A trucking terminal in Ohio, US, will play host to a microgrid that incorporates around half a megawatt of wind and solar generation combined with battery energy storage from distributed energy technology company EnSync.

A ceremony was held yesterday in Niedersachsen, Germany, to welcome the start of operations at a ‘hybrid’ energy storage plant that will use a combination of sodium-sulfur and lithium-ion batteries to stabilise the grid.

An energy storage system running on Greensmith’s GEMS software platform has been installed at a natural gas generation facility in Hungary, by Greensmith’s parent company Wärtsilä.

Some of the “world’s biggest insurance companies” are investigating the advantages of pairing lithium batteries with ultracapacitors in energy storage systems, which can lower costs and extend battery lifetimes, the CEO of an ultracapacitor maker has said.

A utility in Bremen, Germany, has contracted multinational engineering group AEG to build a hybrid solution for regulating grid frequency which combines electrochemical batteries and power-to-heat technology.

Hybrid systems combining the complementary aspects of more than one technology could “change the energy storage landscape”, with 2.1GW predicted for deployment in less than 10 years, according to a report from Navigant Research.