Keele University, which is near the border between Wales and England, is to become a living laboratory for emerging low carbon and smart energy technologies in what is thought to be the largest scheme of its type in Europe and North America.
The World Bank plans to make energy storage an integral part of its ‘Scaling Solar’ program, that until now has been focused purely on facilitating large-scale solar tendering, predominantly in Africa.
Centrica, one of Britain’s so-called ‘Big Six’ energy suppliers, has received planning permission for a brace of battery energy storage units at its UK headquarters in Windsor with a combined capacity of 1MW set to be built at the site.
The US’ two leading states in solar and energy storage, New York and California, have taken steps towards valuing the locational and time-of-use value of distributed energy resources and other states should follow, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) has said.
The real-world performance of batteries paired with “Hywind” – the world’s first floating wind farm – will be analysed by the wind project’s owners, Masdar and Statoil.
New Zealand’s small handful of advanced energy storage systems will be added to with the NZ$2 million (US$1.45 million) trial deployment of a grid-scale Tesla Powerpack 2 by energy generator and retailer Mercury.
Flow batteries will take another major step towards widespread bankability with Lockheed Martin Energy launching its own system before the end of the year.
Major oil company Shell and European utility ENGIE are among investors to have pumped US$20 million into Husk Power Systems, a developer of microgrids which is expanding its efforts in Asia and Africa.
The Australian Capital Territory, the country’s federal district and home of national capital Canberra, is supporting the planned roll-out of 36MW of customer-sited batteries by funding a further AU$3 million (US$2.39 million) in rebates.
