Andy Colthorpe and Ben Willis profile some of the companies and technologies making waves in the fast-changing world of stationary energy storage, in a feature article which originally appeared in the seventh issue of PV Tech Power.
Involvement from billionaire Peter Thiel in Stem’s Series C indicates a shared belief among investors that “distributed, intelligent storage is going to absolutely revolutionise the electric grid over the coming decades”, the company’s marketing director has said.
German storage manufacturer Tesvolt has been awarded a project to power water pumps in Rwanda with 2.68MWh of battery storage linked to a utility-scale solar system.
France has named the winners of its latest solar-plus-storage tender with a total volume of 52MW across 33 projects in its island territories.
A large-scale system combining advanced batteries and ultracapacitor energy storage to provide utility grid services is up and running in North Carolina, according to one of the project’s partners.
Lockheed Martin has told Energy-Storage.News that while the company wants its energy storage systems to support the adoption of renewable energy, its recently launched lithium-ion devices will focus on “commercial applications”.
Work has been completed on Australia’s “largest solar and battery storage project to date”, a 10.6MW PV installation at a copper mine linked to 6MW of storage, according to developer Juwi, which along with its project partners shared some images of the site.
A field trial to deploy 50 grid-connected energy storage systems will go ahead in Scotland between UK energy storage firm Moixa Technology, vertically integrated energy company Scottish Power and an energy efficiency advisory group.
GE’s investment in Sonnen shows a shared belief in online trading of energy and other digitally-enabled services as the fastest potential drivers of a profitable energy storage industry, according to a Sonnen director.
While parallels are often drawn between the solar and storage industries, financing energy storage projects is a lot more complex than simply “transposing” learnings from solar to batteries.
