After approving investment for the acceleration of energy storage deployment in developing countries to the tune of US$1 billion a few months ago, the World Bank has now approved a US$300 million loan to do the same in China.

Plans by ScottishPower Renewables to build a 50MW battery next to its Whitelee onshore wind farm have been approved by the Scottish government, with the developer hailing it as a “significant step” towards renewable energy providing the baseload for the grid.

A 10MW battery energy storage system (BESS), which will allow a 24MW wind farm to keep generating energy even in times of oversupply, officially went into service today near Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

A 6MW / 6MWh containerised energy storage system will help provide power to all 19,000 inhabitants of a tiny Caribbean island, installed by Wartsila, via its recently-acquired energy storage system integrator subsidiary Greensmith.

China’s State Grid Corporation will build 6GW of pumped hydro storage as part of ongoing efforts to cut rates of wind and solar power curtailment.

The first ever wind and solar hybrid project in India, completed in April 2018, is to be retrofitted with energy storage after strong winds this year led to a curtailment of solar production.

Jardelund, Germany, is now host to what is currently Europe’s largest battery energy storage system, a 50MWh project completed and announced just a few days ago by NEC Energy Solutions.

Chinese inverter manufacturer Sungrow has leaned on its joint venture with Samsung SDI to supply both inverters and lithium batteries to a large-scale energy storage project in Japan.

Innovations in new distributed energy technologies are challenging conventional thinking around the most effective ways to serve electricity customers and utilise grid infrastructure. Alex Eller of Navigant Research looks at how one of the most significant expenses for electric utilities, maintaining and upgrading transmission and distribution (T&D) networks could be undercut using non-wires alternatives – including energy storage.

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.