Premier Inn, a chain of budget and competitively priced hotels in the UK, has installed a 100kW lithium ion battery at its Gyle at Edinburgh Park hotel in the Scottish capital, claiming it to be the first ‘battery-powered hotel’ in Britain.

EDF Energy, one of the UK’s ‘Big Six’ major energy suppliers, is seeking to build a portfolio of domestic batteries to take into energy services markets by offering discounted energy storage units to consumers via a new partnership with manufacturer Powervault.

As Japan’s heavily regulated energy markets continue a process of liberalisation and supposedly increasing consumer choices, utility TEPCO has launched a smart electricity tariff enabled by the capabilities of residential battery storage.

Ireland’s DS3 flexibility market will deploy the fastest-reacting batteries in the world under an opportunity dubbed “Enhanced Frequency Response on steroids” by energy expert Felicity Jones, partner for energy storage and flexibility at UK-based consultancy Everoze.

International battery brand Duracell is set to launch a home energy storage system in partnership with a UK energy supply and services company which claims it has enabled big increases in revenues available to owners of the devices.

Israel-headquartered SolarEdge launched a software platform for aggregating household energy storage units – and other distributed energy equipment – into virtual power plants, last week. The company’s solution has already been chosen for a VPP project in Australia by AGL, one of the country’s biggest utilities. The commercial launch of the VPP platform direct to customers is now underway. Andy Colthorpe spoke with Lior Handelsman, one of SolarEdge’s founders and vice president of marketing and product strategy.

RWE Generation is investigating the construction of a 100MW battery at its Tilbury power station in England as part of plans to convert the former coal-fired plant to a gas peaking plant.

Battery storage and demand-side response have continued to play a crucial role in the UK’s power mix, together landing more than 500MW of contracts in the most recent T-1 Capacity Market auction.

Northern Ireland’s Queens University Belfast (QUB) has found that battery-based energy storage can provide inertial response for system reliability much more efficiently, at a lower cost and with substantially reduced emissions than thermal generation. Dr Marek Kubic at Fluence, which is working with QUB, explains.