The Solar Media Podcast returns for a new season to mark the new year. In this first episode of 2021, sponsored by SKE Engineering, Andy Colthorpe and Liam Stoker cast their gazes at the horizon and profile what the immediate future holds for the solar and storage industries.

Australian integrated energy company Origin Energy Limited has issued a call for suitably qualified firms to supply and install a four-hour duration battery energy storage system with up to 700MW rated output, at one of the company’s coal power plants.

Tom Bensen, Nick Warner, Ryan Franks and Michael Bowes from energy storage and fire safety expert group Energy Safety Response Group (formerly Energy Storage Response Group) discuss some of the most important aspects of creating a safe battery storage industry.

Commodities trading company Trafigura has said that it is building a large-scale battery storage plant in Belgium through a newly-launched renewable energy joint venture (JV) company.

A large-scale solar PV system paired with pumped hydro energy storage could cover as much as 25% of the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i’s energy demand, pushing the island’s total share of renewables in its energy mix past 80%.

Updated 10 January 2021: “These longer-duration 2 hour systems highlight a growing recognition of battery based energy storage systems as not only super-fast but also super-robust infrastructure assets that can serve a broader range of capacity and system balancing needs for 20 years or more.”

The world’s largest battery energy storage system (BESS) so far has gone into operation in Monterey County, California, US retail electricity and power generation company Vistra said yesterday.

Updated 7 January 2020: Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd (CATL) will supply lithium-ion batteries to energy storage system integrator FlexGen for two large-scale energy storage projects totalling 220MWh in Texas.

System integrators – companies that create large-scale and commercial and industrial battery energy storage system (BESS) solutions to order – have driven the market’s rapid growth so far but face a diversifying landscape marked by competition and consolidation in the years ahead.

NextEra Energy Resources said in December that wind turbines had been successfully installed and became operational at Skeleton Creek, a hybrid renewable energy project the company is building in Oklahoma, US.