The rapid acceleration in energy storage deployment expected over the coming years will require innovation in the quality and safety standards underpinning new battery and associated technologies. VDE’s Jan Geder looks at the technical work underway to ensure the coming storage boom has firm bankability and insurability foundations.

Batteries are increasingly widely used in grid balancing, but there are many more applications where a battery can play an important role. With electric grids requiring periodic maintenance, batteries can stand in for the grid during downtime in order to reduce the impact on industry and households, writes Dieter Castelein.

New technologies and designs aimed at driving down the cost of energy storage facilities are currently the focus of intense industry R&D. Sara Verbruggen reports on DC coupling, an emerging system architecture that many believe will soon become the industry standard.

The business models and technologies underpinning the development of stationary energy storage markets are evolving rapidly. Dr. Kai-Philipp Kairies, Jan Figgener and David Haberschusz of RWTH Aachen University look at some of the key trends driving the sector forwards, in a paper which first appeared in PV Tech Power’s Energy Storage Special Report 2019.

The huge upsurge in lithium-ion battery deployment expected over the next two decades poses a particular problem: what to do with cells that have reached the end of their useful life. Stefan Hogg investigates how lithium recycling will come into its own to handle spent batteries

Despite the huge strides energy storage has made, significant hurdles remain before the technology in its many guises can be claimed to have fulfilled its massive potential. E-S.n editor Andy Colthorpe assesses the key successes and ongoing challenges for this indispensable part of the future power system.

“With no large-scale batteries participating in the wholesale market in New York, the first day we turned the battery on it was exciting to see if all our internal models were correct in how the battery would behave,” KCE’s COO Dan Fitzgerald told us.

California’s success in embracing renewable energy technologies, particularly solar, has brought with it challenges around reliability of supply to consumers. Janice Lin and Jack Chang of Strategen explore how the Golden State is pioneering the deployment of energy storage as it pursues its goal of complete energy decarbonisation by 2045.

The International Flow Battery Forum is taking place this week and long-time organiser, Anthony Price of consultancy Swanbarton, wrote to Energy-Storage.news with some of his views on the market and a snapshot of where development currently lies.

The pipeline of projects currently stands at 11GW, and although it is unlikely that this will all be built, we currently see nearly 800MW of projects at the ‘under construction/ready to build’ stage.