While the renewable energy industry has suffered significant blows such as loss of employment during the COVID-19 crisis, venture capital (VC) funding into the battery energy storage sector in the first quarter of this year nonetheless saw a significant increase over the previous year’s equivalent period.
With a quarter of all solar project proposals in the US including batteries, transmission grid operators across the country are taking a variety of steps to evaluate the role that can be played in wholesale electricity markets by hybrid power plants – defined as generation coupled with energy storage.
Massachusetts has issued an emergency regulation to its Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) programme, that includes mandating the addition of energy storage on projects over 500kW.
What is thought to be the world’s largest ‘single-stack’ green hydrogen electrolyser, a 10MW project in Fukushima, Japan, began operations on schedule in March, provider Asahi Kasei has said.
Energy storage manufacturing giant CATL has partnered with Shenzhen KSTAR Science & Technology to construct a new lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility Fujian, China.
AutoGrid has struck a deal to supply its distributed energy resources management system (DERMS) platform to NRTC, a cooperative association serving more around 20 million homes in rural America.
Targeting a national economic goal in mind of making hydrogen competitive with natural gas, Australia’s government has put AU$70 million (US$44.3 million) into a “deployment funding round” for renewable hydrogen.
“The elimination of solar energy’s intermittency and ensuring its 24-hour availability at grid-competitive cost is the holy grail and RayGen has found it”.
Ensuring battery systems used in conjunction with solar perform safely and optimally is essential in the continued roll-out of storage technology. Robert Puto and Gerhard Klein of TÜV SÜD examine independent technical assessments that must be undertaken before a storage system is built.
