Analysis firm Wood Mackenzie has held onto its forecast that the US will deploy around 7GW of energy storage annually by 2025 and found that 97.5MW / 208MWh of storage was installed during the first quarter of this year.

The business case for behind-the-meter (BTM) battery storage in Australia appears to be positive, according to a University of Queensland report on the performance of a 1.1MW / 2.15MWh Tesla battery energy storage system (BESS).

There are 1.3GW of read-to-build battery storage projects in the UK, with the majority between 30MW and 49.9MW power output per project, according to new analysis from Solar Media Market Research.

The cost of battery energy storage has continued on its trajectory downwards and now stands at US$150 per megawatt-hour for battery storage with four hours’ discharge duration, making it more and more competitive with fossil fuels. Andy Colthorpe spoke to Tifenn Brandily, lead author of BloombergNEF’s latest LCOE report.

The levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) that can be achieved today for battery energy storage means that “new-build batteries can be competitive on cost with gas peaker plants,” according to BloombergNEF.

While the renewable energy industry has suffered significant blows such as loss of employment during the COVID-19 crisis, venture capital (VC) funding into the battery energy storage sector in the first quarter of this year nonetheless saw a significant increase over the previous year’s equivalent period.

With a quarter of all solar project proposals in the US including batteries, transmission grid operators across the country are taking a variety of steps to evaluate the role that can be played in wholesale electricity markets by hybrid power plants – defined as generation coupled with energy storage.

Mini-grids offer a quick route to electrification in parts of the world where grid extensions are unfeasible. Baptiste Possémé looks at the some of the technological and regulatory trends influencing the deployment of mini-grids in Africa and Asia.

Despite a subdued year in 2019 and a challenging start to 2020 caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, the outlook for energy storage remains strong, says Julian Jansen of market research group IHS Markit, taking a deep dive across segments and geographies.

The upstream segment of the US energy storage industry is expecting “more widespread and greater revenue declines” and bigger reductions in employment in the first quarter of 2020 than the downstream, a survey by the national Energy Storage Association (ESA) has found.