By Jeff Siegel
While the solar industry continues to heat up, I maintain that one of the best plays in the space is SunEdison (NYSE: SUNE).
This is an aggressive operation, run by incredibly smart people. The company is well-capitalized, fairly liquid, and well-diversified in the energy space, boasting both a top-notch, vertically-integrated solar operation, and a basket of healthy wind assets, too.
The company is also now advancing on energy storage – the final obstacle to the creative destruction necessary to alleviate the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.
In a press release this morning, SunEdison made the following announcement …
SunEdison, Inc., the world’s largest renewable energy development company, and Solar Grid Storage LLC, a leader in deploying combined energy storage and solar PV systems, today announced that SunEdison has acquired the energy storage project origination team, project pipeline, and subject to customary consents and assignments, four operating storage projects from Solar Grid Storage. SunEdison now offers battery storage solutions to complement solar and wind projects worldwide, providing solutions that can benefit utilities, municipalities, businesses, and consumers alike.
“Storage is a perfect complement to our business model and to our wind and solar expertise,” said Tim Derrick, General Manager of SunEdison Advanced Solutions. “Our strategy is to increase the value of the solar and wind projects that we finance, develop, own, and operate by improving their availability and ability to interact with the grid. With this acquisition we have added the capability to pair energy storage with solar and wind projects, thereby creating more valuable projects and positioning ourselves as a leader in the rapidly growing energy storage market.”
The growth in the energy storage market is being driven by commercial and municipal customers who are interested in both immediate energy savings from solar and emergency back-up power from storage, and by electricity grid operators, who place a high value on storage for its ability to make the grid more resilient and less susceptible to failure. Renewable generation-plus-storage has proven to be a cost-effective way of integrating renewable energy such as solar and wind into the grid.
“Solar Grid Storage is unique in the storage industry in that we approach storage from a solar perspective. Understanding the core solar customer value proposition, as well as the ways that energy storage can add customer benefits and economic value to solar projects, enables us to deliver renewable energy projects that are more valuable for both customers and grid operators,” said Tom Leyden, Chief Executive Officer of Solar Grid Storage. “Becoming a part of SunEdison, a renewable energy market leader with a strong pipeline of customers and development projects, positions us incredibly well to accelerate our growth and integrate energy storage with renewables to help create the electricity grid of the future.”
Interestingly, this news comes less than one month after Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) genius Elon Musk announced that his company is about six months away from unveiling a new kind of battery that’ll be able to power your home.
I’m telling you right now, the elusive storage dream is about to become reality. And it’s companies like SunEdison and Tesla that are going to make fat wads of cash by getting this stuff out of the labs and into the marketplace first.
Invest accordingly.
Jeff Siegel is Editor of Energy and Capital, where this article was first published.
