CA Energy Commission Awards $25M in Clean Energy Grants

The Energy Commission approved $25 million in clean energy grants on Aug . 10, with the largest $11 million for a four-year extension of an agreement to continue supporting technology testing and commercialization services to California clean energy entrepreneurs.

This program leverages partnerships with more than 60 testing facilities across nine University of California campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The facilities provide test prototypes of pre-commercial distributed energy resource technologies and help them refine their prototype to meet customer specifications.

Also approved was a $4 million grant to Gridscape to demonstrate a bidirectional charging platform that can discharge multiple electric vehicles to power low-income and disadvantaged multiunit housing and tribal community buildings in Los Angeles.

The Commissioners also approved a $2 million grant to Smartville to advance the reuse of EV batteries that no longer have sufficient capacity for a car but still have more than enough to provide energy storage. The batteries generally have about 70% life left in them.

The huge growth in the purchase of hybrid and electric cars is leading to a growing mountain of used batteries, many of which could be put to productive use by giving them a second life or recycling them. The grant to the young company is to accelerate product development on its modular assembly energy storage system for second-life batteries

In June 2020, the CEC awarded $2 million to Smartville, one of a few startups working on breakthroughs to allow EV battery repurposing, to advance its battery degradation testing system at a site in San Diego.

Other CEC awards approved midweek were as follows:

$3 million to the University of California, Davis for a project evaluating bidirectional chargers for heavy-duty electric vehicles to provide backup power at a facility in Oakland and other services to lower demand on the grid. $3 million to Gridtractor for electric farm tractors, which can participate in the demand response market to help reduce stress on the grid, and also power irrigation services. The potential of tractor electrification is high given there are currently 100,000 in the state, representing a potential 3 GW of flexible load if all were converted to electric motors, according to the CEC’s Ben Wender.