The US government’s Department of Energy (DoE) has described its just-published Energy Storage Grand Challenge Roadmap as its first comprehensive strategy on energy storage, identifying cost and performance targets to be met in the coming years.

Long duration energy storage is an “essential” technology to help accelerate renewable deployment, according to the US Department of Energy’s Dr Imre Gyuk, but will require “appropriate regulatory frameworks”.

Southern Research officials, energy companies and other industry leaders were on hand last week in Alabama to formally open the Energy Storage Research Center (ESRC), a facility on Southern Research’s engineering campus where collaborative efforts will look to boost the development and deployment of energy storage technologies for the next generation.

The US government Department of Energy is funding research into storing energy for periods of between 10 and 100 hours, announcing last week that “up to US$30 million” will be available through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) assessment of reliability and security of the country’s electrical grid network is “encouraging”, the Energy Storage Association’s head has said in her initial reaction to the report’s publication.

Austin Energy, a publicly-owned electric utility in Texas, is delivering megawatt-scale storage systems as part of the US Department of Energy’s Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV (SHINES) project.

A US state-backed organisation is partnering with the government of Singapore to build and test up to three energy storage systems using a variety of technologies on the island state.