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.

An auction for solar-plus-storage held in Israel by the country’s Electricity Authority (PUA) awarded 609MW of solar PV alongside 2.4GWh of energy storage.

Increased confidence in the asset class has been driven by three main factors: more third party trading counterparties entering the space and offering new and innovative products, increased volatility in the trading markets and the increased market size of frequency service contracts.

The sovereign wealth fund of Qatar has agreed to invest in energy storage solutions provider Fluence in a transaction that values the technology company at more than a billion dollars.