Energy Storage

The Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research (ZSW) has inaugurated a 250 kW power to gas research plant with a possible methane production of up to 300 cubic meters per day. This makes it the largest plant of its kind in the world.

A lot that needs to be done to enable the transition towards larger shares of renewables in the power mix. The 5th International Conference on Integration of Renewable Energy and Distributed Energy Resources, which opened today in Berlin, Germany, brought together global participants from the energy sector to discuss the transformation of the power system, the challenges that lie ahead and the solutions.

A team led by Argonne National Lab has been selected for an award of up to US$120 million to establish a new Batteries and Energy Storage Hub over five years.

With QBotix having secured US$1 million and Stion $2 million from the U.S. Energy Department’s SunShot initiative, a further seven projects to secure support in the current round of funding focus on PV, storage and grid integration.

IEEE announced today the release of a new report that they commissioned. The report details how energy storage, distributed generation and microgrid technologies stand to evolve given the rapid deployment of the smart grid across the globe over the next five years.

AEG Power Solutions has signed an agreement with energy storage and clean fuel company, ITM Power. The companies will cooperate on integrating ITM Power’s electrolyser with AEG PS’s power control electronics.

Siemens Infrastructure & Cities and the municipal utility SWK STADTWERKE KREFELD AG (SWK) are working together to transform the existing power grid in a municipality in North Rhine-Westphalia. The project “Wachtendonk is doing its part – Researching the grid” is seen as a testbed to boost smart grid solutions, something essential for Germany’s new energy policy.

Last September, GE Energy invested US$3.2 billion in acquiring Converteam. In an interview with pv magazine, Stefan Franko, business leader for renewables at GE’s Power Conversion business, talks about photovoltaic inverter technology, global markets and what the GE acquisition has brought to the Converteam table.

China’s central government is said to be pushing for photovoltaic consolidation in its domestic industry. This, photovoltaic storage solutions, and balancing cost and quality control were some of the key themes at Solarpraxis’ first PV Module and PV Power Plant Workshop – China 2012.

A Pike Research report released today predicts that the Asia Pacific energy storage market will be worth $12 billion by 2022, with a capacity of 25 GW.