A plan proposed by US president Joe Biden to invest US$2 trillion in infrastructure has been praised for “prioritising energy storage and policies that support the industry’s growth”.

The US could see new mines and raw material production “scale up” as demand for battery energy storage systems and grid resilience increases over the next decade, according to Margaret O’Riley, battery, automotive and electrification business recruitment lead for Duke Energy Corporation.

Battery storage systems have been proven to be “extremely lucrative” for commercial and industrial (C&I) customers in the US, but a lack of customer knowledge of regulations and supply shortages of battery cells could yet stymie the market’s growth.

While interconnection queues for America’s electric transmission and distribution operators are “swelling up” with growing numbers of energy storage projects, some of the big challenges ahead include enabling fair market participation for both standalone storage and storage paired with generation.

The opening up of independent system operator (ISO) services as a result of FERC 841 has led to a “huge difference” in storage dispatch strategy for merchant markets with concurrent bidding now the typical strategy.

How do electric grids that were state-of-the-art in the 19th Century remain stable and resilient through 21st Century climate disasters and other problems? They don’t, says Catherine Von Burg, CEO and co-founder of distributed battery energy storage company SimpliPhi Power – but giving people the power to be independent can be a solution fit for the future.

Wärtsilä’s GEMS energy management system platform has grown alongside the energy storage sector for more than a decade. We caught up with Andrew Tang, vice president of Energy Storage and Optimisation at Wärtsilä Energy to learn about the importance of software for the uptake of energy storage.

An energy storage project pipeline of 500MW in Texas’s ERCOT market is being developed by Dallas-headquartered distributed energy resources developer and operator Hunt Energy Network.

News in brief from around the world in energy storage.

The residents of Parlier, a small city in Fresno County, California, are being offered a 20% reduction on their energy bills and reduce the amount of power they buy from utility Pacific Gas & Electric by 90%, by getting solar-plus-storage and energy efficiency equipment installed.