A boost for investment in battery energy storage in much of Australia is strongly expected to come from 1 October onwards, when new National Electricity Market (NEM) rules come into effect.
Canadian Solar’s project development subsidiary Recurrent Energy has sold a majority stake in its 350MW / 1,400MWh Crimson energy storage project currently awaiting the start of construction in California.
Tesla will deliver a battery energy storage system (BESS) to a ‘Battery Power Park’ project in Japan which will participate in various electricity market opportunities and help stabilise the grid on the northern island of Hokkaido.
Electric utilities in Michigan are in agreement that energy storage offers multiple benefits to the customer and network, but uncertainty remains over how it can be introduced into market structures.
Battery storage could play the same role on the grid as a proposed 60MW natural gas and fuel oil peaker plant in Massachusetts and not only result in lower emissions but also in cost savings.
Vertically integrated solar PV company SunPower and residential battery storage provider sonnen have each started up programmes to deploy solar-plus-storage for communities in California and New York respectively.
Talen Energy, a US independent power producer (IPP) with a 13GW portfolio of generation assets, has contracted energy storage developer Key Capture Energy to install a battery storage system at the site of a coal power plant in Maryland.
Infrastructure service provider Lumea has opened up a process to tender for a 300MW grid-connected battery project near Melbourne, Australia, intending to build the project without government funding.
A residential virtual power plant (VPP) programme in Maryland has received regulatory approvals, enabling a partnership between technology provider Sunverge and utility Delmarva Power to get started on the project.
While interconnection queues for America’s electric transmission and distribution operators are “swelling up” with growing numbers of energy storage projects, some of the big challenges ahead include enabling fair market participation for both standalone storage and storage paired with generation.
