Scotland’s first utility-scale battery storage facility has been officially opened today, having begun delivering sub-second balancing services to National Grid at the end of June under a bespoke agreement secured before the hotly contested Enhanced Frequency Response (EFR) auction of 2016.

California’s Governor Jerry Brown has passed the state’s 2045 zero-carbon electricity target into law, offering a major boost to the energy storage sector in the process.

Up to 140MW of capacity will be procured under the first ever tender for Ireland’s new frequency response and balancing programme, with projects to go live by September 2021.

Over 370MW of energy storage projects, along with 1.25GW of solar, have been successfully moved into the ‘first batch’ of projects to be processed under a new connections procedure, brought in to tackle the surging levels of smaller projects aiming to connect.

Known historically for its oil and in the present day for deploying large amounts of wind energy and latterly for deploying batteries at wind farms, the US state of Texas is less well known for solar-plus-storage projects.

Energy storage and other flexibility providers with units as small as 1MW will soon be able to access ‘Great Britain’s core flexibility market’ under reforms being proposed by transmission system operator, National Grid.

Following news yesterday of the first grid-scale solar-plus-storage system on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, two more modestly-sized projects show the potential diversity of applications for energy storage in the US state.

What has driven the recent boom in Germany’s household energy storage installation figures? What value do customers expect when adding a storage system to their homes? And more importantly, what are energy storage providers doing to sustain and accelerate growth, which can eventually unlock a true mass market? Florian Mayr of Apricum takes a closer look.

UK renewable electricity supplier Solo Energy is set to launch a ‘free battery’ business model to UK homeowners after a successful pilot on the remote Scottish islands of Orkney.

The market for power conversion systems (PCS) used in energy storage is becoming “increasingly crowded” with competitors, while the diverse field of players will contribute to “rapid technological innovations and price reductions”, Navigant Research has said.