The scale of the threat facing gas-based electricity generation from renewables and energy storage was outlined this week at the Global Power & Energy Exhibition in Barcelona, Spain.

Rory McCarthy, senior storage analyst for Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, illustrated for attendees how the business case for using renewables in place of natural gas is becoming more compelling following declines in solar and wind costs.

That business case is also improving as a result of massive increases in battery storage, where the U.S. leads the world in terms of operational and planned capacity.

Today, storage capacity amounts to around 6 gigawatt-hours worldwide, but Wood

U.S. electric bus maker Proterra continued its money raising streak with a $155 million round announced Wednesday in Germany.

Automotive giant Daimler co-led the round with Tao Capital Partners, Nicholas Pritzker’s family investment office, which had invested previously. G2VP participated as well.

New capital will help Proterra’s quest to electrify the entire bus sector, but this deal comes with a business opportunity: Proterra and Daimler “have entered into an agreement to explore the electrification of select Daimler heavy-duty vehicles,” the companies said in a statement.

They have selected Daimler’s North American school bus subsidiary, Thomas Built Buses, as the first

This weekend, as the anniversary of Hurricane Maria approached, over 30,000 Puerto Ricans were once again left temporarily in the dark by an electrical fault.

The outage reminded residents of the crippling outages that lasted for months — outages that are one storm away. Thursday marks one-year since Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. Since then, Puerto Ricans have coped with months of power outages, suffered through federal inaction and mourned thousands of deaths. 

Much of the recovery is only beginning. 

In the second year of the crisis, questions linger about the structure of the electricity system and frustrations persist about local versus federal control

Long-duration energy storage — batteries or other technologies that can store energy for at least four hours of continuous operation, or possibly even longer — accounts for a minority of the grid-scale energy storage deployed today. 

There are many reasons for this, including the cheapness and relative reliability of lithium-ion batteries for short-duration applications. As well as the, shall we say, less than stellar record of long-duration battery startups that have gone bankrupt or failed to deliver on their promises. 

Over the past year and a half, we’ve seen Aquion run out of cash for its saltwater batteries, Alevo close down its mystery long-duration lithium-ion play, LightSail fold its

There are hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles on the roads across the U.S. and the European Union, and endless news of American EV maker Tesla's latest moves. But the truth is that China is the center of the battery and electric transportation universe. This is borne out by the sheer volume of capital being deployed in the largest EV market in the world, a market that saw 579,000 electric passenger cars sold last year.

With the caveat that battery and EV claims require some healthy skepticism, here are a few recent billion-dollar EV financial events in China.

Farasis gets $1 billion in financing?

With

“Decarbonization” was the catchword of last week’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco.

Stakeholders from all over the world made new commitments to combatting climate change. But the spotlight was really on California, where Governor Jerry Brown signed an historic bill into law — requiring the state to power its electric grid with 100 percent carbon-free resources by 2045.

That’s not all. Brown kicked off the week with a bang by also signing an executive order committing the California to complete carbon neutrality by 2045.

So the Political Climate team sat down with a man who knows a thing or two about decarbonization

Rampant inflation has put Argentina’s nascent renewable energy market in mortal danger, an analyst has warned. “Banks will be affected by the currency run, which will likely make long-term financing virtually impossible,” said Maria José Chea, a solar analyst with IHS Markit.

This month, Argentina’s central bank posted the highest interest rate in the world, 60 percent, in a bid to stem freefalling devaluation of the peso. The currency has dropped more than 50 percent in value against the dollar so far this year. 

"A failing economy isn't good at all for renewables and particularly a new regulatory framework that's in place in the country," said