News in brief: Japan’s northern island tackles grid constraints for renewables with 60MWh battery; AES switches on large-scale storage in Northern Ireland; telecoms appear to be a good fit for Imergy’s flow batteries.
A UK electricity distribution network operator has signed a contract with Renewable Energy Systems (RES) to deliver an energy storage system co-located with large-scale solar, which will be used to develop ways to commercialise services to the grid.
Production and deliveries of Tesla’s stationary storage systems have now begun, while a company spokesman said it welcomes new competitors such as Faraday Future to the EV space – in line with Tesla’s stated values to accelerate clean energy deployment.
Japanese financial services company Orix Corporation has invested in UniEnergy Technologies (UET), a US company delivering large-scale energy storage based around its own vanadium flow batteries.
Off Grid Electric, a company specialising in providing electrification to rural communities, has created a US$45 million investment vehicle, bringing its total raised this year in equity and debt financing to US$70 million.
Energy storage provider AES Energy Storage has signed a multi-year agreement for Korean battery supplier LG Chem to provide 1GWh of lithium-ion battery capacity for AES’s energy storage systems, which a US analyst has said could take around seven to eight years to install and be worth an estimated US$300 million.
News in brief: UK pro-solar Conservative politician Gregory Barker and film star Leonardo DiCaprio have joined the advisory board of Powerhive; Ireland’s government has become the latest to recognise the potential of energy storage in its national low carbon transition; and flow battery maker has supplied systems to projects in Europe that demonstrate the technology’s strengths in integrating PV generation.
AES Corporation’s Steve Corwell argues that pumped hydroelectric storage (PHS), long a key complement to the inflexibility of nuclear generation due to its ability to provide on-demand power, has met its match in battery energy storage systems (BESS).
Behind-the-meter energy storage controls based around Nissan’s EV batteries and a ‘software-defined power plant’, both designed to incorporate a range of energy resources including solar, have been launched in the past week.
Germany-based utility E.ON has invested in US energy storage software, systems and service company Greensmith, bringing the storage specialist’s Series C round of growth financing to US$18.3 million.
