Shell Energy is to access operational rights to a 60MW / 120MWh portion of a new battery storage system under development in south-west New South Wales (NSW), Australia.

Smart software and artificial intelligence can forecast everything from how much electricity will be generated and when it will be generated, to the right strategies for putting that electricity into different market opportunities. Energy-Storage.news speaks with Matt Penfold, VP of business development for digital at Fluence, about how the company has added 1.5GW to its portfolio of renewables and storage under management in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM).

Australian renewable energy developer Genex Power has achieved financial close on what looks likely to be the country’s first new pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) plant in nearly 40 years.

Over a gigawatt of battery storage has been proposed in a plan to enable the wider rollout of renewables by Powercor, owner and operator of an electricity distribution network serving more than 800,000 customers in the Australian state of Victoria.

Battery energy storage system (BESS) and controls technology will be provided to a “smart industrial park” project in Thailand by Hitachi ABB Power Grids.

Australian flow battery energy storage company Redflow has entered a “high voltage, high capacity grid-scale future,” unveiling a new system it has created to be deployed at a 2MWh project in California.

The Australian Energy Market Commission has drafted a new rule to enable the provision of fast frequency response services to help keep the electricity grid stable which one expert said will be “a really important market for batteries”.

Hydrogen increasingly looks likely to have a role to play in achieving decarbonisation targets worldwide, and investments and innovation are scaling up. But costs remain high and for clean hydrogen to be most effective at integrating high shares of renewable energy, storage is a vital piece of the puzzle, writes Georgina Ainscow, a Senior Patent Attorney at Reddie & Grose, a firm of European and United Kingdom patent, trade mark and design attorneys.

Energy storage can help enable cleaner, reliable, low-carbon energy networks while connecting energy assets to the market opportunities that will make the transition to renewable energy economically feasible. We speak to Wärtsilä’s Jeff Damron about the ways that the value of energy storage can be realised in markets across the world, both today and in the future.

The April 2021 episode of the Solar Media Podcast, sponsored by Honeywell, is now available to stream. We discuss everything from long-duration energy storage and floating solar technologies to the UK’s greenest weekend ever and Vietnam’s solar rush.