Our UK colleagues spoke with some of the winners of the long-duration energy storage technology competition hosted by the government.

Hydrogen increasingly looks likely to have a role to play in achieving decarbonisation targets worldwide, and investments and innovation are scaling up. But costs remain high and for clean hydrogen to be most effective at integrating high shares of renewable energy, storage is a vital piece of the puzzle, writes Georgina Ainscow, a Senior Patent Attorney at Reddie & Grose, a firm of European and United Kingdom patent, trade mark and design attorneys.

An Australian government-backed trial to create “virtual gas wells” using renewable electricity may demonstrate that small-scale, “stackable” units could be viable in making power-to-gas technology work at scale, the company providing electrolysers for the project has said.

The Energy Storage Digital Series, an online-only conference and webinar series, produced and hosted by the events division of our publisher Solar Media kicked off yesterday. Here are some highlights and key quotes from opening panel discussion: ‘Predicting the energy storage tech of the future’.

Australia’s government-owned green bank, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), has pledged AU$300 million (US$192 million) of existing funding towards “building investor confidence in renewable hydrogen”.

What is thought to be the world’s largest ‘single-stack’ green hydrogen electrolyser, a 10MW project in Fukushima, Japan, began operations on schedule in March, provider Asahi Kasei has said.

Targeting a national economic goal in mind of making hydrogen competitive with natural gas, Australia’s government has put AU$70 million (US$44.3 million) into a “deployment funding round” for renewable hydrogen.