Australia’s biggest utility company looks set to be in ownership of the country’s biggest battery storage facility.

Standalone storage, demand from commercial and industrial (C&I) customers and new types of grid services will increasingly help drive growth in energy storage in the coming years, but the future mix between battery-based and alternative storage types is still unclear.

There’s still a disconnect between what’s achievable and what is actually being achieved in the drive to decarbonise. Despite a boom in renewable energy generation, Australia’s government line is instead commitment to “a gas-fired recovery”. That commitment is a dangerous one, says Lillian Patterson of the Clean Energy Council.

Two subsidiaries of Wisconsin-based electric and gas company WEC Energy Group have put forward plans for their second large-scale solar-plus-storage project in as many months.

The US energy storage industry remained “remarkably resilient” during what most of us have found to be a difficult year – to say the least. Andy Colthorpe speaks with Key Capture Energy’s CEO Jeff Bishop and FlexGen’s COO Alan Grosse – two companies that made 2020 one of growth in their energy storage businesses – to hear what lessons can be learned and why economics rule.

Around 2.1GWh of battery storage had been installed in Germany by the end of 2019, in households, at commercial and industrial (C&I) facilities and at large-scale in grid-connected applications.

Energy generation has never been a single technology market and energy storage is no different, says Ed Porter from Invinity Energy Systems.

The latest volume of PV Tech Power, Solar Media’s quarterly technical journal for the downstream sector, is now available to download free of charge.

A study co-written by industry figures has put forward new claims of the cost-competitiveness of European solar-plus-storage, amid predictions that grid parity will unfold continent-wide by 2025.

Strong deployment figures have been posted for the US’ energy storage market in both residential and non-residential segments in the past quarter, amid warnings that an escalating trade war with China could dampen some of that enthusiasm if tariffs are applied.