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With the increasing share of fluctuating renewables in power grids the need for, but also the value of, electrical energy storage is identified. Particularly advanced battery systems such as lithium ion offer various opportunities: they can be designed to be highly modular and are therefore flexible in usage and they offer comparably high efficiency as well as long calendar and cycle life times. Typical examples of such grid connected stationary applications are described in this chapter. These include small residential as well as commercial battery storage for increased self-consumption and self-sufficiency. The principles of system design and the integration of the key components such as inverter and energy management are described for such applications. Furthermore, test results of market available products show the achievements but also the remaining optimization potential, which has to be addressed in future developments. In particular, in the field of commercial and industrial applications, bankability and insurability are key for mass market dissemination. Therefore critical topics such as safety, reliability as well as performance are discussed in this chapter.

The design of control systems in large-scale CPV power plants will be more challenging in the future. Reasons are the increasing size of power plants, the requirements of grid operators, new functions, and new technological trends in industrial automation or communication technology. Concepts and products from fixed-mounted PV can only partly be adopted since control systems for sun-tracking installations are considerable more complex due to the higher quantity of controllable entities. The objective of this paper is to deliver design considerations for next generation control systems. Therefore, the work identifies new applications of future control systems categorized into operation, monitoring and maintenance domains. The key-requirements of the technical system and the application layer are identified. In the resulting section, new strategies such as a more decentralized architecture are proposed and design criteria are derived. The contribution of this paper should allow manufacturers and research institutes to consider the design criteria in current development and to place further research on new functions and control strategies precisely.

Now it is the moment for CPV to become a reliable solution for large scale electricity generation, because it is one of the technologies with higher efficiency, and moreover, it has still margin for improvement. In order to continue with this development, it is important to introduce, in the design of the installations, all the lessons learned during the operation of pilot plants. This paper presents the operation results obtained at the ISFOC pilot plants, during the first three and a half years of operation, and the NACIR project. The CPV technology is not demonstrating signs of degradation which could reduce its high capability of transforming light into electricity. From the operation issues, valuable information is obtained in order to improve the design, turning CPV prototypes into an industrialized product ready to compete with other technologies, making a great effort in the reduction of the installation costs.

The field performance of Concentrix CPV installations is studied for several locations and with respect to the climatic conditions. Four locations are addressed and two locations with very different climatic conditions are studied in detail. The performance of the CPV systems is very similar on both sides. The analyzed data include DNI, ambient temperature, temperature inside the module, wind speed, DC system voltage and AC system efficiency. The system performance can be well understood from the data shown.