Texas’ ERCOT market has been one of the US’ fastest-growing regions for renewable energy, but recent weather-driven events have made it clear that more needs to be done to ensure electricity system reliability. The answers are already here, affordable and practical, argues Wayne Muncaster, vice-president at commercial demand response platform technology group GridBeyond.

A cross-border platform is being created in Europe for the provision of secondary reserve to maintain the grid’s operating frequency, which will be open to energy storage in the coming years. Tanguy Poirot, analyst, and Corentin Baschet, head of market analysis at energy storage specialist consultancy Clean Horizon take a deep dive.

Leaders in the UK and international battery storage space discussed how the industry has rapidly evolved to become a viable business at the heart of the transition to low carbon and renewable energy in this panel session from the Energy Storage Summit 2021.

Gore Street Energy Storage Fund, a publicly listed energy storage investment funds in the UK, is entering its portfolio into the Dynamic Containment grid services market while it has 100MW of projects in Northern Ireland nearing completion.

News in brief from around the world in energy storage.

National Grid ESO, the electricity system operator tasked with keeping the lights on in the UK, is looking to enable multiple application stacking for providers of a new frequency response service that also participate in the national Balancing Mechanism.

Commodities trading company Trafigura has said that it is building a large-scale battery storage plant in Belgium through a newly-launched renewable energy joint venture (JV) company.

Distributed energy storage systems made by power management company Eaton will be able to participate in grid balancing markets through integration with a virtual power plant (VPP) platform developed by electric vehicle (EV) charging equipment provider Virta.

Google is investing in battery energy storage to serve as a backup power solution at one of its data centres, in a project described as a first step in changing data centres “from climate change problems to critical components in carbon-free systems”.

The battery storage optimisation and energy trading teams at EDF and Centrica Business Solutions – stalwarts of the UK’s Big Six of utility companies – have won 40MW of new deals to optimise large-scale battery storage systems.