After a quiet period, M&A in the UK’s large-scale BESS market has picked up with transactions from CIP, Fidra Energy, Elements Green, Gresham House and Eelpower in the past fortnight.

Ark Energy has received approval from AEMO and Transgrid to connect its 3,148MWh Richmond Valley solar-plus-storage site to the NEM.

While Germany is often described as the ‘hottest’ energy storage market in Europe, growing uncertainty on multiple policy and regulatory topics has led to a ‘cooling’ of investor interest.

The UK’s NESO has cleared 150GW of BESS from its grid connection queues, according to figures from BloombergNEF.

Zambia’s president, Hakainde Hichilema, attended the recent launch of the African country’s largest hybrid renewable energy project.

Recurrent Energy Australia has achieved grid connection approval under clause 5.3.4 of the National Electricity Rules from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) for its Sundown Energy Park.

Dutch TSO TenneT has signed a contract with a developer for a large-scale BESS which will help to relieve grid congestion, possibly enabling the quicker deployment of renewables in the Netherlands.

Renewables and battery storage are quick and cheap to deploy for satisfying data centre power demand, writes Jason Kaminsky of kWh Analytics.

Terna, the transmission system operator (TSO) of Italy, has approved the grid connection for a 500MW/3GWh BESS project. Meanwhile several smaller projects have progressed across the rest of Europe.

Jeff Monday of Fluence believes Australia can transform its data centre boom from a grid constraint into a growth opportunity using BESS.