Following the fourth annual Energy Storage Summit hosted by Solar Media in London this month, Solar Media Market Research analyst Lauren Cook discusses recent trends in the UK market.

Managing investor expectations and monetising demand for flexibility are key to future-proofing the industry’s business case, financiers stress at Energy Storage Summit.

Transmission system operators in the US have begun making their moves to accommodate energy storage into their wholesale markets, with New England ISO and Southwest Power Pool both making filings in the past month.

The UK’s transmission system operator National Grid’s redesigned Capacity Market targets around 50GW of reserves up to 2023 and could be an early step towards longer duration energy storage batteries.

Arizona utility Salt River Project (SRP) has followed up the recent completion of a 10MW battery storage system at a solar farm by beginning work on its first standalone grid-scale battery energy storage project.

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.

Energy storage can be an extensive value enabler for existing customers of UPS systems, while attracting new commercial and industrial (C&I) users into the space, a spokesman for Vertiv has said.

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).