At 4:52pm on Friday 9 August 2019, the UK suffered its first wide-scale blackout in more than a decade. More than 1.1 million consumers were plunged into the dark as rail lines screeched to a halt, traffic lights failed and even airports reported problems. Liam Stoker looks at the root causes, and how battery storage came to the rescue.
60MW of energy storage developed by Fluence and Sembcorp Energy UK has come online, lauded as one of the largest transacted fleets of its kind in Europe.
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.
The recent flurry of energy storage project announcements from Massachusetts have been driven in part by a “common sense” approach to tackling the dirtiest impacts of fossil fuel generation, Energy-Storage.news has heard from industry figures.
The business models and technologies underpinning the development of stationary energy storage markets are evolving rapidly. Dr. Kai-Philipp Kairies, Jan Figgener and David Haberschusz of RWTH Aachen University look at some of the key trends driving the sector forwards, in a paper which first appeared in PV Tech Power’s Energy Storage Special Report 2019.
GE Renewable Energy, an arm of the US engineering giant, will supply 100MWh of battery energy storage systems (BESS) to three projects being developed by Convergent Energy + Power in California.
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.
While sized only at 30kW, the successful installation of a battery energy storage system in Puebla, Mexico, is nonetheless being hailed as a milestone as it is claimed to be the first such system to deliver frequency regulation services in the country.
A new white paper from Wärtsilä Energy shows that being able to integrate and then optimise all of these different assets is the key to ensuring that your project – and your investment – is going to provide the maximum benefit, longest possible lifetime in the field – and the best business case. Risto Paldanius, Director of Business Development, Energy Storage and Integration at Wärtsilä told us a bit more about what optimization really means in today’s energy market.
The dramatic fall in cost, occuring alongside the mass roll-out of home storage systems in Germany since 2013, has highlighted the potential of decentralised batteries in virtual power plants to utility companies and grid operators.
