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.

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 cost of solar energy paired with battery storage on France’s island territories has fallen yet again, as the European country awarded contracts to winning bidders in its latest tender process.

UK energy storage firm AceOn has joined a call to reverse changes to Value Added Tax (VAT) rates applicable to energy storage systems that came into effect in the country in 2019.

Distributed energy storage systems made by power management company Eaton will be able to participate in grid balancing markets through integration with a virtual power plant (VPP) platform developed by electric vehicle (EV) charging equipment provider Virta.

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.

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.

Let’s take a look at the news stories that had the most page views on the site since the beginning of 2020. The list covers everything from always-in-focus topics of cost reduction and competitiveness, to fire safety, innovation and commercialisation of new technologies and, of course in this year, COVID-19.