Plans for what is being billed as “Europe’s largest solar plant” have been put forward in Spain as the UN climate negotiations came to a close in Madrid.

Iberdrola has switched on a multi-megawatt battery energy storage system (BESS) in rural Spain that will enable up to five hours of backup power to local networks in the event of an outage.

A study co-written by industry figures has put forward new claims of the cost-competitiveness of European solar-plus-storage, amid predictions that grid parity will unfold continent-wide by 2025.

Snap poll to decide whether goal to add 3.5GW in pumped storage capacity and 2.5GW in batteries in little longer than a decade becomes hard law.

News in brief from around the world of energy storage.

News in brief from the week in energy storage around the world.

Clean energy firm Holaluz has completed Spain’s first shared self-consumption solar PV and battery storage facility on a house near Barcelona.

A ‘hybrid’ plant for storing wind energy in batteries has been constructed by infrastructure and energy firm Acciona in Spain, thought to be the first such project in the country.

In less than a week, more than 180,000 Spanish citizens have signed a petition against plans for a new ‘sun tax’ on use of batteries for residential self-consumption of solar energy in Spain.

The International Electrochemical Commission (IEC) will begin a programme of standardisation for redox flow batteries – which can be used for large scale energy storage applications – following discussions which were initiated in Japan in October 2013.