Keele University, which is near the border between Wales and England, is to become a living laboratory for emerging low carbon and smart energy technologies in what is thought to be the largest scheme of its type in Europe and North America.
Centrica, one of Britain’s so-called ‘Big Six’ energy suppliers, has received planning permission for a brace of battery energy storage units at its UK headquarters in Windsor with a combined capacity of 1MW set to be built at the site.
The real-world performance of batteries paired with “Hywind” – the world’s first floating wind farm – will be analysed by the wind project’s owners, Masdar and Statoil.
New Zealand’s small handful of advanced energy storage systems will be added to with the NZ$2 million (US$1.45 million) trial deployment of a grid-scale Tesla Powerpack 2 by energy generator and retailer Mercury.
Flow batteries will take another major step towards widespread bankability with Lockheed Martin Energy launching its own system before the end of the year.
Major oil company Shell and European utility ENGIE are among investors to have pumped US$20 million into Husk Power Systems, a developer of microgrids which is expanding its efforts in Asia and Africa.
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.
Energy storage provider Connected Energy has secured £3 million (US$4.13 million) of investment from Macquarie Group and ENGIE to fuel its growth plans in the UK and abroad.
