Hospitals, schools and railways in South Australia will be powered by an electricity retailer started up by billionaire steel trader Sanjeev Gupta, following the signing of an agreement between the state government and Gupta’s SIMEC ZEN Energy.

ESS Inc, among several companies looking to commercialise a flow battery energy storage technology, has netted US$13 million in a Series B funding round from investors that include global chemical company BASF.

German renewables company Wirsol has tabled plans for two subsidy-free ground-mounted solar parks in the UK, for which energy storage is expected to be included in “phase two of the build-out”.

Battery storage and smart technologies are to be rolled out to homes in the Irish town of Dingle as part of a new trial to test their potential to support the use of variable renewable energy supply resources and smart connection to the Irish electricity grid.

With energy storage deployments in the US up almost 50% year-on-year, according to GTM Research analysis, the next big question for the industry might be who gets to own all of the assets.

German-American system integrator and technology provider Younicos has completed a two-phase operation to upgrade a lead acid energy storage system for lithium batteries, at the 36MW Notrees facility in Texas.

Distribution network operators (DNOs) in Britain should be able to own and operate a minimal amount of battery storage capacity in certain cases, and be able to compete in the ancillary services market to fund the projects, according to the head of regulation and strategy at Northern Powergrid (NPg), one of the country’s seven DNOs.

Powin Energy has just sold 116MWh of its project assets and pipeline of future developments to esVolta and made a deal which sees Powin become exclusive supplier to the latter’s projects.

Plans are in place for a combined 160MW solar and wind project with up to 40MWh of energy storage in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, while a smaller scale demonstration project experimenting with multiple technologies is being developed for Kerala.

Major Japanese business and government entities have extended their involvement in energy storage with the announcement of the country’s first virtual power plants, an investment in a US frequency regulation project and partnerships on technology.