Distributed energy storage is taking off
Interchange Recharged
Wood Mackenzie
4.8 • 535 Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2024
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
5x growth in five years: Convergent energy is overseeing $1 billion worth of energy storage development.
Managing intermittent energy supply is a crucial part of the energy transition. When the wind doesn’t blow, or the sun doesn’t shine, we need a backup. Across two days of the Solar & Energy Storage summit, industry leaders and analysts explored the newest technology providing that service.
Peter Cavan is Senior Vice President of Market Development at Convergent. They finance and manage all aspects of on-site renewable energy development and operations to significantly and sustainably lower electricity bills for the industrial sector, electric cooperatives, and municipal utilities, and investor owned utilities. Peter joins us in the SESS podcast studio to discuss the future of energy storage and the trends in the market.
Convergent has over 800 MW of storage and 1 GWh of solar-plus-storage capacity operating or under development. How has their approach to storage evolved over the past decade? How are utilities integrating distributed storage into their operations? And where does Peter see the next big innovation in the sector coming from?
To wrap up our SESS 2024 coverage, we bring you everything you need to know about distributed energy storage.
For more information from our sponsor Convergent Energy and Power on their industry-leading battery storage and solar solutions, please go to convergentep.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wood McKenzie's Solar Energy and Storage Summit is back in Denver on the 29th and 30th of April, |
| 0:06.2 | 2026. It's co-located with the brand new North American Power and Renewables Forum, |
| 0:11.9 | which features senior speakers from across the U.S. power sector. Come and join over 450 senior |
| 0:18.2 | leaders from U.S. power developers, utilities, and independent power producers |
| 0:23.3 | to tackle the industry's biggest challenges. From navigating life after tax credits to capturing |
| 0:29.7 | the load growth boom, discover how the energy mix is evolving and how the U.S. is going to meet |
| 0:34.9 | that power demand. Seats are limited, so register now at woodmack.com. |
| 0:40.6 | This is the interchange recharge. |
| 0:43.5 | A Wood McKenzie production. |
| 0:45.5 | I'm David Banmiller. |
| 0:48.8 | Peter, thanks for joining us. |
| 0:50.2 | Thank you. It's great to be here. |
| 0:51.4 | Yeah, and thank you and Convergent for sponsoring this conference. Thank you. It's been a wonderful conference, Yeah, and thank you and Convergent for a sponsor in this conference. |
| 0:54.8 | Thank you. It's been a wonderful conference and we're very happy to be a sponsor. |
| 0:58.0 | So what has load growth meant for the electric sector in general and, you know, storage developers in particular? |
| 1:06.0 | That's a great question. I think low growth is huge, to avoid the pun. But yes, it's something that we've, as an electric industry, we've talked about for a long time. And I know you and many of your listeners will be entirely aware of this, but just to put it in context, you know, we've been looking at basically flat for decades this point. You have to be pretty old to remember a time, and it wasn't that. And it it's all changing it's as if we had a history of |
| 1:27.6 | decades of the you know the federal funds rate for example being zero to point five percent and then |
| 1:33.0 | almost overnight so to speak we thought oh let maybe we make it four percent and see how the see how the |
| 1:38.7 | industry changes and that is really more or less we're facing on the on the on the on the electric side. |
| 1:45.0 | You know, why is, you know, for years we've talked about, you know, people move electric cars, |
| 1:49.0 | you know, heat pumps, etc. But I think two big things have changed there. One is the range of drivers there, the range of things forcing load up of greatly increased. |
| 2:00.0 | Obviously things like industrialization, |
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