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Stem, a US provider of energy storage systems, has secured US$5m investment from Clean Feet Investors  that will allow it to offer battery systems to commercial and industrial customers with no upfront costs.

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E.ON Energy has deployed Europe’s first smart local energy system on the small German island of Pellworm in the North Sea.

The system is a platform for testing and refining localised storage of renewably sourced electricity, as well as the operation of a smart grid.

E.ON worked alongside Schleswig-Holstein Netz to install an energy-storage system with data links between customers' electricity meters and the island's wind and solar power plants to harness the maximum amount of locally produced energy possible.

Surplus electricity can be stored in large-scale lithium-ion and redox flow batteries, which are integrated into the regional power grid, as well as in small-scale storage devices at customers' homes for use at times when generation is low.

The project aims to address the problem of intermittency with renewables by balancing output for localised use. The €10 million project received funding from several federal German ministries as part of the Federal Energy Storage Initiative.

Renewable energy systems specialists Younicos, and Samsung SDI have announced a strategic partnership to build megawatt scale grid-tied battery parks. Younicos has specialist control strategies that will be combined with Samsung’s expertise in lithium-ion cells in the fully-automated battery parks.

These parks will play a crucial role in enabling the use of up to 100% wind and solar energy in existing grids and making renewable energy sources competitive. The battery parks will offer frequency regulation, voltage control, black starts, and short circuit power and have a construction time of 12 months.

Samsung has guaranteed the performance of the cells for 20 years.??

German-based Younicos has been trialing its first MW-scale battery system since December 2012, with success to prove the technical and commercial viability. Younicos focuses heavily upon using batteries as a means to store energy from renewable sources. It will partner with Samsung SDI for system integration and lithium-based systems in European markets including Germany, Austria and Switzerland. 

Clemens Triebel, Founder and speaker of the board of Younicos explained the pairing with Samsung: “We’ve tested all industrially available lithium cells since 2007. Samsung provides the commercially most suitable cell technology for balancing short-term fluctuations in the grid. With Samsung’s unique 20-year guarantee, we are setting a new benchmark in this emerging market. Our battery parks will provide crucial grid stability functions much faster, more efficiently and cheaply than conventional fossil plants, allowing us to switch off coal and other thermal power plants when sufficient wind and solar power is available. Even though current market design does not yet reward these advantages, our battery parks can already compete in markets for frequency regulation and also provide additional system services.”??

The partnership will be extended to use Samsung’s lithium battery technology for Younicos’s current energy storage hybrid battery systems for off-grid renewable energy storage.