GoKawiil
Tech News
California avoided rolling power outages through the hottest August on record, a streak dating back to 2020. The state's grid operator has grown battery storage capacity from under 100 megawatts in 2020 to over 17,000 megawatts today, allowing solar energy captured during the day to be dispatched during peak evening demand.
Furo, a startup building software for industrial battery storage systems, has raised $4 million from mostly U.S. investors including TQ Ventures, Neo, and Sheryl Sandberg's Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. The three 28-year-old founders, originally from Germany, moved back home after studying and briefly operating in the Bay Area, and within a year landed enterprise clients like Deutsche Bahn. Co-founder Lena Sophia Voß says the company is scaling faster in Europe than it would have in the U.S.
US energy storage set another quarterly record, powered largely by seven new gigascale battery installations exceeding one gigawatt-hour each, according to a report from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Behind-the-meter batteries also grew, with data centers accounting for roughly three-quarters of new commercial installations, even as residential battery installations are projected to fall 16% in 2026 after a supporting tax credit expired in 2025.
After the April 2025 blackout across Spain and Portugal shut down its production lines and spoiled tonnes of meat, Spanish processor Fribin lost hundreds of thousands of euros in a single incident. The company has since bought two five-megawatt-hour battery storage modules, together worth about €1.5m, partly funded by EU Next Generation grants, to keep operations running during future outages.