Construction is underway by Statkraft at Ireland’s first 4-hour grid-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) in County Offaly, in Ireland’s midlands.
The 20MW, 4-hour BESS solution is supplied by a global market leader in utility-scale energy storage solutions and services, Fluence. It will be co-located with the company’s 55.8MW Cushaling Wind Farm, which too is currently under construction.
As in other countries, grid capacity in Ireland is becoming scarce, so as Statkraft develops further onshore wind and solar projects, there is a good opportunity to sensibly locate storage to mitigate the risk of local constraints and support congestion management.
The Cushaling battery project will enable energy from renewable sources in the midlands area to be stored during times of low demand, reducing costly curtailment, and later dispatched at times of peak electricity demand.
It will also support Ireland’s TSO EirGrid in ensuring network stability by delivering fast-acting system services as more non-synchronous renewable generation comes online. Additionally, by securing a 10-year capacity market contract, the project will contribute towards energy security in Ireland.
Greater trading opportunity
The Cushaling BESS and wind farm projects together received planning approval in September 2020. The Statkraft team’s decision to size the storage system was shaped by the market conditions in Ireland at the time, available site size and technology maturity looking beyond 2-hour duration.

As with Statkraft’s first two BESS projects in Ireland, Cushaling is co-located with wind generation. Image: Statkraft
The team also considered how to optimise the rating of the main grid transformer to share capacity with our Cushaling wind project. While sharing of Maximum Export Capacity (MEC) grid connection capacity is unfortunately not currently permitted in Ireland, Statkraft sees significant potential in co-location/hybrid assets under the same grid connection and is urging for policy changes in this area to maximise system benefit.
While system constraints can last longer than four hours, the 4-hour Fluence system was seen as a technology we had the confidence to deliver and one that could mitigate the constraint risk. As wholesale prices have also been volatile, there is also a greater energy trading opportunity by increasing to 4-hour duration.
Following the receipt of planning permission, the next step was to secure a 10-year capacity contract that would be the anchor revenue stream to support bringing the project to investment decision. Considering the capacity market auction timelines, the T-3 2024/2025 10-year capacity auction was targeted. Bids were placed in the first quarter of 2022, and in April of the same year, the project was awarded the 10-year capacity contract.
Energy arbitrage
As the team looks ahead to our next projects, we will need to see new routes to market to incentivise longer-duration storage as well as changes to the market systems to fully allow traders to optimise asset capability. We believe there should be more favourable treatment of network charges with respect to energy storage based on its ability to offer flexibility to help shape the demand and manage network congestion.
As it stands, current network charges (namely Demand TUoS) represent a significant barrier and constrain the energy arbitrage opportunities for energy storage, thus limiting the benefits energy storage can offer to the system.
For market access for BESS in Ireland, there are currently three revenue streams: the DS3 system services market, the capacity market and ISEM energy trading opportunities. With each of these markets having its own challenges, it can come down to how an individual developer forecasts them and their risk appetite.
The early BESS projects could underpin the revenue stack using the DS3 and capacity markets, but a quick review of the current state of play shows why Ireland needs storage-specific auctions (specifically targeting longer duration) to support the Irish government’s 2030 targets of 80% of generation from renewable sources.
The current DS3 system service market regime has been in place since 2017, with regulated tariffs designed to support the 2020 target of 40% of generation supplied from renewable sources. This was achieved within a central expenditure cap of €235 million (US$254 million).
The DS3 Programme did provide a clear route to market which encouraged investment in short-duration energy storage and six years later, there is now circa 800MW of 0.5-hour, 1-hour and 2-hour BESS projects operational on the system. This scale of deployment is impressive relative to the size of the Irish system when you consider that the country’s largest single infeed remains at 500MW, at least until the 700MW Celtic Interconnector comes online. This is scheduled to take place at the end of 2026.
Tariff reduction risk
However, the DS3 market is now overheated, as evidenced by the TSO signalling downward pressure on DS3 reserve tariff rates, and scarcity scalars in the latest DS3 rate consultation that came out in late March 2024. Ireland’s energy regulator (CRU) previously cut the tariffs to avoid breaching the expenditure cap. The CRU allowed the expenditure cap to be breached last year, but the industry is again facing tariff reduction risk.
It is not clear what the tariff rates will be between now and April 2026 when the existing DS3 market is overdue to be replaced by the Future Arrangements System Services (FASS) market. All of the above leads to significant uncertainty for existing and future grid-scale energy storage investment decisions, resulting in a significant problem in respect to “missing money” required to make up the business case.
Since the Cushaling BESS secured a 10-year T-3 2024/25 capacity contract, auction derating factors have been eroding for storage. The derating factors did incentivise longer duration storage systems (which pointed the Statkraft team towards four hours), but they have since halved, and the capacity auctions are no longer providing the revenue certainty required to make an investment decision.
In late 2023, the TSO asked for industry feedback on what a long-duration energy storage (LDES) specific auction would look like via a Call for Evidence to which Statkraft responded. The company is currently awaiting the next step in this process, the publication of a recommendations paper to policymakers. Publication of the related DECC Electricity Storage Policy Framework for Ireland is due in June of this year.
As mentioned previously, as in many other countries, good grid access is becoming harder to secure. As part of wind and solar development, developers need to price in lost energy through market dispatch down (system-wide curtailment and local constraints), which drives up auction bids.
While the market registration of full hybrid market units is not currently permitted in Ireland, we still see the benefits of co-location of storage with wind and solar that could help to lower auction bids. Co-locating storage with solar might be easier to forecast, but we also see the merits of co-location with wind to reduce lost energy while sharing capex costs across two technologies.
This is an extract of a feature article that originally appeared in Vol.39 of PV Tech Power, Solar Media’s quarterly journal covering the solar and storage industries. Every edition includes ‘Storage & Smart Power’, a dedicated section contributed by the Energy-Storage.news team, and full access to upcoming issues as well as the 10-year back catalogue are included as part of a subscription to Energy-Storage.news Premium.
About the Author
Rory Griffin is head of grid services at Statkraft Ireland. He has held operational roles with Ireland’s TSO in conventional power generation and, more recently, in developing grid services assets. In the TSO, he worked in Power System Protection for five years, followed by five years in the National Control Centre. Since 2022, he has managed Statkraft Ireland’s Grid Services team which develops storage and grid stability projects.

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In concurrent news, Giga Storage hopes to start construction on its 300MW/1,200MWh Leopard BESS project in the Netherlands this year, CCO Lars Rupert told Energy-Storage.news whilst at the ees Europe trade show and conference last week.
Leopard is also planned for a location in the north of the country, at a former aluminium smelting site of now-bankrupt firm Aldel.
The two announcements are major steps forward for the energy storage market in the Netherlands, which is generally agreed to be significantly further behind than neighbouring Belgium and Germany.
The business case in the Netherlands for large-scale BESS has generally been weaker because of, amongst other things, high grid fees for charging (which do not exist in the other countries).
The two largest operational projects in the country are 62.6MWh and 68MWh systems owned and operated by another firm SemperPower, monetised mainly via tolling deals, which the firm’s commercial director discussed with Energy-Storage.news (Premium access).
Efforts have recently been made by regulators to create the right environment for larger-scale projects to be deployed, including making grid fees more flexible and providing subsidies for co-located projects.
“As the Dutch energy transition efforts accelerate, the demand for flexibility is growing also. The challenges to our electricity grid have never been greater. Without adequate energy storage, the Netherlands risks increasing grid instability and security of supply risks,” Lion Storage said in its announcement.
Giga Storage is the owner and operator of what used to be the country’s largest projects, and has recently made a big push into Belgium too with a 2,400MWh project it also hopes to start construction on in 2025.
Rupert told Energy-Storage.news that the company has chosen the BESS provider for the Leopard project in the Netherlands though isn’t revealing it at this stage. He did, however, say that the company wants to contract with Tier 1 suppliers, most likely those based in Europe.
Lion Storage’s video render of its Mufasa BESS project showed it being comprised of units resembling Tesla Megapacks, though it hasn’t officially revealed its choice of provider either.

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Sierra Estrella, in the city of Avondale, Maricopa County, is the largest standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) in Arizona so far.
Although Salt River Project (SRP) earlier this year added a slightly larger 260MW system at its Sonoran Solar Energy Center, that project charges directly from a solar PV array of the same nameplate generation capacity as its battery storage component’s output, making Sierra Estrella the largest to charge from the grid.
Superstition, in the town of Gilbert, also in Maricopa, is expected to come online this week, slightly earlier than its larger counterpart. Sierra Estrella has also finished its commissioning stage and is due to enter service ahead of the brutal Arizonan summer and the attendant spikes in peak energy demand that will entail.
Both projects availed of tax credit incentives through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), while SRP said the majority of EPC work was carried out by unionised workers.
SRP chief executive officer Jim Pratt said the BESS resources would “provide flexibility and resource diversity to help maintain reliable power during Arizona’s hot summers”.
In addition to targeting net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the utility is also projecting a requirement to double the amount of generating resources it can call on over the next 10 years as it retires some 1,300MW of coal-fired generation and accommodates rising energy demand in the Phoenix metropolitan area.
As set out in its 2023 integrated resource plan (IRP), SRP is deploying 1,100MW of new energy storage resources by the end of 2024 along with that increase in generation capacity.
‘Important to get project online before Arizona summer in full swing’
Both new standalone BESS projects are equipped with Tesla Megapack lithium-ion (Li-ion) BESS solutions designed and manufactured in the US. Plus Power developed both projects in consultation with first responders in Avondale and Gilbert to best understand and mitigate safety concerns.
Burns & McDonnell, the EPC for the Sierra Estrella project, said its completion was ahead of schedule. The project team took a number of “innovative steps” to get construction completed in less than a year, Burns & McDonnell claimed.
These included an “assembly line approach” to various construction stages, such as the equipment installation team being ready to work on the site as soon as concrete foundations were poured, and then installation of the 275 containerised lithium iron phosphate (LFP) Megapacks and commissioning all happening in sequence.
The EPC also factored in Plus Power’s plans for augmentation of the batteries over time, a topic Burns & McDonnell’s energy storage technology manager Jason Barmann spoke to Energy-Storage.news Premium about in a recent interview. Barmann noted in that article that with most BESS projects planned by developers for augmentation to begin within three to five years of the start of operation, the US industry will soon enter its first big wave of augmentations.
Utilities SRP, Arizona Public Service contracting toll agreements for large-scale BESS
“It was very important to have this project online before summer in Arizona was in full swing,” Plus Power CEO Brandon O’Keefe said.
“This project will play an important part in helping SRP meet its needs for sustainable and reliable energy.”
Plus Power’s 1,360MWh of storage was selected by the utility in an all-source request for proposals (RFP) launched in Q3 2021, with contracts signed by the pair about a year later giving SRP the rights to control the dispatch of the stored power to mitigate peak demand.
Plus Power got US$82 million in tax equity investment towards the Superstition project a couple of months ago from Morgan Stanley, building on a US$1.8 billion October 2023 fundraise toward five projects including the Arizona pair and three assets in Texas.
Canadian Solar’s project development arm Recurrent Energy recently secured US$513 million financing for another project in Maricopa County with a different Arizona utility, Arizona Public Service (APS).
Recurrent Energy and APS signed a 20-year tolling agreement for the Papago Energy Storage project following a 2022 RFP. It will be co-located with a 300MWac solar PV plant, and feature a 300MW/1,200MWh BESS, making it the state’s biggest BESS of any kind, albeit Sierra Estrella will be the biggest standalone facility in the state even after Papago comes online in Q2 2025.

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Storage development will go the way of renewables
“To-date, storage development siting has been easy, though when it comes to permitting, there are a lot of negotiations. It involves arguing with legal articles, there are paragraphs of different regulations that are not clear, different decrees can be contradictory depending on who you speak to. One person interprets it as this, the other that etc,” Gerstner said.
That has meant that, for savvy developers, it has been feasible to reach ready-to-build (RTB) stage for a project within 10-11 months of signing a land lease agreement, though this has been getting longer since the start of the year.
“What we are seeing now is some municipalities are starting to discuss guidelines about how to develop storage in the municipality, which permits are necessary, essentially what happened in renewables 15-20 years ago,” Gerstner said.
“So this type of super-fast project development in German energy storage will soon be over. The velocity of developing battery projects in Germany will decrease.”
“There will be a move towards a much slower albeit more predictable procedure, like in the UK where there are clearer regulations. There the challenge is the grid, and it will soon be an issue in Germany.” 
Medium voltage ‘bubble’
There is also going to be a move to building more transmission-level or high voltage-level connected projects, which can be larger in scale than medium-voltage ones albeit more expensive and take longer to build.
A lot of storage project development in Germany has to-date focused on the medium-voltage level, and Gerstner said “there is a bit of a bubble in the medium-voltage environment”.
Major developers and operators of battery energy storage system (BESS) projects in Germany reported on recently by Energy-Storage.news include BayWa r.e., Eco Stor, Kyon Energy, Energisto and Nofar.
‘Danger of nothing happening any more’
Gerstner sounded a note of caution, saying that although it was necessary to formalise and unify project development across the country there is a danger that development stops altogether.
“The danger is these regulations being made – it may become so slow and over-regulated, nothing will happen anymore. There are not yet clear general guidelines for the complete country neither on environmental permitting nor on building permits.”
“Every municipality, district or competent authority has the option to define some things by their own, and there is the danger, in the permitting process, it could really slow down the market. We’re working hard to avoid that and voting for clear but feasible regulations and guidelines.”
BayWa r.e. is part of the BayWa Group, which is also active in agriculture and real estate. BayWa r.e. is active in clean energy project development globally, including Germany as well as the UK, where it recently had a 3-hour BESS approved for construction, France and the US.

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Alpiq acquired the project in Valkeakoski from Merus Power, which also does early-stage development work, and the latter will now provide the BESS hardware along with long-term operation and maintenance (O&M) services. Merus may also provide its trading platform in future too.
The project is scheduled to come online in summer 2025 and amounts to an investment of around €20 million (US$23.6 million). It will primarily participate in Finland’s frequency reserve markets and will be one of the largest BESS in the country.
Jones, Lang & LaSalle (JLL) is advising Merus Power on the project.
Alpiq operates legacy plants as well as renewables in Switzerland, and is the largest shareholder (with 39%) in a 20GWh pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) plant that came online there in 2022. It is also optimising the largest BESS in Switzerland, which was recently expanded from 20MW to 28MW.
Capalo AI to optimise Merus-provided BESS for owner eNordic
In related news, Capalo AI has been enlisted by eNordic to optimise the energy market activity for a 38.5MW/38MWh BESS in Lappeenranta, southeast Finland – eNordic is the local investment manager for global private equity firm Ardian.
Merus Power is also the company providing the BESS hardware for that project, as reported by Energy-Storage.news in February this year. That is scheduled to come online in Spring 2025. Energy-Storage.news interviewed Merus and eNordic about the project whilst at Solar Media’s Energy Storage Summit EU 2024 in London in February (Premium access).
Capalo AI will use its Zeus VPP platform to optimise the BESS project’s charge and discharge in Finland’s ancillary services markets – FFR, FCR- D, FCR-N, aFRR, mFRR – and the Nord Pool wholesale markets, namely the Spot and Intraday.
In written comments to Energy-Storage.news, company CEO Henri Taskinen said that the Finland and Swedish markets remain merchant-based. Toll deals (like a large one seen in the UK recently) are being discussed but not many players are committing to it yet. aFRR, mFRR, and Intraday will be safeguards against the saturation of FCR, he added.

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The plans include several elements aimed at benefiting the community. These include more than 12 acres of land dedicated to woodland creation and wildflower meadows, planting 129 trees, and creating a new permissive footpath through the site. The site is expected to bring a biodiversity net gain of at least 25.7%.
Elements Green executive chairman Mark Turner commented: “Securing planning permission is a remarkable achievement for our team. We are preparing to begin construction and bring our vision to life, creating not only a state-of-the-art energy storage solution but also making a positive contribution to the local environment with additional planting and the creation of a permissive path. Through its connection into the existing national grid substation at Staythorpe, the project builds on the Trent Valley’s long history of powering the UK.”
“We are excited about the future and the positive impact this project will have on our organisation and the broader community,” Turner said.
“The UK Government has set ambitious and legally binding targets to eliminate carbon emissions by 2050. More renewable energy is needed to fast-track away from fossil fuels, and energy storage and large-scale solar development are recognised as having an important role in achieving this.”
The UK has been ranked the world’s third most attractive country for BESS development in Ernst & Young’s (EY’s) latest edition of its Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index (RECAI), and major investment into the sector has been on the rise.
This story first appeared on Solar Power Portal.

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Alongside grid-forming BESS assets, Transgrid stated that a “diverse portfolio of solutions is required to meet NSW’s system strength needs, including synchronous condensers, modifications to existing and future synchronous machines, contracts with hydro, coal and gas assets”.
Specifically, the PADR outlines that between eight and 14 synchronous condensers are needed to replace the system strength lost due to retiring coal assets and support the rollout of renewable energy generation assets.
Contracts should also be established with existing hydro, gas, and coal generators to ensure they can switch on or operate in synchronous condenser mode when needed.
The executive general manager of network at Transgrid, Marie Jordan, outlined that the report is a “big step forward in our planning to ensure the heartbeat of the grid stays strong throughout the rapid transition” and that more supported must be provided to “new sources of system strength”.
“Renewable energy sources like wind and solar don’t have the same capabilities and need to follow a strong signal from the network, or they will disconnect, which is why we urgently need new sources of system strength,” Jordan said.
Transgrid operates and maintains the high-voltage electricity network in New South Wales, as well as the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).
Australia’s support for grid-forming technology
Aaron Gerdemann, senior business development manager at global solar inverter manufacturer SMA, said in PV Tech Power, Vol. 39, that grid-forming battery storage technology offers a rapid delivery of stored power and energy, outperforming conventional synchronous power plants in terms of response time and efficiency.
According to Gerdemann, Australia’s unique energy landscape, particularly with the vast potential for solar and wind deployment, could offer insight into the “future of energy supply and grid stability” as the island nation attempts to integrate renewable energy into the grid seamlessly.
In December 2022, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) announced its support for 2GW/4.2GWh of grid-forming BESS capacity, recognising the urgent need to bolster the grid’s stability.

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Eos said the funding will support its plan to scale operations and execute on its path to profitability, with losses narrowing in recent quarters. It manufactures a proprietary zinc-based battery which it sells to system integrators for projects with up to 12 hours of required discharge duration.
The company will use the proceeds to retire its existing $100 million senior secured term loan on favourable terms, which it said will strengthen its balance sheet. It said it has reached an agreement to extinguish that debt for US$27 million, of which US$20 million has been paid with the remaining US$7 million payable over the next 12 months.
Eos CFO Nathan Kroeker said: “The strategic investment announced today, combined with Eos’ highly efficient manufacturing capacity model, supports our capital needs as we execute on Project AMAZE. We look forward to working with Cerberus and their strong network to continue driving down product costs, improving performance of our storage systems, and developing financing alternatives for our customers.”
AMAZE – American Made Zinc Manufacturing – is the firm’s plan to ramp-up US manufacturing of its battery technology to 3GWh from 800MWh currently, which will mostly be funded by a Department of Energy loan announced in September 2023.
The announcement said Eos has a US$13.3 billion pipeline and $602.7 million orders backlog for its product as of 31 March 2024, though has in the past had to defend these claimed figures. It has primarily been active in the US to-date but was exhibiting last week at the ees Europe energy storage trade show and conference in Munich, Germany.
The Nasdaq-listed company’s share price appears to have temporarily been boosted by today’s announcement with Cerberus, which came just as the markets opened at 8am Eastern Time, although has mostly come back down after the initial jump.

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On the same day, Hochul also said a new large-scale competitive solicitation for onshore renewable energy resources will be held, administered by NYSERDA.
Both renewables and energy storage are considered key to achieving targets that include 70% renewable energy on the New York grid by 2030, and the deployment of 6GW of energy storage by that date.
The targets are at the heart of the state’s Climate Protection and Community Leadership Act (CPCLA), which was initiated by Hochul’s predecessor Andrew Cuomo. Shortly Hochul took office at the beginning of 2023, the storage target was doubled from 3GW to its current goal.
As well as helping New York to decarbonise towards 100% emissions-free electricity by 2040 and contributing to improved air quality, the addition of energy storage at both large-scale and distributed scales would lower electricity system costs by about US$2 billion, Hochul said last week.
As of the beginning of April, New York State had awarded about US$200 million in incentives to around 396MW of BESS now in operation, while it has contracted for a further 581MW that are moving towards construction. That however leaves it well behind national leading states such as Texas and California, the latter of which has surpassed 10GW of batteries connected to its main CAISO grid.
New York Energy Storage Roadmap 2.0
Roadmap 2.0 was published just before the start of 2023, and it included six main proposals.
Among those were plans to launch NYSERDA-led solicitations for 4.7GW of storage across the utility-scale (defined in NYSERDA parlance as ‘bulk storage’ over 5MW), commercial and industrial (C&I) and community storage (defined as ‘retail storage’) and residential systems.
Bulk storage procurement will be done through a mechanism called the ‘Index Storage Credit’, which is likely to be similar in scope to New York’s Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) scheme. Under the REC, developers bid a strike price into a reverse auction, which, once awarded, benchmarks the revenues they can expect to earn through their contracts with state counterparties.
The ‘missing money’ for energy storage has been a major barrier to attracting investment, in a state where electricity prices do not experience as much volatility as other leading markets such as ERCOT in Texas. ERCOT’s merchant market sees big price spikes in wholesale power prices, which BESS asset owners and investors capitalise on.
In other words, the state will underwrite some of the merchant risk for storage developers, but when revenues far exceed the strike price, profits will be paid back, de-risking the investment from both sides of the contract.
The Index Storage Credit has largely been welcomed by industry voices and analysts, but at present remains a work in progress. The PSC’s approval of the roadmap should means its launch later this year can proceed in earnest.
The mechanism will account for 3GW of utility-scale storage, while existing NYSERDA block incentive programmes by region will be expanded to support the development of 1.5GW of retail storage and 200MW of residential storage.
These distributed-scale incentive schemes include the Value of Distributed Energy Resources (VDER) programme, which values clean electricity resources for feeding into the grid at locations and times when it is of most benefit.    
While Roadmap 2.0 was created partly to address the challenges in encouraging large-scale BESS development, the 2018 Roadmap 1.0 was largely successful in promoting the uptake of distributed scale storage, hence the greater reconfiguration of the scheme to enable bulk storage installations, which were not as successful in gaining traction.
The roadmap also provides for 35% of overall programme funding to go towards deployments that benefit disadvantaged communities and target reducing the use of fossil fuel-power peaker plants.
Not only are peaker plants polluting and expensive to run, with some of New York’s fleet running on kerosene, fuel oil as well as natural gas, but they have historically often been built in or close to disadvantaged communities. Health and safety conditions in low and middle-income communities and communities of colour have, therefore, been disproportionately affected by the siting of these power stations. The good news is that battery storage systems of 4-hour duration are considered by many an effective means of mitigating the use of peakers in New York.
Electric utilities will also be ordered to make more comprehensive studies on the value of investing in energy storage as a ‘non-wires alternatives’ (NWAs) to costly transmission and distribution (T&D) network upgrades, research and development (R&D) in areas including long-duration energy storage (LDES) will be a bigger priority at state level.
Finally, workers on projects of 1MW or over in size qualifying for state programmes will need to be paid prevailing wages, under the terms of Roadmap 2.0.
Shortly after it was first published, Dr William Acker, executive director of the trade association and technology development group New York BEST (NY-BEST), told Energy-Storage.news the new roadmap would create “a very, very strong market for energy storage in the state”.
New York’s relatively slow start to life as an energy storage target market has been furthered hindered by a spate of fires that occurred at BESS projects during 2023. The state’s response to growing fire safety concerns has included the formation of a working group made up of state agencies that examined all incidents and installed projects.
A set of 11 recommended changes to state fire codes that emerged from the group have been published in draft form, and further guidance is expected in the coming weeks, following a period of consultation that has since taken place.
“Expanding energy storage technology is a key component to building New York’s clean energy future and reaching our climate goals. This new framework provides New York with the resources it needs to speed up our transition to a green economy, while ensuring the reliability and resilience of our grid,” Hochul said.

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Four containerised 20-foot PowerTitan units totalling 2.75MW/10MWh were lit on fire at an undisclosed third-party lab facility in Puyang, China’s Henan province.
Aiming to replicate a real-world scenario, no external fire control measures were applied as the units burned at the 23 May event.
Sungrow said the results demonstrated that even if thermal runaway caused cells inside the systems to ignite, the fire would not propagate to neighbouring containers or cause damage to other equipment at both DC block and station control levels.
The PowerTitan’s roof’s deflagration panels automatically activated, sending fire upwards to prevent its spread to other battery cabinets and system equipment.
Large-scale burn tests from other providers
Other BESS providers have conducted publicly announced burn tests on full-scale containerised units, although Sungrow claimed its test to be a world-first in terms of scale and the fact that it was live-streamed to selected stakeholders, including owners’ engineers, subject matter experts and fire protection consultants.
A company spokesperson claimed tests carried out by other providers “were very small, with a limited number of batteries,” versus Sungrow’s “largest” test to date.
In May 2023, Wärtsilä said it had put its GridSolv Quantum containerised unit through close simulation of a “worst-case scenario” event, lighting a fire inside a BESS unit and allowing it to burn for eight hours inside the ventilated unit.
That test proved the GridSolv Quantum’s doors would remain closed and prevent fire from spreading, while third-party fire safety group Fire & Risk Alliance captured gases released by the fire, concluding that the gases would be no more harmful than a fire involving more common consumer products.
This followed the BESS solution undergoing UL9540A thermal runaway propagation testing under accepted conditions and standards a couple of months previously, but the company said it wanted to push further to prove its safety in a scenario closer to a real-world event.
According to Wartsila director of product management and hardware Darrell Furlong, “this kind of bespoke, worst-case scenario testing demonstrates to our stakeholders that we’re serious about safety.”
Furlong told Energy-Storage.news Premium at the time that rather than just passing the minimum requirements of UL9540A and other standard testing, the company was investing in a more rigorous testing programme.
Similarly, in September 2023, Fluence performed a large-scale fire test that Andrew Gilligan, director of commercial strategy at the integrator and manufacturer, said “extended beyond industry standards and demonstrated the safety of our storage products.”

Sungrow released reports from the test, which was supervised by DNV, at last week’s ees Europe conference in Germany. Image: Sungrow
Although the Sungrow spokesperson claimed to Energy-Storage.news that its competitors had not live-streamed their own tests, “considering the possibility of failure to burn,” all three companies will, of course, share a common interest in proving the safety of battery storage as an asset class in energy, power and grid infrastructure.
“Too often, renewable energy sceptics raise fire safety concerns, even though batteries are overwhelmingly safe. These criticisms slow the adoption of such technologies,” Sungrow USA product engineering manager for its ESS division Bryce Laber said.
“At this stage, we are the only energy storage system supplier to execute a test with the complete machine of 10MWh and successfully pass, with unprecedented industry-firsts and transparency.”
Of course, all BESS providers will be hoping that their products will not be put through similar punishment in the field.
Sungrow pointed out that its PowerTitan series, including the newer, higher energy density and capacity PowerTitan 2.0, is equipped with liquid cooling technology that prevents dust and humidity from entering the system, which could be a risk of air-cooled BESS.
PowerTitan also suppresses thermal runaway through rapid arc shutdown technology, coolant loop connectors that self-seal, fusing protection at rack level and advanced temperature management controls that limit variations in cell temperature to within 2.5°C.
Watch Energy-Storage.news’ sponsored webinar with IHI Terrasun from March 2023, “What experts think you should know about UL9540 codes and standards for battery storage,” for more on UL9540A and related topics.

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