At 4:52pm on Friday 9 August 2019, the UK suffered its first wide-scale blackout in more than a decade. More than 1.1 million consumers were plunged into the dark as rail lines screeched to a halt, traffic lights failed and even airports reported problems. Liam Stoker looks at the root causes, and how battery storage came to the rescue.
Energy-Storage.news was delighted to be asked to moderate a session in which participants and pioneers of UK energy storage – and solar – gave their perspectives on everything from the right technologies and what they can do, how financiers view the market today, to how we can all join together to create a modern, clean and sustainable energy sector.
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.
The Nobel Foundation recognised not only the role of lightweight, portable battery technology for mobile phones, laptops and latterly electric vehicles, but also that it “can also store significant amounts of energy from solar and wind power, making possible a fossil fuel-free society”.
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.
Distributed renewables and energy storage are now the cheapest form of baseload power and if Western Australia’s remote areas can benefit from that, we can all benefit, argues David Martin, founder of energy trading platform provider Power Ledger.
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.
Energy-Storage.news editor Andy Colthorpe shares his top takeaways from last week’s Solar Power International convention, incorporating Energy Storage International and hosted this year at the North American Smart Energy Week in Utah.
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
