Arsenal football club’s Emirates Stadium has become home to what could be the first behind the meter battery of its size aimed at wholesale energy trading over frequency response.
NEC Energy Solutions has been selected by the UK’s first listed fund targeting energy storage to deliver two projects totalling 19MW, including what could be the largest behind the meter installation in the country.
There has been a substantial drop in the levels of new battery capacity being entered into consideration for the UK’s Capacity Market (CM) mechanism, according to the prequalification results of the next auctions.
The future of the Capacity Market has been plunged into doubt after the European Court of Justice annulled the European Commission’s decision not to object to the scheme.
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.
