Monday, 24 August 2026

The 200 MW/3,600 MWh Rigifa battery energy storage system (BESS) in Scotland has secured planning consent, ESS News reported. The 18-hour duration project is one of the largest lithium-ion storage schemes to clear consenting in the country.

Rigifa is one of five Field projects picked by Ofgem for support under the forthcoming long-duration electricity storage (LDES) cap and floor scheme, according to ESS News.

The regulator published its minded-to decisions for LDES projects in June 2026, selecting 16 projects from a shortlist of 77 that had been revealed in September 2025, ESS News reported.

Seven of those 16 selected projects sit in the north of Scotland, per the same report.

Rigifa will connect to the Gills Bay substation near Thurso on the north coast of Scotland, ESS News said.

EcoPro BM is converting an existing NCA cathode line at its plant in Debrecen, Hungary, so it can also turn out high-nickel NCM material for European carmakers, according to electrive.

The upgrade carries a price tag of around 40 billion won, or roughly 25 million euros, electrive reported.

Output from the reworked line is contracted forward. From the fourth quarter of 2027, the site will ship cathode material with a nickel content above 90 per cent to a German premium car manufacturer, according to electrive.

Debrecen currently runs three production lines with a combined annual capacity of 54,000 tonnes, enough for the batteries of roughly 600,000 electric cars, electrive reported.

Actual throughput sits well below that ceiling. EcoPro BM has planned a production volume of about 10,000 tonnes for 2026, rising to 30,000 tonnes in 2027, according to electrive.

The site was originally scoped larger. At the 2023 groundbreaking, the company had set out a future capacity of 108,000 tonnes per year in Debrecen, electrive reported.

On the financial side, higher volumes and improved capacity utilisation are expected to push the Hungarian subsidiary into quarterly profitability in the second half of 2026, according to electrive.

An engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) tender has opened in China for a 660 MW/3.96 GWh compressed air energy storage (CAES) facility, according to ESS News.

The plant will be built in Sili town, Jiyuan, in Henan province, with planned static investment of about CNY 4.79 billion (USD 670 million), ESS News reported. The tender covers engineering, procurement and construction work for the 660 MW/3.96 GWh facility under a single package.

Jiyuan Hengdong Energy Storage Technology is developing the project and will award engineering, procurement and construction works under one EPC contract, according to ESS News. Bids are due by Sept. 22, 2026, and the construction period is expected to run 36 months.

The design uses an advanced adiabatic CAES configuration, with pressurized water serving as the thermal storage medium, ESS News reported. Rather than reusing an existing salt cavern or mine, the developer will excavate a new underground cavern to hold the compressed air.

That combination sets the technical scope of the tender. Adiabatic designs recover the heat generated during compression and return it during expansion, removing the need for fuel combustion on discharge. Cavern construction, rather than turbomachinery supply, typically drives both the schedule and the capital cost in such projects, which is consistent with the 36-month build window attached to the Jiyuan tender.

At 3.96 GWh, the facility would store six hours of output at its rated 660 MW, based on the capacity figures reported by ESS News.

Harmony Energy has energized its 35 MW / 70 MWh Skeeby battery energy storage system near Richmond, North Yorkshire, England, according to ESS News.

The site is the first Harmony Energy project to go live since Alpiq acquired a 90 percent stake in the developer, an agreement announced in July, ESS News reported. That transaction brought roughly 400 MW of assets under construction into the Swiss producer's existing European battery storage portfolio.

Construction at Skeeby began in early 2026, giving a turnaround of about seven months from shovel to energization, per ESS News. The installation uses Tesla Megapacks.

Harmony Energy's most recent large commissioning before Skeeby was the 100 MW / 200 MWh Chevire battery system at the port of Nantes-Saint-Nazaire in France, brought online in 2025, ESS News reported. Skeeby's 70 MWh of energy capacity is roughly a third of that French site, and both projects hold a two-hour duration at nameplate power.

Japanese households shopping for rooftop solar and home batteries are driven mainly by electricity costs. An August poll by iChoosr, which runs group-buying campaigns for solar and storage, put bill reduction first for 48% of respondents, while 19% pointed to disaster resilience, pv magazine reported.

The respondent pool numbered 14,478, drawn from 24 prefectures. All had signed up for iChoosr's "Minna no Ouchi ni Taiyoko" ("Solar for Everyone's Home") campaign, with sign-ups running from Feb. 25 to July 23, according to pv magazine.

A March poll by the solar and battery marketplace operator Goodfellows produced a similar ordering. Among solar owners weighing a battery purchase, 51.9% pointed to electricity savings in 2025, up from 39.3% in 2022, pv magazine reported.

Expectations of what the hardware will actually do skew the same way. Residential installer ECODA surveyed households in 2025 and found 76% expecting solar-plus-storage to cut electricity costs, with 49.1% expecting backup power in a disaster, according to pv magazine.

Behind the cost focus sits the end of guaranteed export payments. Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) counted roughly 530,000 residential solar systems, about 2 GW, exiting the feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme during November and December 2019 alone, pv magazine reported. Once a FIT contract expires, the owner loses the fixed export price and must either accept a lower rate for exported power or keep it on site.

The group-buying channel has built up a sizeable pipeline. iChoosr counts more than 110,000 household registrations in Japan since 2019 and more than 10,000 completed installations, according to pv magazine.

Canada is putting nearly CAD 10 million into modernizing the City of Red Deer's electricity system, drawn from Natural Resources Canada's Smart Renewables and Electrification Pathways Program (SREPs), the department said. Shafqat Ali, President of the Treasury Board, announced the funding.

The money covers the deployment of over 45,000 smart meters across Red Deer, according to Natural Resources Canada. It also pays for the communications equipment required to run the smart meter network.

SREPs is a CAD 4.5-billion program, per Natural Resources Canada, backing grid modernization, energy storage and renewables in every region of the country.