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.

The drive towards longer duration energy storage will likely be multifaceted, with different technologies finding their place both in front of and behind the meter.

The challenges of explosion prevention – with flammable gases needing to be vented “very rapidly” – in the event of a battery fire have been highlighted at this week’s Energy Storage Summit USA.

The energy storage industry should be well prepared to deal with failure in lithium-ion battery systems so that thermal runaway in a single battery cell never becomes a fire or explosion.

The devastating power crisis in Texas last month proved the value of the energy storage market, particularly distributed models, according to a panel of renewables investors this week.