Standalone storage, demand from commercial and industrial (C&I) customers and new types of grid services will increasingly help drive growth in energy storage in the coming years, but the future mix between battery-based and alternative storage types is still unclear.
Investors are becoming increasingly comfortable with energy storage as an asset class but numerous regulatory and market design hurdles remain across European markets.
Australian energy retailer Origin Energy intends to build a 700MW battery storage system on the site of a coal power plant for which it has brought forward a planned retirement date by seven years.
In the Philippines, Fluence has brought into commercial operation the first project in an order totalling nearly half a gigawatt, for vertically-integrated power company SMC Global Power Holdings (SMCGPH).
France-headquartered renewable power producer Voltalia brought online a 32MW / 32MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) project in southern England in December, the company’s second UK battery project.
Used lithium-ion batteries taken from carmaker Audi’s electric vehicles (EVs) have been repurposed into a ‘second-life’ stationary energy storage system by energy company RWE at a project in Herdecke, Germany.
A second installation phase has been completed at TotalEnergies’ battery energy storage facility in Dunkirk, northern France, bringing its output and capacity to 61MW / 61MWh.
The largest battery energy storage system (BESS) project in the Netherlands so far will also be Europe’s first large-scale grid storage project to use lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery technology.
