Dr Alan Ruddell is a Senior Research Engineer at STFC. In his early career, he was an electronics and electrical system design engineer and project manager. In the 1990s he joined Imperial College and then Rutherford Appleton Laboratory to work on energy storage in renewable energy systems. Since then he has been involved in a wide range of wind, solar, and energy storage research projects. He is particularly interested in the characteristics of energy storage technologies, and their suitability in both grid-connected and standalone applications.