SunPower and partners working on solar powered microgrid home communities; Aspen secures $350 million from Carlyle; Primergy announces 155 MW AC solar project; Westbridge adds 300 MW solar & 200 MW storage project to portfolio in Alberta.
New microgrid community model by SunPower and partners: SunPower along with the University of California, Irvine (UCI), Schneider Electric and Southern California Edison (SCE) have entered a partnership with homebuilder KB Home to create a 'blueprint' for new home communities of the future. The plan is to have more than 200 state-of-the-art all electric homes of KB's Energy-Smart Connected Communities in Menifee, California to be powered by solar with individual battery storage and connected to a microgrid powered by a large, shared community battery. Through this project, the project partners say they are reimaging what a new home community could look like if built to reduce emissions, cut energy costs and produce clean, reliable energy.
"Every home, while maintaining its regular service with local utility Southern California Edison, is designed to operate during an outage as part of a self-supporting microgrid, drawing energy from its own SunVault storage system as well as a large community battery. Together, they are designed to support critical loads such as lights, refrigeration and WiFi, as well as additional high-capacity loads like HVAC and domestic hot water. When the sun is shining, individual and community batteries can be continually recharged using excess solar generation until the grid connection returns," explained SunPower.
$350 million for Aspen Power Partners: Distributed generation US platform Aspen Power Partners has secured $350 million investment form funds managed by global investment firm Carlyle. Aspen said it will enable the company's organic and acquisition-driven growth strategy targeting community, multifamily, and commercial and industrial (C&I) solar and storage markets to execute, for which it has acquired Safari Energy, LLC. The latter comes to Aspen with its 220 MW portfolio of operating and under construction distributed generation solar assets. Calling the acquisition one of the industry's largest distributed solar C&I transactions to date, Aspen said it is now on track to achieve GW scale by mid-decade.
Primergy seeks permit for 155 MW solar: Solar and storage projects developer Primergy Solar Management, LLC has submitted initial permit application with La Plata County in Colorado to develop 155 MW AC Hesperus Solar Project. It has proposed to locate the project on 1,600 acres of private and 320 state-owned acres on Fort Lewis College's Old Fort at Hesperus Campus. Primergy has signed a solar energy planning lease with the college to evaluate the suitability of these 320 acres for the project. Once online tentatively planned for the end of 2025, the facility is likely to generate $37 million in tax revenues over its lifespan. Primergy is currently constructing 690 MW solar and 380 MW storage, while claiming it has several additional GWs of solar and storage to come online over the next 3 years.
Westbridge announces 300 MW solar and storage project: Westbridge Renewable Energy Corporation has added a new solar project to its portfolio with 300 MW PV and 200 MW/400 MWh of battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity with 2-hour battery duration. The Eastervale Project is located in the Municipality of Provost in East-Central Alberta, Canada. As on November 2, 2022 its total solar PV development portfolio stood at 1.285 GW with BESS of 553 MW/1,106 MWh.