A pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) project at a former gold mine in Queensland, Australia which would be able to store 250MW of power for up to eight hours has raised significant funding in the past few days.
Industry group Scottish Renewables has warned that the UK’s climate change targets will not be met without the removal of barriers to long-duration energy storage such as pumped hydro.
A lithium-ion battery energy storage system that has been switched on in Rani Bagh, Delhi, will serve multiple applications and could pave the way for adoption of smarter energy networks based on renewable energy across India.
An energy storage project pipeline of 500MW in Texas’s ERCOT market is being developed by Dallas-headquartered distributed energy resources developer and operator Hunt Energy Network.
The residents of Parlier, a small city in Fresno County, California, are being offered a 20% reduction on their energy bills and reduce the amount of power they buy from utility Pacific Gas & Electric by 90%, by getting solar-plus-storage and energy efficiency equipment installed.
The drive towards longer duration energy storage will likely be multifaceted, with different technologies finding their place both in front of and behind the meter.
Update 25 March 2021: NGK Insulators responded to a request for more info from Energy-Storage.news and confirmed that the NAS battery storage system will be sited at the 5MW Uliastai solar PV project which is included in the ADB’s Upscaling Renewable Energy Sector project for Mongolia.
The challenges of explosion prevention – with flammable gases needing to be vented “very rapidly” – in the event of a battery fire have been highlighted at this week’s Energy Storage Summit USA.
The energy storage industry should be well prepared to deal with failure in lithium-ion battery systems so that thermal runaway in a single battery cell never becomes a fire or explosion.
