Swedish public utility Vattenfall is about to start filling a 45m-high, 200MW-rated thermal energy storage facility with water in Berlin, Germany.

Nuclear power firm Westinghouse Electric Company has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with a state-owned energy company to build 2GWh of pumped thermal energy storage (PTES) capacity in Bulgaria.

The Long Duration Energy Storage Council, the organisation formed last year to push for the global deployment of eight-hour-plus duration storage technologies, has elected its first board of directors.

It’s been a positive week for thermal energy storage technology, with utility Edison International validating a cold storage solution, a collaboration between two groups to achieve 100% round trip efficiency, and an acquisition involving several intellectual property rights patents.

A seasonal heat storage plant which will have a capacity of about 90GWh looks set to begin construction next year in Vantaa, Finland, with water stored in underground caverns heated to 140°C using renewable energy and waste heat.

Australian startup Vast Solar said it has picked a site in Queensland where it could develop a AU$600 million (US$427 million) power plant combining different low emissions technologies to provide baseload power cost-effectively over a 30-year lifetime.

The Southern California Public Power Authority (SCPPA), an organisation comprising the municipal utilities of 10 cities and one irrigation district, has ordered a potential 1MW of ice battery storage systems from Ice Energy.

A utility in California is investigating how energy storage technology for keeping food and other goods refrigerated could help counter the challenge posed by the famous “duck curve” of PV energy supply and demand.

Glen Dimplex, by some estimates the world’s biggest maker of domestic heating appliances, is due to start recruiting households to participate in the latest phase of an EU trial of energy storage technologies.

Sunamp, a Scottish manufacturer of heat batteries for domestic energy storage, including models designed to link with PV systems, has started serial production of its units from a base in the UK.