Canadian Solar Inc. has entered into a strategic partnership and investment with Habitat Energy Limited, a UK-based market leader in power trading and asset optimization services for battery storage assets that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The partnership will allow Canadian Solar to offer enhanced technology solutions for developers and owners of battery storage assets to capture additional revenue from trading optimization, while improving grid stability and contributing to the global energy transition to a cleaner, smarter and more efficient power grid.
Habitat Energy provides state-of-the-art optimization services for grid-scale battery storage assets, which includes a trading platform with full route-to-market capabilities for wholesale and balancing markets. Habitat Energy’s proprietary software, PowerIQ, combines algorithmic forecasting and artificial intelligence to maximize asset performance and value. The software is supported by an experienced team of energy traders and has been delivering market leading revenue performance.
The partnership will leverage Canadian Solar’s global scale and reach to provide system solutions and assets with optimization and dispatch services for the storage and solar solutions it provides globally.
“The power grid of tomorrow is not only built by renewable energy and battery storage, but crucially driven by artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, cloud computing and many more technologies,” said Dr. Shawn Qu, chairman and chief executive officer of Canadian Solar Habitat Energy.
“We strongly share Habitat Energy’s belief that making merchant battery storage investable at scale is a vital step towards delivering a low carbon future and the preservation of our habitat for generations to come. Through this partnership, we will continue to de-risk and improve returns for project owners and investors, while contributing to a smarter, stabler, cleaner and more powerful global electric grid for global consumers.”
Canadian Solar is currently a leading provider of turnkey energy storage battery systems with vast experience in developing and executing renewable energy projects, offering its energy storage customers long term operation and maintenance services including battery capacity augmentation, warranty-wrapped energy capacity, and performance guarantees as well as safe and reliable system operations.
“Storage-enabled renewables are critical to the energy transition and require continued innovation and collaboration across the entire value chain to achieve their full potential,” said Andrew Luers, co-founder and CEO of Habitat Energy. “We share Canadian Solar’s mission to work toward a cleaner earth for future generations and look forward to working together on storage and solar plus storage projects around the world.”
Canadian Solar currently has over 500 MWp of projects in operation, over 5 GWp of projects under construction or in backlog (late-stage), and an additional 15 GWp of projects in pipeline (mid- to early- stage).
Habitat Energy was recently awarded the optimization contract for the world’s largest solar powered vanadium flow battery in Australia, and currently operates over 200 MWh of storage assets in the UK.
