Renewable Energy Systems (RES) has completed work on its first utility-scale battery-based energy storage system in the UK, at a solar farm owned by British Solar Renewables (BSR).

Two large-scale solar plants planned for the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido will be paired with utility-scale energy storage, in order to meet regulations set out by the region’s electricity authority.

Chinese energy storage company TrinaBEST launched its residential storage product for the Australian market at last week’s All Energy show, while the USA’s Enphase and Australian flow battery maker Redflow were among the other exhibitors showcasing residential products.

VARTA’s energy storage system project manager Michael Gopp discusses the technologies past, present and future.

The United Kingdom’s decision by referendum last week to exit the European Union has been received negatively by one of the few commentators prepared to go on record with a UK industry view.

The future for Tesla-SolarCity could lie in aggregating rooftop PV with stationary energy storage, EVs and other distributed energy resources, the head of energy storage market analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has said.

The prospect of the ‘commoditisation’ of lithium-ion batteries is not likely to be as clear-cut as has been seen in the PV industry, one manufacturer has said.

Trina Best, the energy storage company begun as part of Trina Solar but now a separate entity in its own right, wants to go public by 2020 and has not ruled out building its own battery cell production facilities in future.

A wide-ranging report from UK politicians into the country’s energy system has found that policy has moved at “glacial pace” to adapt to energy storage technologies and urged for faster action.

Morgan Stanley has predicted a boom in solar-plus-storage in Australia, calling PV a direct substitute for grid power and warning investors that the incumbent energy industry has been slow to react to trends.