Friday, 17 July 2026

Regulators in Spain have put two battery projects out for public comment that would attach 100 MW/400 MWh of storage to the Solaben ST1 and Solaben ST6 hybrid plants at Logrosán, Cáceres, which combine concentrated solar power (CSP) and photovoltaic (PV) generation, according to ESS News.

The design splits evenly across the two sites. Each carries a 50 MW battery with 200 MWh of usable storage, drawn from 225 MWh of installed capacity, according to ESS News.

Equipment plans call for 36 Hithium Power lithium-ion containers of 6.25 MWh apiece, or equivalents, wired to 15 inverters and spread over eight medium-voltage transformer stations, ESS News reported.

Output will stay constrained even as the batteries add power. The shared transformer holds the hybrid plants to 62.5 MW, below the 50 MW each battery can deliver, while grid access rights hold at 104.99 MW, ESS News reported.

Cost estimates land close together: EUR 21.21 million (USD 24.2 million) to build the Solaben ST1 unit and EUR 22.03 million for Solaben ST6, according to ESS News.

The host site is the Solaben complex, four 50 MW parabolic trough CSP plants raised between 2012 and 2013, first built by Abengoa and now held within Cox, ESS News reported.

Comment stays open for 15 working days, according to ESS News.

UNIGRID has shipped the first units of its Na+Casa residential sodium-ion battery, with the initial systems now installed in homes across Europe, according to Electrek.

The California-based company expects US installations by the end of 2026, pending North American certification requirements for sodium-ion batteries, Electrek reported.

The Na+Casa stores 9.25 kWh of electricity and is compatible with most existing hybrid inverters, according to Electrek, making it suitable for both new solar installations and retrofits. UNIGRID says the battery is designed to last 25 years, roughly the lifespan of a rooftop solar system.

Per Electrek, the battery is designed to operate in temperatures ranging from -40F to 140F (-40C to 60C).

UNIGRID currently produces enough battery cells to supply 200 MWh of storage per year, according to Electrek. The company plans to raise annual production to 2 GWh in 2027 through manufacturing partnerships in China, South Korea, and Japan.

UNIGRID CEO and co-founder Darren H. S. Tan said Na+Casa moves NCO sodium-ion from a promising technology to a tangible residential storage product, giving installers an alternative to lithium-ion.

PJM reached an all-time peak load estimated at 168,158 MW between 5 and 6 p.m. on July 2, according to preliminary figures from PJM Inside Lines that factor in demand response programs. That surpassed the grid operator's previous record of 165,563 MW, set on August 2, 2006.

The record came as the PJM region observed its hottest-ever RTO average air temperature of 97 degrees on July 2, according to PJM Inside Lines.

Paul Dajewski, PJM's Sr. Manager for Dispatch, told stakeholders that the record load approached PJM's 90/10 seasonal forecast of 169,128 MW.

Forced generation outages ran between 18,100 MW and 19,400 MW from July 2 to July 4, according to PJM Inside Lines. Those figures exceeded the 12,800 MW average outage rate for the top 10 summer peak days of the last three years.

Demand response helped hold the line. PJM estimated preliminary demand response performance of about 6,113 MW on July 2 and 5,037 MW on July 3, according to PJM Inside Lines.

PJM requested and received a Department of Energy 202c emergency order granting temporary relief from environmental permit restrictions for generating units. The operator estimates about 3.25 GW of generation ran beyond environmental permit limitations under the order. Both 202c orders were effective July 1 and extended through July 6.

On the evening of July 2, PJM issued an Emergency Use of Backup Generator Warning for the BGE, PEPCO and Dominion transmission zones as transmission constraints and generation outages posed challenges, according to PJM Inside Lines. The warning notifies large load customers to prepare to switch to backup generation within 15 minutes. The follow-on Action requiring the switch was not needed and was never issued.

Red Eléctrica has finished expanding two 220 kV substations in the province of Toledo, at Calera y Chozas and Torrijos, the operator said.

The Calera y Chozas site gained two 220 kV bays. Torrijos also received two new bays, which will serve the railway corridor linking Castilla-La Mancha with Extremadura.

Red Eléctrica put roughly EUR 3 million into the work, which falls under the current Electricity Transmission Grid Plan.

Both projects qualify for European Union NextGenerationEU funding under the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, according to the operator.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked residents to set their air conditioners to 78 degrees Fahrenheit to protect the city's strained grid during a heat wave, according to Canary Media.

Canary Media reported that a historic heat dome affected the U.S. Midwest and Atlantic Coast earlier in the month.

Mamdani posted on X urging residents to ease demand and get through the heat together, according to Canary Media.

Masdar has signed BYD Energy Storage to deliver 11.275 GWh of batteries for an Abu Dhabi round-the-clock renewable plant that pairs solar generation with storage, ESS News reported.

The BYD order equips one storage station within the wider development, rated at 1,644 MW/11,275 MWh and built on the firm's Haohan battery system.

Masdar and Emirates Water and Electricity Co. (EWEC) are building the plant to a design of 5.2 GW of solar generation and 19 GWh of battery storage, according to ESS News. Commissioning is targeted for 2027.

Sungrow took a separate contract for the same development in May, covering 7.5 GWh of storage and 2.6 GW of photovoltaic inverter capacity, ESS News reported.

The two developers announced the round-the-clock project in January 2025, then broke ground on its first phase in October 2025. Masdar has called it the world's first large-scale round-the-clock gigascale renewable energy project.

The levelized cost of storage for a 100 MW, four-hour battery system has risen to roughly $210/MWh to $292/MWh, according to Lazard, which cited higher capital costs, supply chain constraints, and changing market conditions.

Storage costs have climbed about 27% on a $/MWh basis since 2020, according to Lazard, a rate the firm put at compound annual growth of about 4% to 6% depending on the metric.

Tariffs on lithium-ion battery imports are beginning to push costs higher, said Samuel Scroggins, managing director and head of renewables and sustainable infrastructure at Lazard. Restricted access to low-cost Chinese battery cells under Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) provisions is forcing the supply chain to reroute through other countries in Southeast Asia, with the increases passed on to offtakers, he said.

Unsubsidized utility-scale solar remains among the lowest-cost generation options, with an LCOE of roughly $40/MWh to $98/MWh, according to Lazard, up from $38/MWh to $78/MWh in 2025. Utility-scale solar LCOEs are up 18% from last year but remain 81% lower than in the report's first edition, Scroggins told ESS News.

Gas-fired combined-cycle generation (CCGT) is the lowest-cost dispatchable conventional technology in the report, with an LCOE of about $51/MWh to $129/MWh, according to Lazard, which said costs have risen on higher construction expenses and broader market pressures.

New nuclear generation carries an LCOE of roughly $175/MWh to $255/MWh, according to Lazard, which attributed the level to high capital requirements and lengthy development timelines.

India's commercial and industrial (C&I) sector accounts for nearly 42% to 45% of the country's total electricity consumption, according to ESS News, yet it has been slow to adopt battery storage even as costs fall and government support expands.

Lithium-ion battery prices have declined by nearly 90% globally since 2010, ESS News reported, citing the International Energy Agency (IEA). Despite that drop, cost remains a barrier at the project level. A battery energy storage system (BESS) installation can account for 30% to 50% of the total project cost for a renewable energy system, depending on size and configuration, according to ESS News.

The C&I segment's weight in national demand makes its uptake decisions significant for the wider market. That segment represents close to 42% to 45% of electricity use across the country, per ESS News.

Policy measures are targeting the gap. India has announced a Viability Gap Funding (VGF) scheme worth INR 37.6 billion, or USD 393 million, to support 4,000 MWh of battery storage projects, ESS News reported. On the supply side, the Advanced Chemistry Cell (ACC) Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme aims to establish 50 GWh of domestic manufacturing capacity, according to ESS News.

The storage push sits within a broader shift in the country's generation base. India has crossed 50% installed power capacity from non-fossil fuel sources, ahead of its 2030 target, and aims to reach 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by the end of the decade, ESS News reported.

Renewable and storage developers will compete for grid access at the Beariz 400 kV node in Galicia after Spain's Ministry for the Ecological Transition cleared an auction that reserves all newly available capacity for those project types, according to ESS News.

ESS News reported that the resolution reached Spain's Official State Gazette (BOE) on July 8, closing off the earlier first-come, first-served route for new capacity at the node. Any capacity that opens up at Beariz will be allocated competitively.

Behind the decision sits a July 1 assessment by Spanish transmission system operator Red Electrica, which judged the Beariz node fit for a competitive allocation process on technical and regulatory grounds, according to ESS News.

The threshold matters here: a mainland node needs at least 100 MW of available capacity before Spain can open a competitive access procedure, ESS News reported.

Bidding falls under Article 18 of Royal Decree 1183/2020, which opens grid access at chosen transmission nodes to competition when demand runs high or fresh capacity appears, according to ESS News. The auction admits new renewable generation and storage projects.