Anthony Price summarises what took place at this year’s International Flow Batteries Forum Summer Conference in Brussels, Belgium.

Energy storage deployment in the US is growing at a phenomenal pace. But the appetite for storage is much greater than the ability to build, and getting grid interconnection rights is often the biggest hurdle.

Getting grid interconnection rights for energy storage in the US is difficult.

There is still plenty of educating decision-makers on storage’s place on the grid to do for US states to follow in the footsteps California and Texas.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has said the state is “exploring every resource available as a potential tool to address climate change,” as funding was announced for long-duration energy storage technologies along with investigation on the role of green hydrogen in decarbonisation.

New software that helps businesses and utilities in the US to assess the value of energy storage has been launched by Sandia National Laboratories, while the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has launched its own platform for calculating the value of distributed energy resources (DERs).

Southern Research officials, energy companies and other industry leaders were on hand last week in Alabama to formally open the Energy Storage Research Center (ESRC), a facility on Southern Research’s engineering campus where collaborative efforts will look to boost the development and deployment of energy storage technologies for the next generation.

The fact that lithium-ion batteries experience degradation over time with use should not necessarily be a limiter for their widespread use in stationary storage systems, but requires long-term strategies for their management.

Virtual power plants, flow batteries and the economics of lithium-ion battery degradation are the focus of three feature-length articles, available now in the latest edition of Solar Media’s quarterly journal PV Tech Power.

Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities (LG&E and KU), arms of US firm PPL Corporation, have developed a research centre for energy storage at a power plant in Kentucky.