Alectra's three Ontario batteries enter service; NYSERDA funds 15 projects

Storage announcements between November 2 and 6, 2026 ran from 320 MWh of batteries on Ontario's grid to a single village system in Fiji, alongside a New York grant round for storage technologies not yet on the market and a change at the top of Fluence.

Alectra's three Ontario batteries add 80 MW / 320 MWh

Three lithium-ion batteries in Vaughan and Guelph are now in service on Ontario's grid, adding 80 MW of capacity, Ontario's Ministry of Energy and Mines said on November 6, 2026. The largest, Vaughan 3, is 40 MW / 160 MWh; Vaughan 1E in Vaughan and Arlen in Guelph are 20 MW / 80 MWh each, which makes all three four-hour systems by our arithmetic (power versus energy). The province says it had just 228 MW of storage in 2023, most of it at a single pumped storage facility, and has now secured nearly 3,000 MW of batteries; the Expedited Long-Term 1 procurement that produced these three contracted roughly 880 MW of storage.

Convergent Energy and Power goes unnamed in the province's version, which says the projects were delivered by Alectra Energy Solutions; only Energy Storage Canada, quoted in it, congratulates Alectra and its partners. Alectra's own release, sent out on the wire that evening, says Alectra marked the completion in partnership with Convergent and quotes Convergent co-chief executive Frank Genova. The two won the three contracts in 2023, and all three now run under 20-year contracts with the IESO, Alectra says. For scale, Northland's Jurassic battery, which the company calls Alberta's largest, reached commercial operation in September at the same 80 MW and half the energy, 160 MWh (Northland's 80 MW Jurassic battery reaches commercial operation in Alberta).

NYSERDA puts nearly $13 million into 15 storage projects

New York's energy research agency has awarded nearly $13 million to 15 projects through its Power Generation and Storage Innovation program, NYSERDA said on November 6. The largest award, over $2.4 million, goes to Inlyte Energy to deploy a more than 10-hour iron-sodium battery to address substation peak load growth and distribution-level resilience challenges. Inlyte already has a planned system behind a Massachusetts grant: in September the state awarded Berkshire East Mountain Resort $4,513,200 for a 4 MW / 80 MWh Inlyte sodium-iron chloride battery (Massachusetts' long-duration awards).

The other 14 awards run from $250,000 each for InfinitEnergy and Orion Polymer to $1.8 million for Standard Potential's sodium-ion portable power station. They include nearly $1.5 million for Urban Electric Power's zinc-manganese dioxide system, over $1 million for Sprocket Power's fast chargers fed by an underground vanadium redox flow battery, and over $590,000 for Aestus Energy Storage to test ceramic heat-sink materials for a 20 megawatt-hour advanced compressed-air design.

NYSERDA describes the program as funding long-duration storage and other alternatives to traditional lithium-ion that have yet to be commercialized. Lithium turns up anyway: four awards develop lithium-ion cells with new anodes or cathodes, two work on lithium-metal electrodes and one on lithium-sulfur. The money comes from the Clean Energy Fund.

Fluence names Siemens and AES veterans as interim CEO and CFO

Julian Nebreda departed as president and chief executive of Fluence Energy on October 30, 2026, effective immediately, and also resigned from its board, according to the company's 8-K filed November 2, which says the board resignation did not result from any disagreement with the company over its operations, policies or practices. The board named director Axel Meier interim CEO effective November 2 and Ricardo Roizen interim CFO in place of Ahmed Pasha. John Zahurancik, chief customer success officer, also left on October 30.

Both stand-ins have ties to Siemens and AES, which Fluence's release calls its major shareholders. Meier was chief financial officer of Siemens Smart Infrastructure until June 2026, after a Siemens career that began in 1988, and stopped providing services to Siemens before his appointment; Roizen is seconded from AES Andes, an AES affiliate, which keeps paying his salary for up to 90 days or longer, as mutually agreed. The board has also set up a Manufacturing and Operations Oversight Committee to oversee manufacturing performance, operational execution and customer delivery, part of what the release calls an operational transformation at a company reporting a record backlog of $6.4 billion in its fiscal third-quarter 2026 results.

Lyten switches on a village battery on Fiji's Yasawa Island

Lyten has installed a Voltpack Mobile System battery at Yasawa i Rara, a village on Fiji's Yasawa Island without access to the national grid, the company said on November 5. Energized on October 28, it serves up to 64 households, a cold store for the community's fish catch and services including a maternity unit. Solar panels and diesel generators charge it, and the generators run only when the batteries need topping up, Lyten says.

Energy Solutions Pacific bought the system and brought it to Fiji in collaboration with Investment Fiji; the Marshall Islands' ambassador to Fiji, Junior Aini, did the switching on. The release gives the product's range, from 290 kWh to hundreds of MWh, and says it is built in Gdańsk, Poland, but not the size of the unit on Yasawa.