Infrastructure development and engineering company Black & Veatch has just completed a microgrid project in the US for Shell which is set to help inform the oil and gas company on its next steps into distributed energy.

The US state of Iowa got its first grid-scale solar-plus-storage system at the beginning of this year, and this has already been followed by the completion of another, larger battery project in the US state this week.

VRB Energy, a maker of flow batteries headquartered in Canada and owned by a metal resources and mining company, said the first phase of a 40MWh flow battery project in China has now been commissioned.

News in brief from around the world in the energy storage industry.

While a tranche of seven solar-plus-storage projects under proposal in Hawaii would see renewable energy make its biggest competitive play against fossil fuels in the US island state so far, a project just completed will deliver energy well into the evening at just US$0.11 per kWh.

In today’s third and final instalment of our series to welcome in 2019, we look at what our respondents are expecting to see this year, what they would like to see happen and some of the ways they will be trying to fulfil those expectations.

In the previous instalment of this blog, we looked at how our respondents from across the energy storage industry had viewed 2018’s biggest challenges. This time out we look at what some of 2018’s biggest successes were.

Following a report on Friday that Hawaiian Electric has contracted PPAs with 75MW of solar projects including battery storage with developer Clearway, the utility has put before regulators proposals for five other grid-scale projects.

While market opportunities for energy storage in Texas are considered to be limited, the largest battery project in the state so far, a 42MWh system, has just come online.

After another record-breaking year, in which the US surpassed 1GWh of deployed energy storage and China began its programme of building flow batteries several hundred megawatts in size each, we canvassed opinion on what 2018’s biggest challenges and successes were. In this first part, we look at the challenges faced by the industry in 2018.