Sodium sulfur (NAS) batteries produced by Japan’s NGK Insulators are being put into use on a massive scale in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

While the likes of California, Massachusetts and New York make headlines as the leading US states for energy storage policy, initiatives from the ground up in New Hampshire, Georgia and Michigan have been announced already this year.

Now in its fourth year, the Energy Storage Summit has been supporting the deployment of this world-changing set of technologies in the UK and beyond since it began and it returns in just a few weeks’ time for the 2019 edition.

A local authority in England has unveiled two landmark solar-plus-storage projects on existing landfill sites which aim to be the first of their kind in the UK.

Automotive giant Toyota and electronics firm Panasonic have announced a joint venture which will look to lead the field in EV battery technology.

Indian state majority-owned firm Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) and Libcoin are in final stage talks over setting up what they have dubbed as a lithium-ion Gigafactory in India.

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.

Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) is planning to develop its own renewable energy projects at the Indian archipelago of Lakshadweep, with an eye on coupling the projects with battery energy storage.

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.