Guest Editorial: Special Section on Battery Energy Storage Systems for Net-zero Power Systems and Markets

Battery energy storage technologies have witnessed both dramatic cost reduction and technical evolution in recent years. This is leading to widespread deployment of battery energy storage systems (BESSs) worldwide, particularly to support operation of power grids with already deep penetration of renewables. Considering the development of new battery technologies with different power-to-energy ratios and for various engineering applications, BESSs could play a strategic role towards a net-zero energy future. New opportunities are emerging for BESSs to participate in several markets, provide different grid services, and perform “value stacking”, eventually allowing development of new business cases and improved BESS economics. BESS configurations that are “behind the meter”, “in front of the meter”, hybrid plants co-located with renewables, and so forth, are only some of the exciting propositions that are being seen in different countries and at different scales, from highly distributed (virtual power plants), to neighbourhood-level (community batteries), to utility scale.