From the perspective of both renewable-energy advocates and electric utilities, grid-scale energy storage offers many potential benefits. By storing energy in battery packs for later use, energy storage can make intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind into more reliable forms of power. It also helps utilities "balance" the gird by... Energy storage batteries face biggest test in California
From the perspective of both renewable-energy advocates and electric utilities, grid-scale energy storage offers many potential benefits. By storing energy in battery packs for later use, energy storage can make intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind into more reliable forms of power. It also helps utilities "balance" the gird by... 
Engineers are nothing if not creative. Significant research is going into improved ways of storing electricity, including alternatives to the currently dominant lithium-ion battery-cell chemistry in electric cars. That includes using supercapacitors to substitute for storage batteries in some circumstances. DON'T MISS: Batteries from junkyard... 
Even after they have degraded too much for continued automotive use, the lithium-ion battery packs in electric cars still have significant useful storage capacity. That's led several automakers to experiment with alternative uses for these "second-life" batteries in stationary energy storage. Battery packs can store energy generated by renewable... 
Tesla is perhaps best known for its electric cars, but the company has another prominent business as well. Its Tesla Energy division markets stationary lithium-ion battery packs for energy storage. Energy-storage systems can increase the utility of home solar arrays, meaning Tesla Energy will likely become more important now that Tesla is set to... 
The combination of Tesla and SolarCity is already promoting its potential synergies, albeit in a location far away from the mainland United States. The island of Ta'u in American Samoa is located more than 4,000 miles from the U.S. West Coast, and typically relies on imported diesel fuel to generate electricity. With no local sources of fossil...