Charges of fraud levelled at Elon Musk after the Tesla CEO recently tweeted his desire to take the company into private ownership have resulted in a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and an agreement that Musk will step down in his other role as chairman of the company’s board.

While the relationship between renewable energy and energy storage is a close one, combining storage with natural gas is also an important stepping stone measure in the transition to 100% renewables, Energy-Storage.news has heard.

Regulatory changes at the national level coupled with policy programmes in leading states will drive residential and commercial energy storage to new heights, according to various sources at this week’s Energy Storage International in California.

The opening address and a handful of sessions took place on Monday for SPI/ESI at Anaheim Convention Center, California. While the two shows are national and international, it is expected there will be a great deal of attention paid to the state’s SB100 bill.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has approved a US$40 million loan to support a 41MW hybrid distributed renewable energy system combining wind, solar, battery storage and a thermal heat pump in Mongolia.

Installations of sonnen’s latest hybrid battery storage units are underway, alongside new residential solar arrays, as part of a Local Energy Market (LEM) being built by one of the UK’s largest energy companies to test the capabilities of a virtual marketplace of distributed energy resources.

With a view to creating a mass market design for vanadium flow batteries, Australia’s Protean Energy will deploy a 4MWh battery energy storage project in South Korea that will be researched over eight years of operation.

Gore Street, the UK’s first listed fund targeting energy storage specifically, has acquired two battery storage projects from Origami Energy, taking its portfolio to 29MW across four projects.

The fact that lithium-ion batteries experience degradation over time with use should not necessarily be a limiter for their widespread use in stationary storage systems, but requires long-term strategies for their management.

Just over US$28 million has been awarded by the US Department of Energy to projects that could deliver energy storage durations of up to 100 hours, while also committing US$120m to the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR).