The UK’s second subsidy-free solar farm, and the first by a local authority using battery storage, has been completed by West Sussex County Council in a project that ticked “every box” and will generate significant income over the next 25 years.

The renewables investment community “needs to come to grips” with merchant risk after a decade of being “spoiled” by government-backed subsidies for wind and solar.

The rise of grid trading and off-peak tariffs, rather than the closure of the feed-in tariff and potentially the export tariff, will see the domestic storage market experience “huge growth” over 2019 according to SolaX’s European product manager ahead of next week’s Solar & Storage Live conference and exhibition in England.

Cloud-aggregated virtual power plants using residential or C&I battery storage as part of a smart energy management system can benefit the grid, integrate renewables and EVs and hopefully add a powerful long-term value proposition for home storage. Andy Colthorpe and David Pratt report on how some of the UK’s first VPP projects are proving the concept.

UK Power Reserve, a British developer of flexible electricity assets, has confirmed that battery storage solutions from Fluence will be used to build out its entire 120MW portfolio of projects.

Installations of sonnen’s latest hybrid battery storage units are underway, alongside new residential solar arrays, as part of a Local Energy Market (LEM) being built by one of the UK’s largest energy companies to test the capabilities of a virtual marketplace of distributed energy resources.

Gore Street, the UK’s first listed fund targeting energy storage specifically, has acquired two battery storage projects from Origami Energy, taking its portfolio to 29MW across four projects.

Food wholesaler Philip Dennis Foodservice has installed energy storage units totalling over 4MW at one of its UK offices in an effort to generate revenue from grid services, rather than making savings from behind-the-meter activity.

Scotland’s first utility-scale battery storage facility has been officially opened today, having begun delivering sub-second balancing services to National Grid at the end of June under a bespoke agreement secured before the hotly contested Enhanced Frequency Response (EFR) auction of 2016.

Leclanché has been selected by a new UK electric vehicle (EV) charging network to support the roll-out of hundreds of EV chargers by limiting their impact on the grid with energy storage units.