Northvolt, the start-up aiming to manufacture lithium-ion batteries on a massive scale in Europe sustainably, has signed a contract to deliver its own first commercial energy storage system (ESS) project and revealed news on a second planned ‘gigafactory’ in Germany.

Developer NRStor and technology provider Hydrostor have completed work on a multi-megawatt, commercial, advanced compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) system in Canada.

A Singapore-headquartered start-up which recently completed microgrid projects including solar and battery energy storage, for luxury resorts in South East Asia, says it wants to take the tech and its concepts into a number of other sectors.

As US states work to address and enable the swift growth of distributed energy resources (DERs), including solar and energy storage, the issues surrounding their interconnection to the electric grid require close attention, Sara Baldwin, VP for regulatory affairs at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC), explains.

Batteries are increasingly widely used in grid balancing, but there are many more applications where a battery can play an important role. With electric grids requiring periodic maintenance, batteries can stand in for the grid during downtime in order to reduce the impact on industry and households, writes Dieter Castelein.

Energy Storage Special Report 2019, from the editorial teams behind Energy-Storage.news and PV Tech, brings you no less than seven feature articles and technical papers looking at everything from the policy and regulatory initiatives that still need to happen, to bankability and profitability of ESS, system technologies and architecture, all the way to recycling and end-of-life care for batteries.

DC-coupling of combined solar and energy storage plants could be a more effective way to save energy that would otherwise be clipped and ‘lost’, benefitting the grid and helping efforts to reduce the amount of carbon pumped into the air, the COO of Fluence has said.

We’ve arrived at Day One of Smart Energy Week – hosting Solar Power International and Energy Storage International in Utah. Here are some of my observations: both on and ‘off’ the record.

The pipeline of projects currently stands at 11GW, and although it is unlikely that this will all be built, we currently see nearly 800MW of projects at the ‘under construction/ready to build’ stage.

A 10MW battery energy storage system (BESS), which will allow a 24MW wind farm to keep generating energy even in times of oversupply, officially went into service today near Rotterdam, the Netherlands.