US Congress has been urged to unlock US$50 billion of federal spending power to implement upgrades to the country’s electricity sector, including measures to support energy storage.

In the first part of this interview with Swell Energy CEO Suleman Khan we heard about how Swell Energy has been working to ‘productise’ the virtual power plant proposition: making it attractive to utilities and to their end-customers and then wrapping that into a long-term agreement. This time out, we speak to Suleman about some of the finer details of the VPP proposition and where he thinks the market is heading.

The award of contracts to battery storage developers in a recent auction by Italy’s transmission system operator proves the technology’s competitiveness in providing grid services once again, an analyst has said.

Italy’s transmission system operator Terna has awarded five-year contracts for battery energy storage systems (BESS) to provide Fast Reserve grid services in an oversubscribed pilot auction.

The UK needs “robust energy storage technologies and clear strategies for implementing them,” to accelerate the transition towards decarbonisation, the lead author of a new roadmap detailing the role of energy storage technologies in the country over the next 10-15 years has said.

ENGIE EPS incurred increases in operating expenses and extraordinary costs due to COVID-19 which “more than offset” an increase in revenues that ENGIE’s energy storage subsidiary earned in the first half of this year.

The greatest value aggregrators putting batteries and other assets in the UK’s electricity markets offer to their customers today is in providing access to the Balancing Mechanism (BM), through which the electricity system operator National Grid ESO matches supply and demand in real-time.

More news in brief from around the world in energy storage.

Batteries, hydrogen and other energy storage should be a “key topic of energy policy,” in the EU, Members of European Parliament (MEP) that worked together on formulating a report into the role of storage in a decarbonised, fair and secure energy system have said.