The German state of North-Rhine Westphalia looks set to go ahead with a 200MW pumped hydro energy storage project in a coal mine, as well as a smaller energy storage demonstration project which includes a flywheel from Stornetic.

Queensland’s workplace regulator, the Electrical Safety Office (ESO), has revoked its recommendation that all home energy storage battery units should be installed separately from households in an external enclosure.

Fundamental changes in how battery energy storage technology works come faster than they have done in solar PV or wind historically – and governments and regulators will need to adapt to keep up, one industry insider has told Energy-Storage.News.

Tesvolt has claimed its new commercial energy storage system pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved in such devices for modularity and safety.

AGL has commissioned the first phase of what it claims is the world’s largest virtual power plant (VPP).

Utility San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E) and Sumitomo Electric (SEI) have launched a 2MW/8MWh pilot vanadium redox flow battery storage project in California to study how the technology can reliably integrate renewable energy and improve flexibility in grid management.

EDF Renewable Energy has created a new business unit, Distributed Electricity and Storage (DES), which will focus on distributed solar and storage projects up to 30MW.

The government of Victoria in Australia plans to invest AU$20 million (US$15.2 million) in large-scale energy storage initiatives across the state to reach 100MW by the end of 2018.

A multi-million pound EU funded project is set to provide the Isles of Scilly with a new smart energy system, using new software platforms to manage supply and demand through renewables, energy storage and electric vehicles.

While Germany is one of the world’s leaders in solar PV and now an early leader in residential energy storage, utility-scale energy storage is still “under discussion” and not yet a mature proposition, industry figures have said.