Wisconsin investor-owned utilities Madison Gas and Electric (MGE) and WEC Energy have received regulatory approval to buy a 200MW solar and 110MW battery energy storage system (BESS) in Kenosha County.
Energy storage could garner a market share of one-third by 2025 for the new, pan-European automatic frequency restoration reserve (aFRR) market, which is set to launch in the middle of this year with France and Germany mutualising capacity first.
Blair Reynolds, SMA America’s product manager for energy storage, discusses the role inverter-based renewable and storage technologies can play in maintaining grid stability.
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.
