A newly-announced battery gigafactory in the US from startup SPARKZ will make batteries suitable for grid storage and will be built in the heart of Appalachian coal county in West Virginia.
The start of work on a hybrid renewable energy project combining large-scale wind power, solar PV and energy storage, marks “an important moment in South Australia’s clean energy transition,” the state’s energy minister has said.
The CEO of Key Capture Energy has said the company will immediately be able to apply lessons learned from a 20MW battery project in New York to its pipeline of much bigger projects in the state to come.
Energy storage can change electricity’s status as the ultimate ‘just-in-time’ product, where supply and use have to be matched in real-time, but this won’t be possible without increasingly sophisticated software solutions.