First developed by NASA, flow batteries are a potential answer to storing solar – and wind – for eight to 10 hours, far beyond what is commonly achieved today with lithium-ion. In the second of a two-part special report, Andy Colthorpe dives deeper into questions of bankability, market segmentation and manufacturing strategies with four very different providers of flow energy storage technology.
Installations of sonnen’s latest hybrid battery storage units are underway, alongside new residential solar arrays, as part of a Local Energy Market (LEM) being built by one of the UK’s largest energy companies to test the capabilities of a virtual marketplace of distributed energy resources.
The fact that lithium-ion batteries experience degradation over time with use should not necessarily be a limiter for their widespread use in stationary storage systems, but requires long-term strategies for their management.
Food wholesaler Philip Dennis Foodservice has installed energy storage units totalling over 4MW at one of its UK offices in an effort to generate revenue from grid services, rather than making savings from behind-the-meter activity.
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.
Andres Cortes and Ben Kaun of the Electric Power Research Institute discuss some of their recent work looking into the issues of the attributes and operations of co-locating energy storage with renewables
Virtual power plants, flow batteries and the economics of lithium-ion battery degradation are the focus of three feature-length articles, available now in the latest edition of Solar Media’s quarterly journal PV Tech Power.
A battery energy storage system (BESS) has been selected as a proven and resilient solution to help power a mainland US military facility, saving money on electricity costs and being delivered on a commercial basis.
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.
