A roundup of some of the best user-posted views, analysis and reveals from across the energy storage community in the past week.
This article will be something a bit different from what you’re used to on Energy-Storage.news. Every day we come across dozens of posts on LinkedIn and elsewhere giving fresh perspectives on some of the biggest topics in the industry, and sometimes unearthing things we didn’t even know were happening.
But sadly, we don’t always have the time to look into these, while in other instances, we’re talking about hot takes and nuggets of insight that might, in themselves, not form the basis of a fully formed, standalone article. So today, we’re rounding up some of my favourites from the past week or so, the first in a regular series helping you keep your finger on the pulse of the industry.
Today’s topics include the long-duration energy storage (LDES) cap-and-floor in the UK, battery thermal runaway, the second MACSE auction in Italy, a new 23GWh VPP in Germany, Saudi Arabia’s latest BESS procurement, and more. We’ve linked to all the posts under the summaries, so you can go in and join the discussion yourself.
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LCP Delta: UK LDES cap and floor could reduce IRRs by 2.7 percentage points
The long-duration energy storage (LDES) cap-and-floor support scheme in the UK is well underway, with winning projects shortlisted in June. Most of the capacity looks set to go to lithium-ion battery energy storage systems (BESS) which many in the industry have opposed.
Those opposed say it will negatively affect the buildout of short-duration BESS, as you’ll have a bunch of subsidised BESS projects able to bid into ancillary service and balancing markets at lower prices than the unsubsidised ones.
Research firm LCP Delta has done some analysis on this question, the first we are aware of.
Their analysts estimate that, compared to a scenario with no new LDES on the system, the scheme leads to project IRR reducing by 2.7 percentage points. However, compared to LCP’s existing Central Scenario, where significant LDES deployment was already anticipated, the IRR reduces by just 0.5 percentage points. The impacts very by location and asset specifications, obviously.
See the post by George Martin, principal consultant at LCP Delta, here.
Thermal runaway: forever being ‘solved’
Battery safety and thermal risk consultant Neza Lupsina prompted a lively discussion this week with her overview of the evolution of how the industry has gotten closer and closer to solving thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries – but never fully getting there.
“Every new chemistry, sensor, barrier or standard moves us closer to ‘solved’ – that does not mean we can remove the requirement to design for failure,” she said.
MACSE round two: none in North again, but for how long?
The MACSE auction in September 2025 was effectively the starting gun on the Italian grid-scale storage market. TSO Terna used it to procure 10GW of BESS capacity, but only in the south of the country. That is the case again in round two which will run on 24 November.
Giovanni Battista, sales manager ESS grid for LG Energy Solution, gave his take on this, asking how long it would remain the case and how you need to think about it as an investor, considering MACSE’s 15-year contract length.
Germany: new battery VPP rules effectively creates a new 23GWh grid asset
Germany has always had a huge residential battery market, though we’ve mostly covered the grid-scale side, where each project moves the needle towards its long-term deployment targets much more obviously.
However, that distinction is now less obvious, after a rule change on 1 October means an additional 23GWh of home batteries will be able to play in the same markets as big BESS, said Fabian Fürst, founder & CEO of Flexa, a virtual power plant (VPP) firm. The big question mark now hangs over what the battery owners will do.
How BESS impacts the grid as a whole as more comes online
The most reacted-to and commented post in this selection comes from Maryiam Arshad, business development lead at Pakistan-based energy industry consultancy Energy Futures.
She explained how BESS can fundamentally change the grid dynamics at the point of interconnection, by introducing or influencing harmonics, voltage fluctuations, resonance, flicker and other power quality issues.
“While suppliers often focus on the battery’s capacity, efficiency and performance, the potential impact on the wider electrical system and particularly power quality is not always given the attention it deserves,” she said.
Among the 85 comments, some said that grid-forming (GFM) inverters solve all of this, while others pointed out that, while true, some BESS procurement teams don’t know how to ask those kinds of questions.
See the post and discussion here.
Saudi Arabia: latest procurement sets low price record
This week we reported on Saudi Arabia’s award of contracts for 2GW/8GWh of BESS capacity across four projects.
Digging into the numbers, ex-Fluence exec Marek Kubik (now at Saudi megaproject NEOM) found that the procurement set a new low battery price record of US$145/kWh, all in.
He explained what this means in his post, see here.
Volytica CEO: Dividing up the capacity of a project is not as straightforward as you think
Does a 100MWh BESS’ batteries being at 50% state of charge (SOC) mean you have 50MWh to use? It’s not so simple, points out Claudius Jehle, CEO of battery analytics company Volytica.
Spain putting renewables obligations on data centres
The news that Spain is considering forcing data centres above 1MW to cover at least 80% of their electricity demand with renewables was first reported by Reuters a few days ago. Florian Mayr, partner at consultancy Strategy&, part of accounting giant PWC, posted on it, see his analysis here.
