Walking around Energy Storage Europe this year it was obvious that the show, like the market, has grown from a small handful of “strong believers” as one source put it, to a forward-looking show focused on a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario.
NextEra Resources will build a 100MW solar farm for Arkansas utility Entergy Arkansas, to include 30MW of battery energy storage, as Entergy seeks to build out solar capacity in the state.
Sales of battery storage units to residential households in Germany are booming, but it’s the value of services the batteries can provide, rather than the hardware itself that offers a long-term economic opportunity, a Siemens representative has said.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has agreed to part-fund a US$53.2 million undertaking to power Tonga with renewable energy, including the installation of 22.2MWh of energy storage.
Saba Electric Company, sole supplier of electricity to the Dutch Caribbean island of Saba, celebrated as the island ran on 100% solar for the first time ever this month, with the switch-on of a solar-plus-storage microgrid.
This year’s Energy Storage Europe event marked something of a culmination of “more or less 10 years of continuous evolution” in the industry, Energy-Storage.news has heard.
In the hierarchy of grid needs, peaking power is often a priority in terms of providing resiliency and balance to the network. This is usually provided by natural gas turbines, which come at a high environmental and economic cost. Andy Colthorpe charts the rise of the solar-plus-storage peaker plant.
Insurer Munich Re has launched what it claims is the world’s first long-term insurance plan for battery performance, signing up ‘all-iron’ flow battery maker ESS Inc as its first customer.
Perhaps the biggest indicator of the recognition of behind-the-meter storage so far this year has been the acquisition of Sonnen by oil major Shell. CEO Christoph Ostermann spoke to Andy Colthorpe about why home storage uptake could be on a worldwide series of inflection points.
Energy storage enjoyed another record-breaking year of deployments in the US in 2018, while the residential segment is now “moving beyond early adopters” and into commercial viability, a report from Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables claims.
