A remote town in Canada which lies 55km away from the nearest electrical substation, was supplied with a battery system aimed at shoring up the reliability of its electricity supply.

Toshiba is to provide a 1MWh lithium-titanate battery for an energy storage system being developed by University of Sheffield in the UK.

SunPower Corporation has become the latest US solar provider to pilot the deployment of residential storage systems in California by extending the terms of an existing partnership with homebuilding company KB Homes to include storage.

California governor, Jerry Brown, is expected imminently to sign off new legislation extending a funding programme said to be a vital lifeline for the state’s nascent energy storage sector.

Fuel cells for distributed generation will be developed through 13 new projects that have been announced by Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the US government agency responsible for promoting funding and RnD into advanced energy technologies.

Sunverge, a California-based provider of distributed energy storage and control systems, has closed a US$15 million funding round that it said would support its expansion.

NEC Energy Solutions has completed six new grid-tied energy storage systems for UK distributed network operator (DNO), Northern Powergrid.

Battery maker Trojan claims its new proprietary ‘Smart Carbon’ technology can improve the cycle life of lead acid batteries by as much as 15%, through effective management of the cell in a partial state of charge.

Certification for safety and other technical standards must become uniform in the market for residential energy storage systems which can combine with PV systems, according to an expert at technological research institute Fraunhofer ISE.

The deployment of solar storage units in German is set to boom over the next few years in what has been hailed a “quiet revolution” for the PV industry.