We sat down with Vincent de Rul, Director of Energy Solutions at EDF, based in the UK, to discuss the long term opportunities that battery storage and related technologies represent for energy flexibility and the future of renewable energy.
A number of projects have been announced in the past couple of weeks highlighting the link between the stationary energy storage space and electric cars – aka “batteries on wheels”.
Investors are queuing “all the way down the street” but many require the first projects to be built before committing, Gridserve’s chief investment officer Mark Henderson has said.
An energy storage system made up of ‘second life’ batteries previously used in Renault’s electric vehicle (EV) has been deployed for Umicore, a multinational materials technology company headquartered in Belgium.
The India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA) has welcomed provisions in finance minister Nirmala Sitharam’s Union Budget 2020-2021 to support renewables and prioritise climate change policy, although the group hopes more will be done to support in-country manufacturing of batteries for applications including ESS.
Pivot Power is keeping an eye on solutions other than lithium-ion, but chief executive Matt Allen stressed the need to focus on the now and deploy chemistries that are “ready and investable”.
Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology has gone into use at Johan Cruyff Arena in Amsterdam, with energy infrastructure installed onsite including a 3MW battery energy storage system allowing visitors to both charge their cars at the stadium and put power back into it.
