Battery storage is of growing interest to commercial and industrial (C&I) entities in the UK, but the wider energy efficiency sector has seen Brexit and other policy woes send confidence to new lows.

There is a perception that “batteries cannot be long life assets”, but it depends very much on how they are designed and used, Dr Marek Kubik of Fluence has said, in a video interview with Energy-Storage.News.

Northern Powergrid (NPg) has called on the energy sector to collaborate to decide the future of network-scale energy storage after differences in the role of network owned and operated batteries emerged between differing distribution network operators (DNOs).

The energy industry is evolving towards more ‘enterprise platform’-based business models, enabling energy storage to play a vital role for businesses and the grid, NEC Energy Solutions (NEC ES) CEO Steve Fludder has said.

Already this year we’ve been able to learn directly about the energy storage market in Europe from the Energy Storage Summit in London at the end of February and Energy Storage Europe in Dusseldorf, which just took place last week. Andy Colthorpe summarises what he’s seen and heard.

UK demand response aggregator Flexitricity has successfully secured gas and electricity supply licences from regulator Ofgem, giving the demand response aggregator the green light to enter the country’s balancing mechanism.

While research published this week demonstrates that the US as a whole is embracing energy storage technology, with regulator FERC’s recent wholesale market ruling likely to have a “significant impact”, the picture varies greatly when looking from state-to-state, an analyst has said.

The UK’s Valuation Office Agency (VOA) is calling on the sector to engage with the development of business rates that will be applied to energy storage projects in 2022, including those attached to subsidy-free solar farms.

A project in Jamaica, pairing utility-scale solar with battery energy storage at a microgrid could become “a model for other countries in the Caribbean and beyond”, the head of the country’s main utility has said.