“Preventing a service event from becoming a catastrophic one,” is how Cadenza Innovation CEO Christina Lampe-Önnerud describes the way her company’s lithium-ion ‘Supercell’ battery architecture reacts to thermal runaway.

The first grid-scale battery energy storage project in the Canadian province of Alberta is on-track to go into operation this month, while TransAlta, the company behind the project, has expedited plans to retire a coal plant citing “future market conditions”.

It is likely Spain will introduce “important regulatory changes in the coming years” to enable the European country to meet a national target of deploying 2.5GW of energy storage by 2030, analysts at consultancy firm Clean Horizon have said.

News in brief from around the world of energy storage.

A “first-in-the-nation” policy called the Clean Peak Standard has been launched in Massachusetts, US, whereby a proportion of electricity used on the grid at times of highest demand must be considered ‘clean’.

Stationary energy storage in support of electric vehicles (EVs) charging could reach a global installed capacity of 1,900MW by the end of 2029 according to a new Guidehouse Insights report.

The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) hosted a technical conference on hybrid resources – pairing storage with generation – examining in order to overcome barriers that exist to the otherwise fastest-growing phenomenon of the grid.

More up-to-date training could have prevented severe injuries sustained by four firefighters in the April 2019 fire and explosion at battery storage facility in Arizona, according to a report into the incident from UL Firefighter Safety Research Institute (UL FSRI).

Eskom, the state-owned electricity utility of South Africa, has begun tendering for a battery energy storage system (BESS) of minimum size and capacity 80MW / 320MWh.

There’s a race to develop new technologies – and adapt existing ones – that can either be complementary to lithium batteries, or even compete with them. Representatives from three technology providers offer up some case studies, data, insights and opinions on where they think the market could go.