Major Japanese business and government entities have extended their involvement in energy storage with the announcement of the country’s first virtual power plants, an investment in a US frequency regulation project and partnerships on technology.
Government policy and regulation offer the biggest barriers to the deployment of battery energy storage in the UK according to a cross-party group of MPs focussed on energy storage, which claims 12GW of batteries could be deployed by 2021 under the right circumstances.
Applications made to the government of New South Wales in Australia for two solar farms totalling 285MW of capacity are open to comment from stakeholders and members of the public.
The tiny Caribbean island of Saba, a Dutch municipality apparently filmed in silhouette for the 1933 film adaptation of King Kong, is tendering for a utility-scale solar park coupled with battery energy storage.
Australian large-scale renewables investor Lyon Group has confirmed it is selling three projects under development, totalling 800MWh of energy storage and 545MW of PV generation capacity, in Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.
Verv, an energy monitoring and AI company, has laid claim to launching the UK’s first energy trading community at a housing estate in Hackney, East London.
While energy storage can be considered “critical” to Australia’s transformation to a distributed, low carbon energy mix, a lack of investment and planning for the technology could have negative consequences for the network.
Centrica has revealed plans to build a single 100MW battery energy storage system in Ireland for delivery by 2022 to take advantage of capacity market and grid services opportunities currently under development.
Sunrun CEO Lynn Jurich has said that using behind-the-meter systems to provide grid services could be “extremely valuable in certain targeted ways” as the company rolls out energy storage systems into key regional markets.
A representative of National Grid, the UK’s transmission system operator (TSO), has said that energy storage will be “integral” to the network’s flexibility strategy – while urging developers not to rely solely on early frequency regulation contracts.
