QCELLS has invested AU$5 million (US$3.45 million) in SwitchDin, an Australian distributed energy resources (DERs) software company that offers capabilities including virtual power plant aggregation and microgrid-forming.

Industry voices in the UK have said that electricity market activity during the COVID-19 pandemic shows that the network will become prohibitively expensive and possibly unmanageable without the further rapid deployment of energy storage.

A former Tesla head of products has said that his new start-up’s redesign of the humble electrical panel offers “breakthrough interaction with home batteries,” and can streamline both labour and component costs of energy storage installations.

Portsmouth International Port (PIP) on the south coast of England has announced it will pilot a new smart energy system that includes a novel energy storage solution.

Another three developers with more than a gigawatt-hour of wins in Hawaiian Electric’s (HECO’s) massive solar-plus-storage and standalone energy storage tenders have gone public with size and location details of their proposed projects.

News in brief from around the world in energy storage.

Sunverge CEO Martin Milani talks about the system architectures and technologies that can make residential storage virtual power plants economically viable and useful to the local electricity network. As told to Andy Colthorpe.

The contract is for the 35MW hybrid York solar farm designed and constructed by developer GRIDSERVE, which was completed late last year.

There was a near-70% increase in capacity of operational energy storage projects in China paired with solar energy from 2018 to 2019, according to figures recently published by the China Energy Storage Alliance (CNESA).

Battery energy storage deployed at Cleve Hill, the largest solar farm planned in the UK to date, will be installed and operated in line with a safety plan agreed with local fire services and the national Health and Safety Executive.