Co-located battery storage’s ability to help mitigate risk and counter renewable yield compression has been hailed as a “fantastic opportunity” by renewables investor Bluefield Partners’ investment director Jan Libicek.
Bigger projects, increased synergy with renewable energy generation, better evolved business models and a forward-thinking market design have contributed to the success of battery storage in the UK, with neighbouring Ireland also showing strong signs of rapid growth.
Colocating battery energy storage systems alongside renewables projects will be ‘critical’ to energy networks in the future, and could help level up debt financing.
Ireland’s first grid-scale battery system was commissioned at the beginning of 2020 but was followed just a few months later by another one 10 times larger. The opportunities for further development in the country appear huge, with a grid operator willing to recognise the role energy storage can play in balancing the network.
Construction work has begun in the US on what is claimed to be the world’s biggest solar-charged battery storage project, by utility company Florida Power & Light (FPL).
The US energy storage industry remained “remarkably resilient” during what most of us have found to be a difficult year – to say the least. Andy Colthorpe speaks with Key Capture Energy’s CEO Jeff Bishop and FlexGen’s COO Alan Grosse – two companies that made 2020 one of growth in their energy storage businesses – to hear what lessons can be learned and why economics rule.
Updated 7 January 2020: Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd (CATL) will supply lithium-ion batteries to energy storage system integrator FlexGen for two large-scale energy storage projects totalling 220MWh in Texas.
Work has begun on a 195.5MW solar farm in Georgia, US, colocated with 40MW / 80MWh of battery storage for RWE Renewables, subsidiary of Germany-headquartered multinational energy company RWE Group.
Find out what’s been going on in the UK energy storage market over the past three years, presented by not-for-profit clean energy expert group Regen at the Virtual Energy Storage Summit which took place online in late September.
