to be a backup for your home, is that really the best way for you to use the cycles available in your car? How will auto OEMs change the terms of the warranty since mileage isn’t the totality of the use case of the car? Don’t get me wrong, I understand why it should be more common for your EV to be a grid DER, but what is the price signal to make a market out of it? Wait and see.
Big Batteries, Big Tenders. On the other side of the spectrum is the large scale energy storage market, also (in some markets) looking to find price signals for grid operators that are yet to discover the use case that energy storage can most valuably fill in the grid operations (we’re looking at you PJM). That hasn’t slowed the 100’s of GWh of tenders to hit the market around the world and the tens of billions of capital committed to this market. No more esoteric, capital formation got here rather quickly. Now folks are looking for that deal flow, platforms that know how to do batteries are getting some nice acquisition flow. Obviously, I’m a bit of an insider to this market so I can say that hardly a day goes by that capital isn’t calling to see what potential deal flow is out there for investment.
The Sunrun VPP Market. Sunrun picking Lunar Energy is not a headline you would typically see on this newsletter but this has so much inside baseball that I feel I need to point some of the obvious ones out to you. Lunar, by the description in the website, helps companies like Sunrun manage their virtual power plant contracts. It was hardly a secret that Autogrid (acquired by Schneider in 2022) was the platform that used to do this for Sunrun. Lunar came out of stealth last year and the interesting part is that Sunrun was a major investor in that venture funding, with Sunrun’s co-founder and Co-Chair (ex-CEO), Lynn Jurish, joining Lunar as the Chair. For extra inside deal, most of the founding team of Lunar comes from Tesla Energy.
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- Solar Power World: Enphase will release its own bidirectional EV charger
- Energy Storage News: Hope for large-scale tenders to drive forward energy storage’s role in the energy transition
- PV-Tech: Sunrun appoints startup Lunar Energy to manage virtual power plants
- Utility Dive: CAISO board approves Western day-ahead market, with expected economic, reliability benefits
- Axios: Arctic outbreak shatters records in Northeast, including -108°F wind chill
- Reuters: German minister Habeck calls for green tech cooperation with United States
- PV-Magazine: Utility-scale updates on Texas 36 GW five-year solar path
Opinion
Best, Yann