Thursday, 13 August 2026

Battery storage on the US power grid reached nearly 52 GW of nameplate capacity by mid-2026, after developers commissioned 8.3 GW in the first six months of the year, according to pv magazine.

The grid had closed 2025 with 43.6 GW of operational battery capacity, pv magazine reported. Averaged across the last three years, utility-scale battery capacity has expanded at 70% annually, according to the latest Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) cited by pv magazine. The EIA report attributes that pace to rapid utility-scale solar deployment and wholesale price arbitrage.

Project developers have told the EIA they plan to connect a further 54 GW over the next two and a half years, pv magazine reported. The pipeline splits into 14 GW scheduled for the second half of 2026, 26 GW for 2027, and 14 GW for 2028. On that schedule, national operational storage capacity is expected to pass 105 GW by the end of 2028, according to pv magazine.

Texas carries a large share of the build. The ERCOT territory battery fleet is projected to grow from 15 GW in 2025 to 37 GW by the end of 2027, pv magazine reported, to manage surging solar generation in the state.

The near-term concentration is visible in the numbers: the 26 GW slated for 2027 alone is roughly half the 52 GW installed base reported for mid-2026. The 14 GW planned for the second half of this year would also exceed the 8.3 GW added in the first half.

Federal regulators have cleared a path for virtual power plants to serve rising electricity demand in PJM, described by Canary Media as the biggest energy market in the country.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered PJM Interconnection to treat statistical sampling as a valid method for measuring the reliability of programs, according to Canary Media.

Measurement method is the pivot. Aggregators that pool thousands of distributed devices, from home batteries to smart thermostats, have argued that verifying performance device by device is impractical at scale. Sampling lets an aggregator measure a representative subset and extrapolate across the fleet, and the FERC order requires PJM to recognize that approach.

The ruling applies to demand-side resources competing in a market that Canary Media identifies as the largest in the country, where load growth has become the central planning question for grid operators.

Canary Media reported the decision as a win for virtual power plants in PJM.

BW ESS has bought the ready-to-build Yanco battery energy storage system in the Riverina region of New South Wales from ACEnergy, a 250 MW / 1,000 MWh project the Swiss owner-operator plans to bring into operation by 2028, according to ESS News.

Construction is set to start in late 2026, ESS News reported, following the transfer of the project from the Melbourne-headquartered developer ACEnergy.

Before the sale, ACEnergy locked in the delivery chain. It appointed China-headquartered CATL as system integrator and the Australian engineering, procurement and construction firm ACLE Services as Balance of Plant contractor, ESS News said.

Yanco lifts BW ESS's Australian holdings, held wholly or jointly, to 1.3 GWh in commissioning and 1 GWh entering construction, alongside a greenfield pipeline of roughly 2 GW, per ESS News.

Separately, Edify Energy reached financial close on the co-located Ganymirra and Majors Creek hybrid projects in north Queensland, which together will supply 360 MWp of solar and 1,200 MWh of lithium-ion battery storage, ESS News reported.

The financing pool behind Edify's Queensland build-out runs wider than those two assets. Fourteen domestic and international lenders have committed AUD 3.2 billion, or USD 2.25 billion, across a group that also takes in the 720 MWp / 2,400 MWh Smoky Creek and Guthrie's Gap projects, which closed in May 2026, according to ESS News.

Both Edify projects are backed by Australia's Capacity Investment Scheme and are due to be operational in 2028, ESS News said, putting them on the same commissioning year as Yanco.

A four-hour battery in Sicily and Sardinia will be rated at 31% in Italy's 2028 Capacity Market auction, down from 67% in the previous auction, according to ESS News. The change follows an August 6 decree by Italy's Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security (MASE).

The decree sets battery rating coefficients that differ by zone for the first time in the Capacity Market, with northern zones favoured, ESS News reported. The stated aim is to provide more locational development signals.

The final figure for the two island zones landed well below the level floated earlier in the process. ESS News reported that 31% is much lower than the 51% proposed during the consultation phase.

For developers holding four-hour projects in Sicily and Sardinia, the arithmetic is direct: the final values imply battery remuneration 50% lower than in the previous auction, according to ESS News.

The localised approach means developers must re-evaluate project pipelines and expected returns across the country, ESS News reported.

Limes Renewable Energy has secured Ready-to-Build (RTB) status for Huañil, a 200 MW / 1,000 MWh standalone battery project in the Coquimbo region of Chile, ESS News reported. It is the Italian developer's first RTB asset in Chile and its first anywhere outside Italy.

The lithium-ion installation is sized to deliver 200 MW of continuous output for up to five hours, at an estimated investment of approximately USD 188 million, according to ESS News.

Huañil is designed as a standalone storage asset rather than a generation hybrid. It will draw and store electricity from Chile's National Electric System (SEN), providing up to 1,000 MWh of capacity, per the ESS News report.

The developer's maturing Chilean portfolio extends beyond the single site. ESS News put that pipeline at roughly 180 MWp of solar PV and 620 MW of battery capacity.

Counting both markets, Limes' fully authorized and RTB pipeline across Chile and Italy now exceeds 600 MW, according to the same report. That total sets the RTB milestone in Coquimbo against the company's stated push into markets outside its home country.

Fraunhofer EMI has built an X-ray technology that shows dynamic processes inside large-format prismatic battery cells in real time, and one such system is set for installation at PowerCo's Salzgitter site in 2028, according to electrive.

The setup records up to 1,000 images per second, electrive reported, exposing gas formation, material displacement and crack propagation inside the cell at extremely high resolution.

That frame rate is the point of the instrument. Failure inside a prismatic cell happens faster than conventional inspection can follow, and the Fraunhofer EMI method is aimed at capturing it while it unfolds rather than after the fact.

The institute said it has already characterised material ejection during thermal runaway, along with propagation behaviour in multi-cell setups, for several German car manufacturers including VW and Audi.

PowerCo, founded by Volkswagen Group in 2022, is based in Salzgitter and is building three cell factories with a combined capacity of up to 200 GWh per year, according to electrive: Salzgitter in Germany, Valencia in Spain and St. Thomas in Canada.

The Salzgitter installation therefore lands inside the group's own cell manufacturing base rather than in a standalone laboratory, placing the imaging capability at the same address as the company's headquarters and its first plant.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said the Department of Energy will not proceed with designating three proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors (NIETCs) that had been selected in December 2024 to advance through the review process, according to a Department of Energy announcement.

The three dropped corridors are the Lake Erie-Canada Corridor, the Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor, and the Tribal Energy Access Corridor, the department said.

Wright attributed the decision to the outcome of the department's own review. Extensive review, including public feedback and stakeholder input, made clear that the current designation process for the three proposed transmission corridors should not continue, the secretary said.

NIETC designation is the federal mechanism through which the Department of Energy identifies geographic areas where transmission constraints or congestion warrant expedited treatment. The three corridors had cleared an earlier stage of that process before the cancellation.

Noon Energy and Sabanci Renewables have agreed to deploy up to 1 GW (100 GWh) of ultra-long-duration storage for AI infrastructure, structured as power purchase agreements or capacity offtake contracts. Commercial deployment could begin as early as 2027.

The contracting choice matters more than the headline capacity. By routing the systems through PPAs or capacity offtake agreements rather than equipment sales, the two companies shift performance risk onto the storage developer and give data-center offtakers a fixed cost per delivered block of energy.

Noon Energy's cells store energy using carbon and oxygen instead of relatively scarce metals like lithium, and are designed for durations of 100 hours and above. That duration class targets multi-day gaps in solar and wind output, a different problem from the two-to-four-hour arbitrage and frequency work that lithium-ion fleets handle today.

The company has raised more than USD 45 million in venture capital and government grants.

Sabanci Renewables is operating and constructing four power plants with a combined capacity of 790 MWdc within the ERCOT market. The developer is targeting a 3 GW renewable portfolio over the next five years.

Set against that pipeline, the storage agreement is close to a third of the portfolio target in power terms, and its energy rating of 100 GWh would exceed the daily output of the 790 MWdc already operating or under construction. The deal therefore reads less as a bolt-on to existing solar assets and more as a separate product line aimed at buyers who need firm supply rather than intermittent megawatt-hours.

AI data-center load is the stated end market. Those sites run flat around the clock, which is the profile ultra-long-duration chemistry is built to serve and the profile lithium-ion cannot cover through a multi-day lull without heavy oversizing.

The 2027 start date is framed as potential, not committed. Between now and then the technology has to move from a chemistry with 100-hour design duration to systems that can be underwritten at gigawatt scale under contract terms an offtaker will sign.

The announcement was distributed by GlobeNewswire.