Commissioned at the start of this year, the Alamitos Battery Energy Storage System in California is a landmark project for the industry in having competed against natural gas to provide peaking capacity for the grid. Andy Colthorpe finds out the project’s backstory from Fluence’s Ray Hohenstein and AES’ Mark Miller.

What do Ireland, Germany, Poland and Spain all have in common? Well, like the other members of the European Union they all have a requirement to decarbonise and a desire for sustainable economic growth. Andy Colthorpe speaks with energy storage associations from those four countries to hear about their unique situations as well as the opportunities and challenges they share.

Battery storage is flexible, remarkable — and investable — but you need to know what you’re doing and know where the market opportunities and limits lie. Renewable and clean energy financier Laurent Segalen from Megawatt-X explains some of the things he’s seen as batteries have become an infrastructure asset in their own right.

Battery storage deployments, both with and without solar, have been in a new growth phase that has smashed quarterly records consistently while costs have continued to fall. Nonetheless, the maturity of the industry is not always reflected in the information available to financial decision-makers, writes Adam Walters from Stoel Rives LLP.

Software is rapidly becoming recognised as key to the value proposition and bankability of energy storage, which in turn lies at the heart of the low carbon energy transition. Andy Colthorpe speaks to three providers of software aimed at the energy storage industry.

With a project pipeline in excess of 14GW, a developing regulatory envelope and maturing revenue streams, the UK’s energy storage sector continues to be at the forefront globally. Molly Lempriere charts the market’s development to date and uncovers how it has responded to deployment barriers.

Using abundant resources for components and as ‘fuel’, zinc batteries can be a cost-effective, flexible and scalable technology to deliver many of the needs of a resilient, low-carbon energy system, says Ron MacDonald at Zinc8.

Growth in renewables and corresponding market pricing is the key driver for the commercialisation and global adoption for vanadium flow batteries (VFBs) and an important reason why we will see further growth for this technology over the years to come, says Ed Porter of Invinity Energy Systems.

What are the best ways to match up long-duration energy storage technologies to applications and revenues? And what is ‘longer-duration’ storage and when will we need it? Florian Mayr and Dr Fabio Oldenburg at Apricum – The Cleantech Advisory offer some perspectives.

The US energy storage industry remained “remarkably resilient” during what most of us have found to be a difficult year – to say the least. Andy Colthorpe speaks with Key Capture Energy’s CEO Jeff Bishop and FlexGen’s COO Alan Grosse – two companies that made 2020 one of growth in their energy storage businesses – to hear what lessons can be learned and why economics rule.