AGL, govt invest in battery storage for solar power

AGL Energy has joined the federal government in investing in San Francisco-based solar company Sunverge Energy’s battery storage technology.

AGL is investing US$20 million ($28.8 million) in the company. This follows the US$7 million that the government, through the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and SBCVC, invested to help Sunverge Energy establish operations in Australia.

The investments are aimed at accelerating the adoption of battery storage in Australia to accommodate solar power technology.

With the investment by AGL and the government, Australian sources made up the majority of the US$36.5 million raised by Sunverge Energy during its most recent funding round.

Australia has the largest proportion of households with solar panels in the world, at about 15% or 1.4 million premises. This makes Australia an ideal market for battery storage companies.

The government’s investment in Sunverge came from the Southern Cross Renewable Energy (SXRE) Fund. The renewable energy target provides an average rebate for a solar system of $3000, or around 30% of the installation cost.

In homegrown battery storage news, Brisbane-based Redflow is preparing to launch its residential energy storage offering in late March.

Following a successful end-user trial in Africa, Redflow said it is confident its offering can meet the objective of delivering reliable power in an unreliable energy grid environment.

The residential offering is also expected to be available in international markets, and Redflow already has its first order with an African company.

Redflow Executive Chairman Simon Hackett said the company expects to commence the first commercial installations by June.

“Our goal is to deliver a battery that can be deployed rapidly on-site with simple system integration. To support the retail delivery of energy systems using our batteries, we’re already working with installer partners to deploy initial ‘exemplar’ residential installations in a variety of settings,” he said.

“We’ve already performed successful integration testing with products from Victron Energy while integration testing with various other inverter/charger products is underway.”

Image courtesy of Mike Spasoff under CC