A Sydney-headquartered private investment firm and renewable energy and storage developer have lodged a development application to build a large-scale battery energy storage system in Newcastle, in the Hunter region of New South Wales in Australia.

PG&E, one of California’s main investor-owned utilities (IoUs) has awarded contracts for more than 1,000MW of battery energy storage projects to be deployed in its service area by the end of 2023, the company’s senior VP for energy policy and procurement has said.

The US government’s Department of Energy (DoE) has described its just-published Energy Storage Grand Challenge Roadmap as its first comprehensive strategy on energy storage, identifying cost and performance targets to be met in the coming years.

Vertically-integrated solar company Q CELLS has completed the acquisition of US-based Growing Energy Labs Inc (Geli) that was announced in August.

An integrated energy system installed for a textiles company in Costa Rica by Rolls-Royce Power Systems will pay for itself in just over four years, the technology provider has claimed.

A couple of weeks ago the New York Power Authority (NYPA) began trialling an energy storage system using lithium batteries based around start-up Cadenza Innovation’s ’Supercell’ architecture which aims to eliminate the threat posed by thermal runaway. NYPA’s R&D lead Alan Ettlinger and Cadenza Innovation CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud spoke with Energy-Storage.news as the trial got underway.

Google is investing in battery energy storage to serve as a backup power solution at one of its data centres, in a project described as a first step in changing data centres “from climate change problems to critical components in carbon-free systems”.

NREMC, a rural utility cooperative in Indiana, has just announced that it is deploying 108MWh of battery storage in a five-year project with energy storage technology and solutions provider FlexGen.

The European Union (EU) looks set to introduce the “most extensive product legislation in the world for batteries,” but its potential shortcomings include the risk that battery prices could go up and that established manufacturers from Asia might be better positioned to benefit from the rules than the new European value chain.

An agreement has been signed for a 100MW / 400MWh battery storage project in Queens, New York, by utility company Con Edison and Hanwha Group-affiliated renewable energy developer 174 Power Global.