Battery storage technology costs will have to fall by a further 30% before projects in the UK are feasible without lucrative frequency response revenues, a leading investor has said.

The government of the state of South Australia has named four utility-scale energy storage projects which it will support with grants toward the total cost of development.

Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil’s Batwind project in Scotland, combining wind turbines with energy storage, will have a battery system installed by system integrator Younicos.

Applications made to the government of New South Wales in Australia for two solar farms totalling 285MW of capacity are open to comment from stakeholders and members of the public.

Northern Powergrid, one of the six distribution network operators (DNOs) responsible for delivering power across regions of the UK, is to plough £1.9 million (US$2.53 million) into the creation of a smart energy grid across its network, allowing its eight million customers to trade power and services using their home solar, battery systems and electric vehicles (EVs).

Over the past couple of weeks, various flow battery makers have touted new sales and supply chain agreements as the fledgling sector fights for a share of the stationary energy storage market.

Verv, an energy monitoring and AI company, has laid claim to launching the UK’s first energy trading community at a housing estate in Hackney, East London.

Start-up Romeo Power has opened a lithium battery pack factory in Los Angeles, aimed at the EV and stationary energy storage markets, aiming to ramp up to 4GWh production capacity by next year.

While energy storage can be considered “critical” to Australia’s transformation to a distributed, low carbon energy mix, a lack of investment and planning for the technology could have negative consequences for the network.

The goal of the project, as with the rest of Centrica’s activities in Cornwall, is to harness renewables and smart energy technologies to free up capacity on the local grid and provide flexibility to the distribution network operator or the national grid.