Battery storage is flexible, remarkable — and investable — but you need to know what you’re doing and know where the market opportunities and limits lie. Renewable and clean energy financier Laurent Segalen from Megawatt-X explains some of the things he’s seen as batteries have become an infrastructure asset in their own right.
Talen Energy, a US independent power producer (IPP) with a 13GW portfolio of generation assets, has contracted energy storage developer Key Capture Energy to install a battery storage system at the site of a coal power plant in Maryland.
The Philippines is set to become a “full-sized market” for energy storage within a couple of years, according to Wärtsilä’s director for the Australasia region.
Germany’s second ‘Innovation Tender’ for clean energy projects combining different technologies has awarded 258MW of capacity to solar-plus-storage across 18 bids.
Talen Energy Corporation, a US power and infrastructure development group with 13GW of mostly fossil fuel assets in its portfolio to date has said that it is developing a gigawatt of battery storage projects.
The Australian Energy Market Commission has drafted a new rule to enable the provision of fast frequency response services to help keep the electricity grid stable which one expert said will be “a really important market for batteries”.
The first battery energy storage system deployed to help stabilise the electricity grid in Turkey could help show the country’s energy sector that more rapid uptake of renewable energy can be feasible and cost-effective.
Australian energy retailer EnergyAustralia has said that it will build a 350MW, four-hour standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) project to enable one of its coal-fired power plants to be retired “after decades of faithful service”.
Despite the fall in unit prices for energy storage, a total of US$3.6 billion of investment was committed to energy storage projects in 2020, around the same amount as in 2019.
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.
