Wednesday, 8 July 2026

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued parallel show cause orders under section 206 of the Federal Power Act, requiring each of the six regional grid operators it oversees to defend or revise tariffs covering data centers and other large energy users.

The orders came in response to a large load interconnection proceeding that Secretary Wright directed.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and Deputy Secretary of Energy James P. Danly commented after the actions taken at the commission's open meeting.

Danly said the announcement showed Chairman Swett was acting on Secretary Wright's directive.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued orders requiring the nation's six major grid operators to propose reforms or justify their existing rules on how data centers and other large customers connect to the electric grid within 60 days, according to Inside Climate News.

Each grid operator and its transmission owners must also submit a report within 30 days describing how they will ensure adequate generation to serve existing and new large loads, Inside Climate News reported. The 60-day deadline applies to the reform proposals or justifications.

The orders trace back to a directive from U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who last October ordered FERC to begin rulemaking on energy demands and grid stability tied to large customers, particularly data centers for AI and cryptomining, according to Inside Climate News.

Regional grid operators manage the wholesale energy market for two-thirds of the United States, roughly 200 million customers, Inside Climate News reported.

The orders point to disruptions already recorded on the system. After lightning struck a transmission line in Dominion Energy's Virginia territory, 60 data centers simultaneously dropped off the system and switched to backup power, causing a sudden loss of 1,500 megawatts in demand, according to Inside Climate News.

In Texas, ERCOT reported five loss incidents of greater than 100 megawatts from October 2023 to October 2024, Inside Climate News reported.

FERC Chairman Laura Swett said the orders do not intrude on state authority to site and permit generating resources or to set the rates, terms and conditions of retail electricity sales, according to Inside Climate News.

Virginia regulators at the State Corporation Commission are reviewing Dominion's interconnection process for 70 gigawatts of data center requests, Inside Climate News reported.

German utility E.ON will extend standardized flexible connection agreements for battery energy storage systems to its German distribution grids before the end of the year, ESS News reported.

The utility will apply the model across all of its distribution system operators, which between them span about 65% of Germany's land area, according to ESS News.

The wider deployment follows a trial run with storage developer Eco Stor in Bollingstedt, in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, ESS News reported.

BVES pushed for a criteria-based framework shaped to local network conditions instead of a fixed nationwide contract, imposing only restrictions that are genuinely needed, according to ESS News.

The SunZia Transmission line has entered full commercial service, moving renewable power out of New Mexico to customers in the Southwest, Pattern Energy and Hitachi Energy said, according to Electrek.

Electrek reported that the 550-mile HVDC link can deliver as much as 3,000 MW, tying the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico to Arizona and buyers across the western grid. The wind project behind it runs to 3.65 GW across 916 turbines, per Electrek.

The circuit operates at plus or minus 525 kilovolts. Electrek described it as the largest voltage source converter-based HVDC installation in the US and one of the largest in the world.

In its first full year, the project is expected to avoid roughly 9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, according to Electrek.

FAW Jiefang completed a full-condition, systematic test of a sodium-ion battery in heavy-duty trucking that ran for nearly seven months and covered more than 15,000 km, according to Electrek.

The 339 kWh pack was co-developed by FAW and battery supplier Zhongke Haina. At -40C, the pack retained more than 90% of its usable capacity, Electrek reported.

Zhongke Haina says a full charge takes 20 to 25 minutes. The battery has a cycle life exceeding 8,000 cycles under fast charging conditions, according to the supplier.

Other Chinese manufacturers are scaling sodium output. CATL has committed more than USD 700 million to build a 40 GWh annual sodium battery production capacity plant in Fujian, Electrek reported. BYD claims it has developed a new long-life sodium battery good for more than 10,000 charging cycles.

Hydro-Québec moved about 2.4 terawatt-hours across the New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC) transmission line through the end of April, according to Grist. Massachusetts had contracted for 9.55 terawatt-hours of hydropower each year, roughly 20 percent of the state's annual electricity demand.

Electricity started flowing from Canada into Maine on the line in January, Grist reported. Since the opening, there have been roughly 27 days when nothing at all crossed the route, commonly called NECEC.

Hydro-Québec spokesperson Lynn St-Laurent tied the most recent stoppage to "technical difficulties" in a written statement.

The line has not run in one direction only. During the first four months of this year, more than 500 gigawatt-hours flowed the other way, into Canada on the Phase 2 line, according to Grist. Volumes were far larger before the current arrangement took hold: in 2019, more than 12 terawatt-hours of hydropower reached the New England grid over the Phase 2 line.

The Mobility House Energy now oversees more than 1 GW of battery storage spread over 47 projects in four countries, ESS News reported.

The German aggregator and trading firm brought four new battery projects online during June 2026, according to ESS News.

The company attributed the shift to a rising count of negative electricity price hours and shrinking feed-in tariffs, which it said are improving the economics of co-located storage.

The firm traces its trading and optimization work back to 2016, when it pooled around 12 MW from 1,000 retired electric vehicle batteries, ESS News reported.

Phenogy, a Swiss sodium-ion battery maker, presented its modular Phenogy 1.1 storage unit at The Smarter E Europe in Munich, targeting commercial and industrial buyers, according to pv magazine.

The unit is rated at 50 kW nominal power and 100 Ah nominal capacity, and runs air-cooled thermal management, pv magazine reported. Its design targets a cycle life of at least 6,000 cycles.

Each cell carries a rated 170 Ah capacity and a 2.85 V nominal voltage, according to pv magazine. Wired in a 1P208S layout, the pack delivers a nominal 592 VDC across the system.

For its primary communication interface, the Phenogy 1.1 relies on the SI50-20 inverter built by German manufacturer SMA, pv magazine reported.

Phenogy earlier put a 1 MWh sodium-ion installation into service in island mode near Bremen Airport in Germany, a system the company calls Europe's largest operational sodium-ion deployment, according to pv magazine.

Eos Energy Enterprises' Z3 battery modules passed independent destructive testing and received ISO 14001 certification, according to Solar Builder.

Under the tested conditions, the Z3 batteries showed no thermal runaway, no sustained fire, and no propagation to adjacent live modules, according to Solar Builder. The certification followed the positive test outcomes.

Eos subjected its modules to both direct flame impingement and overcharge during testing, Solar Builder reported.

The testing addresses a requirement in the 2026 edition of National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 855, under which battery systems must confirm that heat-related system failures do not spread between units, according to Solar Builder.

In November 2025, the Allegheny County Department of Emergency Services and several municipal departments responded to an incident involving overcharged battery modules at Eos' Turtle Creek facility, according to Solar Builder.

CATL will start shipping its TENER Sodium energy storage system abroad in June 2027, after first supplying the Chinese market from September 2026, according to ESS News.

The system runs to 15,000 charge cycles when operated between 25 C and 30 C, CATL said. Caspar Spinnen of CATL said the product holds 10,000 cycles at temperatures reaching 45 C and keeps 92% of its capacity below -20 C.

Each modular unit carries just under 30 MWh of capacity and weighs roughly 42 tons, according to ESS News. CATL has attached a 30-year warranty to the system.

The company has locked in 60 GWh of sodium-ion supply deals running over three years, CATL said.

CATL is dedicating 40 GWh of yearly sodium-ion capacity at its Fuding site, and plans another 160 GWh at its Jining base in Shandong province, China, according to ESS News.

Battery energy storage systems (BESS) deployed across the United States reached a record 3.3 GW / 8.4 GWh in Q1 2026, with utility, commercial and residential segments each setting highs, according to the U.S. Energy Storage Monitor from the American Clean Power Association (ACP) and Wood Mackenzie.

That total ran 54% ahead of the previous first-quarter record, the report found.

Utility-scale projects carried the quarter, contributing more than 2.3 GW / 6.8 GWh of the total.

Residential deployment hit a record 1.3 GWh, a rise of 86% against Q1 2025 and 5% against the prior quarter. ACP and Wood Mackenzie linked the surge to a backlog of projects begun late in 2025 to capture the expiring Section 25D tax credit.

Paired solar and storage installations gained ground. The national residential attachment rate for solar-plus-storage climbed to 45% in Q1 2026 from 38% a year earlier, the report said.

The Community, Commercial and Industrial (CCI) sector added 97.7 MW, up 27% from Q4 2025, with California installing 75 MW of that figure.

Cumulative BESS capacity could reach 200 GW / 655 GWh by 2031, according to the report, which attributed most of that growth to the utility sector at 85% of installations between 2026 and 2031.

Ola Cell Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ola Electric, has received Bureau of Indian Standards certification under IS 16046 (Part 2):2018/IEC 62133-2:2017 for its indigenously developed LFP 46100 cylindrical cell, according to ESS News.

Ola Electric becomes the first Indian company to receive BIS certification for an indigenously developed cell in the 46100 format, ESS News reported.

The LFP 46100 cell also qualified under IS 16893 Parts 2 and 3 and UN 38.3 standards, according to ESS News.

The cell offers an energy density of over 170 Wh/kg and a development pathway toward more than 4,000 charge-discharge cycles, per ESS News.

The certified LFP 46100 platform expands Ola Electric's in-house cell portfolio beyond its NMC 4680 Bharat cell, according to ESS News.

A grid-forming battery energy storage system (BESS) held a utility-scale solar plant stable through sharp output swings and grid faults, according to research published in Scientific Reports and reported by pv magazine.

The BESS relied on a grid-forming inverter built around a virtual synchronous machine (VSM) controller, which provided synthetic inertia, voltage regulation, and frequency support, according to pv magazine.

Researchers tested the setup across a wide range of grid strengths. They varied short-circuit ratio values from 0.42 to 4.5 to gauge performance under both weak- and strong-grid conditions, according to pv magazine.

In one scenario, the team cut photovoltaic (PV) output by 50%. Total plant power temporarily fell from about 92-93 MW to 70-72 MW, while frequency deviation stayed within roughly 0.8-1.0 Hz and settled within 0.5 seconds, according to pv magazine.

Under a permanent fault, the system stayed stable even as voltage dropped to 0.7-0.8 pu and reactive power peaked at 45-48 MVAR, with frequency deviations reaching up to 2.5 Hz, according to pv magazine.

Researchers from Jordan's Yarmouk University and Al-Ahliyya Amman University participated in the work, according to pv magazine.

ESS Tech Inc. is accelerating development and production of its non-lithium battery systems after a surge of early customer interest, according to Solar Builder.

The Wilsonville, Oregon-based company has seen strong early customer engagement across the United States since signing a letter of intent with battery manufacturer Alsym Energy in late April, Solar Builder reported.

"The demand we're seeing for sodium-ion is unlike anything in our company's history," said Drew Buckley, CEO of ESS Tech, in comments reported by Solar Builder.

Buckley and the company say the sodium-ion batteries will find outsized use in data centers, utility markets, and other critical infrastructure applications. That customer response is driving the faster push on development and output of the non-lithium systems.

Alongside its sodium-ion battery energy storage system products, ESS Tech will continue development of its iron flow battery technology for long duration applications, according to Solar Builder.

Quino Energy, a developer of water-based organic flow batteries, won a grant from Tencent's CarbonX program to build a MWh-scale battery for Himandhoo Island in the Maldives, according to a GlobeNewswire release. The system will serve the island's power supply.

The battery will sit inside a wider microgrid that also draws on floating photovoltaic (PV) generation, with the solar portion funded by the Asian Development Bank, the release said.

Atri Energy Transition will back the project and run operations and maintenance on the island battery for a minimum of five years once it enters service, according to the release. Atri Energy Transition also led Quino Energy's Series A round in October 2025.

Hardware for the flow battery will come from Suqian Time Energy Storage. Sinosoar, described as an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) and island microgrid specialist, will manage installation, construction and integration, the release said.

Chief executive Eugene Beh characterized the Maldives project as Quino Energy's first commercial rollout of its organic flow battery, set apart from earlier government-backed work the company had announced.

The company has separately tapped U.S. public funding. It received a USD 10 million grant from the California Energy Commission and USD 5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy's Critical Facility Energy Resilience (CiFER) program, money directed at a 5 MWh flow battery in Southern California, according to the release.

Turbo Energy and HiTHIUM announced the deployment of an AI-enabled energy infrastructure project across 15 industrial facilities of one of Europe's largest electro-intensive ceramic manufacturing groups, according to a GlobeNewswire release.

The project pairs 366 MWh of battery energy storage capacity with Turbo Energy's proprietary AI-driven optimization platform, the companies said. More than 130 MWh of that storage capacity has already been installed on site.

The deployment forms part of the Pamesa Net Zero initiative, described by the companies as one of Europe's most ambitious industrial energy transformation programs.

Mariano Soria serves as Chief Executive Officer of Turbo Energy. Kelson Li is Vice President of HiTHIUM Europe.

Turbo Energy, S.A. trades on Nasdaq under the ticker TURB and describes itself as a global integrator of AI-driven solar energy storage solutions.