Real estate developer ERNE Gruppe and architecture firm FlexBase are hoping to start construction on a data centre project in Switzerland next year, which will include a ‘non-flammable and non-explosive’ 500MW energy storage unit.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) will guarantee a loan from U.S. Bancorp Impact Finance for a project pairing 15MW of solar PV with 70MWh of long-duration energy storage (LDES) on Tribal Lands in California.

Investor Return has acquired an energy storage development platform in Germany, Swedish optimiser Flower has bought another large-scale BESS project, while Romania’s CIS Group has revealed a flurry of solar and storage projects.

A project in China, claimed as the largest flywheel energy storage system in the world, has been connected to the grid.

Three-quarters of the lithium-ion battery supply chain could have exposure to forced labour, contravening US and EU laws and potentially leading to products being blocked from those markets, a report said.

Stem Inc has seen its CEO step down while Energy Vault has been warned by the NYSE over its low share price, in a double helping of unfortunate announcements from SPAC-listed energy storage firms.

DNO and IPP Electrica has received €3.4 million (US$3.8 million) in EU grants for a c.70MWh BESS project it will build in Romania.

It was a busy week of news in the UK’s grid-scale energy storage market last week, with BESS projects put into operation by Eku Energy and Harmony Energy Income Trust (HEIT), and projects in the gigawatt-hour scale announced by ESB and Apatura in Scotland.

News from the Nordics and the Baltics, with BESS projects launched in Sweden, Denmark and Latvia by Centrica, Nordic Solar and Niam Infrastructure and Evecon.

Recognition of the role energy storage must play in Europe’s energy transition has been long overdue. Now that it has arrived, the hard work begins, write Julian Jansen and Lars Stephan of system integrator Fluence.