Swiss utility and power distribution company EKZ (Elektrizitätswerke des Kantons Zürich) is building a grid-balancing and renewables integrating 18MW / 7.5MWh energy storage system and has appointed NEC Energy Solutions to execute the project.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) announced Wednesday that it has selected Doosan GridTech and its partner, KTY Engineering, to provide LADWP’s first battery energy storage system (BESS) with a capacity of 20MW at its Beacon Solar Plant in Kern County, California.

A village in the south east of the Czech Republic will be host to what is thought to be the country’s first grid-scale lithium-ion battery energy storage system (BESS) connected to a solar farm.

As might be expected, California’s main utilities led the way in 2016 for US state-by-state deployment of energy storage, with Southern California Edison installing as much as 40% of the national total, according to a new survey.

News in brief from this week in energy storage around the world.

South Korean industrial group Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction has self-executed a solar-plus-storage project at its head offices in Changwon, using this and other projects on its own premises as a learning curve for external projects.

Our publisher Solar Media produces the quarterly technical journal PV Tech Power, aimed at the downstream end of the solar PV industry, and the September 2017 edition, Volume 12 in the series, is available now.

Kodak, the tech company best known for producing photographic film and imaging equipment, has inaugurated the Kodak Cell Assembly Center, a new facility aimed at accelerating development and scale-up of advanced batteries for energy storage.

US energy storage designer and manufacturer SimpliPhi Energy has installed a combination of solar PV and batteries to power air-conditioning units at a school in Hawaii, with a further 1.4MWh of such projects in the pipeline.

A not-for-profit utility cooperative from Texas has been awarded a contract to electrify a community in Liberia with a solar-plus-storage microgrid, to benefit around 400 homes and businesses.