Wärtsilä Corporation’s CEO has said that “activity in the energy storage market held up well” in 2020 despite a difficult year for the company due to prevailing market conditions around the COVID-19 pandemic.

Finland has launched a new battery development strategy and is touting for investors to build up its manufacturing industry.

Norwegian state-owned energy company Statkraft is to provide market access and trading optimisation for battery storage assets being developed by RWE in Ireland.

News in brief from around the world in energy storage: this edition has a distinctly British flavour.

European member states are to bankroll dozens of projects to create new battery manufacturing solutions.

National Grid ESO, the electricity system operator tasked with keeping the lights on in the UK, is looking to enable multiple application stacking for providers of a new frequency response service that also participate in the national Balancing Mechanism.

Despite the fall in unit prices for energy storage, a total of US$3.6 billion of investment was committed to energy storage projects in 2020, around the same amount as in 2019.

France’s electricity transmission system operator, RTE, is exploring options to reduce congestion on the grid at four strategic locations around the country and could award long-term contracts to battery storage systems that can help.

Vertically-integrated vanadium mining, production and supply company Largo Resources wants to launch its own vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) onto the market within a year-and-a-half, predicting that the technology will play a “critical role” in addressing significant demand for energy storage.

The amount of corporate funding coming into the global battery storage industry in 2020 was more than double the amount the previous year, with over US$6.5 billion raised last year compared to around US$2.8 billion in 2019.