Commissioned at the start of this year, the Alamitos Battery Energy Storage System in California is a landmark project for the industry in having competed against natural gas to provide peaking capacity for the grid. Andy Colthorpe finds out the project’s backstory.

In an interview with Energy-Storage.news, FlexGen CFO Yann Brandt talks us through the logical progression that he has taken from solar into energy storage and how he views the opportunities and challenges ahead.

Smart software and artificial intelligence can forecast everything from how much electricity will be generated and when it will be generated, to the right strategies for putting that electricity into different market opportunities. Energy-Storage.news speaks with Matt Penfold, VP of business development for digital at Fluence, about how the company has added 1.5GW to its portfolio of renewables and storage under management in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM).

Cost, complexity and carbon footprint. Earlier this month, Switzerland-headquartered Leclanché launched its new, modular energy storage system solution aimed at reducing all three of these challenging points for the industry. VP for system engineering Daniel Fohr and EMEA region sales and business development manager Cyril Carpentier speak about how and why Leclanché believe LeBlock solves some of the major concerns energy storage developers face.

Leaders in the UK and international battery storage space discussed how the industry has rapidly evolved to become a viable business at the heart of the transition to low carbon and renewable energy in this panel session from the Energy Storage Summit 2021.

What could you do with a battery that can store and discharge energy for 150 hours and do it cost-effectively? CEO and co-founder Mateo Jaramillo was happy to speak with Energy-Storage.news’ Andy Colthorpe about the applications and market opportunities Form Energy is targeting.

In the first part of this interview with Swell Energy CEO Suleman Khan we heard about how Swell Energy has been working to ‘productise’ the virtual power plant proposition: making it attractive to utilities and to their end-customers and then wrapping that into a long-term agreement. This time out, we speak to Suleman about some of the finer details of the VPP proposition and where he thinks the market is heading.

Energy storage can help enable cleaner, reliable, low-carbon energy networks while connecting energy assets to the market opportunities that will make the transition to renewable energy economically feasible. We speak to Wärtsilä’s Jeff Damron about the ways that the value of energy storage can be realised in markets across the world, both today and in the future.

As society moves away from centralised fossil fuel generators to increasing shares of distributed renewable energy resources, the idea that customers’ homes could become host to virtual power plants (VPPs), joining the dots between electricity supply and demand across the grid, has gradually gathered traction. Andy Colthorpe speaks with Suleman Khan CEO of Swell Energy, which has raised nearly half a billion dollars in financing for solar-plus-storage VPPs in 14,000 homes across California, New York and Hawaii.

Wärtsilä’s GEMS energy management system platform has grown alongside the energy storage sector for more than a decade. We caught up with Andrew Tang, vice president of Energy Storage and Optimisation at Wärtsilä Energy to learn about the importance of software for the uptake of energy storage.