The world will witness an international ‘megashift’ towards energy storage – batteries in particular – within the next 10 years. That was the prediction made by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) in the summer of 2015.
A year later, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) went a step further, estimating that he annual investment in energy storage systems will increase six-fold to $8.2bn (£6.7bn) in 2024, and to $250bn (£197bn) by 2040. This massive growth in energy storage – first in the utilities sector, and then among corporations seeking to reduce overheads – will create a “fundamentally different” global power system, BNEF senior analyst Logan Goldie-Scot said at the time.
If 2016 was anything to go by, the energy storage megashift is already beginning to gather pace. The battery market has seen breath-taking levels of growth from utilities over the past 12 months, while non-utilities are increasingly realising that lithium-ion or flow storage systems can act as the perfect accompaniment to on-site renewable energy installations.
Here, edie has rounded up some of the biggest and best energy storage projects across the globe – most of which were installed or agreed in 2016 – which are together demonstrating the vast potential that this low-carbon innovation has to offer for the green economy.
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