With a project pipeline in excess of 14GW, a developing regulatory envelope and maturing revenue streams, the UK’s energy storage sector continues to be at the forefront globally. Molly Lempriere charts the market’s development to date and uncovers how it has responded to deployment barriers.

While interconnection queues for America’s electric transmission and distribution operators are “swelling up” with growing numbers of energy storage projects, some of the big challenges ahead include enabling fair market participation for both standalone storage and storage paired with generation.

Energy market mechanisms must evolve in order to support long-duration energy storage, with the existing frameworks having “significant problems” incentivising those technologies, a panel of experts has concluded.

While European power markets outpace the US and China for renewable energy deployment, the continent’s policymakers are yet to recognise the importance of energy storage for integrating that capacity onto the grid, new research from Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables finds.

Construction work has begun on Technology provider Highview Power’s 50MW / 250MWh liquid air energy storage (LAES) facility in Greater Manchester, England.

As part of an optimisation deal with Open Energi and Erova Energy, battery storage owner and operator Zenobe Energy is set to enter a new battery into the UK’s Balancing Mechanism (BM).

The largest battery storage project to be owned by a local government authority in the UK, the 30MW Fideoak project, required a novel software solution to ensure that the best return and maximum impact could be made with public money invested, as Thomas Jennings of Kiwi Power explains.

The auction was the first of its kind in Portugal that invited companies to lodge bids with a storage component included, with eight of the 12 batches awarded to solar-plus-storage projects.

The market for grid-connected energy storage will defy the “headwinds” caused by the coronavirus pandemic on industries across the world, analysis firm IHS Markit has predicted.

This article looks at the current status of each of these end-markets and where there are similarities and differences in how the markets have developed, along with future opportunities.