Production of commercial energy storage systems has begun at Tesvolt’s new 255MWh annual capacity factory in Wittenberg, Germany, with staff working in isolation due to the risk of COVID-19 infection.

Microgrid and energy storage project technology provider ENGIE EPS has said it cannot commit to a 2020 earnings target, although 2019 revenues showed a 29% increase on the previous year.

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”.

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.

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.

By the middle of the 2020s, using hybrid ‘portfolios’ of batteries and renewable energy sources will economically outperform existing gas power plants, while the combination of technologies is already cost-competitive with building new gas plants, a new report from the US-based Rocky Mountain Institute has said.

Japanese developer Eurus Energy and Australian-headquartered wind developer Windlab have signed an MoU with Kenyan authorities to develop an 80MW solar-plus-wind-plus-storage facility.

European energy company Vattenfall is combining a 22MW wind power plant with 38MW of solar PV at a hybrid project in the Netherlands, integrating the capacity with 12MWh of batteries from carmaker BMW.

‘Own and operate’ model creates option of a ‘one-stop’ solution for customers in exchange for a pence per-mile service fee or fixed monthly charge.

Walking around Energy Storage Europe this year it was obvious that the show, like the market, has grown from a small handful of “strong believers” as one source put it, to a forward-looking show focused on a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario.