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.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s annual State of the State Address has reaffirmed his administration’s commitment to combating climate change and growing the green economy, while West Virginia Governor Jim Justice’s address spoke of “fighting” to retain coal jobs.
Convergent Energy & Power’s first projects out of a joint venture with Shell have come online, while GE Renewable Energy touted the imminent implementation of the country’s ‘first hybrid electric gas turbine’ project.
By the middle of the 2020s, using hybrid ‘portfolios’ of batteries and renewable energy sources will economically outperform existing gas power plants, while the combination of technologies is already cost-competitive with building new gas plants, a new report from the US-based Rocky Mountain Institute has said.
