A hybrid battery energy storage project aimed at helping authorities and power system operators in Poland better understand how to integrate and expand renewable energy capacity in the country has gone into operation.

A multi-gigawatt co-location market looks set to take off within the next five years, however uncertainty over DC coupling, the need for costly symmetric grid connections and outdated regulatory frameworks risk stymying the market’s growth.

The auction was the first of its kind in Portugal that invited companies to lodge bids with a storage component included, with eight of the 12 batches awarded to solar-plus-storage projects.

Update 21 August 2020: A representative of Capital Dynamics contacted Energy-Storage.news with additional information on the sizing and capacity of the projects.

Lynn Jurich, CEO at major US residential solar installation and leasing company Sunrun has spoken of the big opportunity for aggregated solar-plus-storage systems to provide grid services and in doing so help lower the cost of installations.

Bringing a proven, flexible, virtual power plant (VPP) platform into North America is a step towards “unleashing the potential” of distributed energy, the chief commercial officer of UK-headquartered solutions provider Kiwi Power says.

A new project is underway in the US to tear down a significant barrier for “realising the full benefits” of energy storage: the complexity and lack of clarity over interconnection rules across the country.

While lithium-ion batteries continue to take the dominant share of new installations by some distance, there are a variety of other technologies looking to complement, combine or even compete. Panellists at the Energy Storage Digital Series looked at the questions of which energy storage technologies are the likeliest contenders for that future.

Barriers have been removed allowing for battery storage projects five times the size as the current limit in Britain, in a move hailed as a “significant, positive and well-timed” step.

Taking the UK’s transmission system and the circumstances which led to a dramatic blackout as a direct example, Javier Cavada and Gary Preece of liquid air energy storage (LAES) systems company Highview Power look at how such events could be avoided, cost-effectively and with lesser environmental consequences.