The start of construction on India’s largest energy storage project is not only of strategic importance to regulators, but could also drive another wave of utility-scale projects in India, the chief of the country’s storage Alliance has said.
Four projects have been awarded £42 million (US$59.6 million) of UK government money between them to conduct research aimed at overcoming battery challenges, mainly focused on electric vehicles.
ADS-TEC has just completed and connected a 2.5MW energy storage system in Germany, designed to smooth the variable output of wind power generation, while RES Group has just been awarded a 10MW energy storage project contract in the same country.
Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) has reached out to industry to establish how much interest there is in providing EPC services for a 160MW solar-wind hybrid project coupled with energy stroage in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
The World Bank plans to make energy storage an integral part of its ‘Scaling Solar’ program, that until now has been focused purely on facilitating large-scale solar tendering, predominantly in Africa.
The Australian Capital Territory, the country’s federal district and home of national capital Canberra, is supporting the planned roll-out of 36MW of customer-sited batteries by funding a further AU$3 million (US$2.39 million) in rebates.
Northern Ireland’s Queens University Belfast (QUB) has found that battery-based energy storage can provide inertial response for system reliability much more efficiently, at a lower cost and with substantially reduced emissions than thermal generation. Dr Marek Kubic at Fluence, which is working with QUB, explains.
The vast majority of battery projects set to compete in Britain’s upcoming Capacity Market (CM) auctions will face significantly decreased de-rating factors after it emerged that most projects are still set to use either 30 minute or one hour duration batteries.
