Home batteries in a South Australia delivered significant revenues from their first six months of participation in a virtual power plant to help balance the grid, even with only an initial 1MW – 2MW of aggregated customer systems participating.
Realising the theoretical promise of solar-wind-storage hybrids is far from straightforward, with individual projects likely to vary considerably. Ben Willis examines some of the technical complexities of combining different technologies into a single, profitable entity.
Technology provider Sinexcel has announced the successful commissioning of a 72MWh pair of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery energy storage projects in Illinois and West Virginia in the US, to deliver frequency regulation services to the PJM Interconnection service area.
UK stock exchange-listed dedicated energy storage fund has suspended all construction on assets currently in the works as it also announces the completion of the 10MW Lower Road project in southern England.
Production of commercial energy storage systems has begun at Tesvolt’s new 255MWh annual capacity factory in Wittenberg, Germany, with staff working in isolation due to the risk of COVID-19 infection.
California, the world’s fifth largest economy and a global innovation engine, is confronting ambitious clean energy and GHG reduction goals. California must achieve 60% renewable energy and 5 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030, and a fully decarbonised power sector by 2045.
An auction for 700MW of grid energy capacity in Portugal is being configured to allow bids from solar and also solar-plus-storage projects to participate on a competitive basis, with guaranteed payments for energy storage co-located projects to use a capping mechanism in the event of ‘price spikes’.
Last year saw large-scale storage come of age in the USA and Canada, with some heavyweight storage portfolios starting to take shape. Speaking to four leading North American developers, Andy Colthorpe takes the pulse of a market poised for growth.
“The bottom line is that this is a good business decision. We will get back our money in eight to 10 years at the current price of power. As the price of energy goes up, we’ll pay it back even quicker.”
When lithium-ion’s dominance of the energy storage market begins to wane, redox flow batteries are well positioned as a strong competitor, emerging technology market research and business intelligence group IDTechEx has said.
