Lithium-ion battery energy storage will be deployed at a 10MW solar farm in a remote part of Siberia, as a pilot to investigate the potential for the technologies to combine in the region.

Cloud-aggregated virtual power plants using residential or C&I battery storage as part of a smart energy management system can benefit the grid, integrate renewables and EVs and hopefully add a powerful long-term value proposition for home storage. Andy Colthorpe and David Pratt report on how some of the UK’s first VPP projects are proving the concept.

Installations of sonnen’s latest hybrid battery storage units are underway, alongside new residential solar arrays, as part of a Local Energy Market (LEM) being built by one of the UK’s largest energy companies to test the capabilities of a virtual marketplace of distributed energy resources.

Food wholesaler Philip Dennis Foodservice has installed energy storage units totalling over 4MW at one of its UK offices in an effort to generate revenue from grid services, rather than making savings from behind-the-meter activity.

Virtual Power Plant (VPP) operator Next Kraftwerke and electric vehicle (EV) aggregator and smart charging platform provider Jedlix has launched a trial to test if EV batteries can be used to provide automatic frequency reserve.

Scotland’s first utility-scale battery storage facility has been officially opened today, having begun delivering sub-second balancing services to National Grid at the end of June under a bespoke agreement secured before the hotly contested Enhanced Frequency Response (EFR) auction of 2016.

Leclanché has been selected by a new UK electric vehicle (EV) charging network to support the roll-out of hundreds of EV chargers by limiting their impact on the grid with energy storage units.

Andres Cortes and Ben Kaun of the Electric Power Research Institute discuss some of their recent work looking into the issues of the attributes and operations of co-locating energy storage with renewables

Up to 140MW of capacity will be procured under the first ever tender for Ireland’s new frequency response and balancing programme, with projects to go live by September 2021.

Over 370MW of energy storage projects, along with 1.25GW of solar, have been successfully moved into the ‘first batch’ of projects to be processed under a new connections procedure, brought in to tackle the surging levels of smaller projects aiming to connect.