Update 24 September 2020: A few hours after the publication of this story, Entergy made public a new pledge to reach carbon neutrality by the year 2050. The company said that while it commits to this goal it will remain committed to “grid reliability and affordability for customers”.

Mitsubishi Power has launched a simplified approach to commercially integrating hydrogen into energy systems either as long or short duration energy storage, or as a means of balancing the grid as higher shares of renewable energy are added.

“Solar-charged batteries” can help solve California’s energy shortage, with energy storage already playing a small but active role in mitigating the struggle to meet peak energy demand, according to the leadership of two trade associations based in the US state.

The 20MW / 80MWh Pomona battery energy storage facility, in operation in California since a fast-track process brought it online in partial response to the 2015 Aliso Canyon gas leak, has been bought by Ormat Technologies.

Wärtsilä has been contracted to deliver a hybrid solution combining battery energy storage with liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and light fuel oil (LFO) engines on the US Virgin Islands.

FlexGen, an energy storage system integrator that counts GE and Caterpillar among its backers, said this week that a lithium-ion battery storage system it was supplied was used by an Indiana utility to black start a 77MW natural gas plant.

Australia’s government-owned green bank, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), has pledged AU$300 million (US$192 million) of existing funding towards “building investor confidence in renewable hydrogen”.

The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), is planning to host a technical conference on ‘hybrid resources’ – energy storage paired with generation – in July this year.

Despite making huge strides forward, the energy storage industry’s work in helping stakeholders across the value chain understand the technologies and the roles they can play in a renewable energy future is far from done. Andy Colthorpe speaks with Energy Storage Association chief executive, Kelly Speakes-Backman, at the forefront of the industry’s push into unchartered regulatory, policy and public affairs matters.

Storelectric CTO Mark Howitt puts forward the case for his company’s ‘innovative’ adiabatic compressed air energy storage, which he claims is a long duration technology complementary to other existing and advanced tech such as batteries.