Hawaii is inviting proposals for up to 200MW of storage in the face of regulatory demands and unprecedented distributed generation challenges. As Dean Frankel writes, the process could offer some answers to the conundrum of integrating higher volumes of renewable energy generation.

Representatives of battery and energy storage companies including AES Corporation and FIAMM believe the priority for the nascent energy storage industry should be to standardise technologies, along with developing a regulatory framework that recognises the value of storage.

Energy storage technologies are not the “silver bullet” they have sometimes been hyped as, but nonetheless have a crucial role to play in a decarbonised electricity system, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).