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.

An auction for 700MW of grid energy capacity in Portugal is being configured to allow bids from solar and also solar-plus-storage projects to participate on a competitive basis, with guaranteed payments for energy storage co-located projects to use a capping mechanism in the event of ‘price spikes’.

Blockchain technology and a digital trading platform enables sonnen’s latest virtual power plant (VPP) project in northeast Germany to store wind energy that would otherwise be curtailed and ‘lost’.

This week’s news-in-brief stories come from across Solar Media’s publishing channels.

New technologies and designs aimed at driving down the cost of energy storage facilities are currently the focus of intense industry R&D. Sara Verbruggen reports on DC coupling, an emerging system architecture that many believe will soon become the industry standard.

Energy-Storage.news spoke with Samir Succar, a director and DER analyst at consultancy group ICF, shortly after he spoke on a panel at Solar Power International / Energy Storage International in Utah.

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.