US Congress has been urged to unlock US$50 billion of federal spending power to implement upgrades to the country’s electricity sector, including measures to support energy storage.

After local opposition to the construction of a new gas peaker plant in Oxnard, California, a battery storage plant that was chosen instead has gone online just nine months after construction began.

NTPC, an independent power producer (IPP) in India with over 65GW of power plants across the country wants to install 1,000MWh of energy storage at its existing generation facilities.

The first battery storage components have been installed at Manatee Energy Storage Center in Florida, US, which is to date the largest solar PV-plus-storage project under construction anywhere in the world.

This edition of news in brief from around the world in energy storage focuses on solar-plus-storage updates from Africa.

California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has approved a 11.5GW procurement of electricity capacity from greenhouse gas-free sources, while also approving a resolution that campaigners said will have severe negative impacts on the state’s residential solar and solar-plus-storage growth.

Hybrid renewables are playing a strategic role in accelerating the decarbonisation of power generation and supporting the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as supporting the UK’s net zero by 2050 ambition and its interim emissions reduction of 78% by 2035. Consultant Peter Lo of ITPEnergised discusses the UK’s emergence into the hybrid energy sector and how it is better for our planet, better in the economics and better for offtake.

Growth in renewables and corresponding market pricing is the key driver for the commercialisation and global adoption for vanadium flow batteries (VFBs) and an important reason why we will see further growth for this technology over the years to come, says Ed Porter of Invinity Energy Systems.

A 50MW lithium-ion battery storage system which will form part of a transmission system-connected ‘Energy Superhub’ has been commissioned in Oxford, England, while another 100MW transmission-connected project in the country has reached financial close and is set to begin construction soon.

Janet Mills, Governor of Maine, has signed legislation that makes hers the ninth US state to have adopted a deployment target for energy storage.