Australia could be getting its first lithium-ion battery ‘Gigafactory’, with some progress made in the past few days for a facility proposed to be built in Queensland.

Swiss vertically-integrated battery and energy storage system and equipment maker Leclanché has followed sonnen in netting a significant amount of investment to go into the second half of 2018, securing CHF75 million (US$76 million) from its main existing investor.

Britain’s transmission system operator (TSO) National Grid has said it wants a new procurement process for ‘black start’ capabilities up and running by the mid-2020s, and wants it to involve renewables and battery energy storage.

Volume 15 of PV Tech Power, from our publisher Solar Media, has just hit the virtual shelves – and the quarterly technical journal is free to download from the PV Tech site.

Australia’s ‘peak national body’ representing transmission and distribution organisations in both electricity and gas, Energy Networks Australia (ENA), has pushed for a more consistent approach to grid connections of solar PV and battery storage by issuing a set of guidelines.

A hydrogen ‘power station’ which includes 15MWh of batteries as part of a total 140MWh of renewable energy-charged energy storage, will be built on French Guiana by Hydrogène de France (HDF Energy).

Utility NV Energy has awarded contracts in the US state of Nevada for over 1,000MW of renewable energy projects – including a 420MW-dc solar farm – and has also requested approval for 100MW of energy storage.

An inauguration event was held last week to unveil a new battery energy storage system combined with pumped hydro storage in Bavaria, Germany, after multi-national utility Engie completed work on the project.

Shell, which has just participated in an investment round for sonnen, is one of the big players in the incumbent energy industry that “really acts” on clean energy, rather than just talking about it, sonnen’s CEO has said.

Indian EPC firm Sterling and Wilson has won its first large-scale hybrid and energy storage turnkey EPC contract order in Western Africa, including what it believes to be both the largest battery storage project and single battery installation in the whole continent.