Legislation to help the US economy invest in clean energy jobs and support innovation and industry passed the House of Representatives this week – and Energy Storage Association (ESA) CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman applauded the prominent inclusion of energy storage in the bill.

Lithium has been added to a list of raw materials deemed essential to secure supply in Europe, for the first time ever, by the European Commission.

The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) has awarded 200MW of renewable energy capacity in a reverse auction, while the state government has emphasised the significant role large-scale batteries that were also handed contracts will play in the region’s transition to cleaner energy.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading using distributed battery storage in Japanese households could be a scalable business once prohibitive rules change in a couple of years’ time, a provider of renewable energy equipment in the country has said.

It is likely Spain will introduce “important regulatory changes in the coming years” to enable the European country to meet a national target of deploying 2.5GW of energy storage by 2030, analysts at consultancy firm Clean Horizon have said.

A “first-in-the-nation” policy called the Clean Peak Standard has been launched in Massachusetts, US, whereby a proportion of electricity used on the grid at times of highest demand must be considered ‘clean’.

The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) hosted a technical conference on hybrid resources – pairing storage with generation – examining in order to overcome barriers that exist to the otherwise fastest-growing phenomenon of the grid.

Long duration energy storage is “essential” to help accelerate renewable deployment, according to the US Department of Energy’s Dr Imre Gyuk, who moderates this panel discussion with Matt Harper from flow battery provider Invinity Energy Systems and Russ Weed from gravity energy storage company ARES.

While lithium-ion batteries continue to take the dominant share of new installations by some distance, there are a variety of other technologies looking to complement, combine or even compete. Panellists at the Energy Storage Digital Series looked at the questions of which energy storage technologies are the likeliest contenders for that future.

UPDATED 14 July 2020: The European Union has agreed that energy storage will be vital in its clean energy economy of the future as Members of European Parliament (MEPs) voted overwhelmingly to adopt a strategy report putting energy storage and hydrogen at the heart of its agenda.