EPRI, Southern Company and Storworks have completed testing of a concrete thermal energy storage pilot project at a gas plant in Alabama, US, claimed as the largest of its kind in the world.
Battery storage failure incidents have dramatically decreased in frequency in the last few years, but the industry still needs to be more transparent and share data when incidents occur.
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.
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.
