Hospitals, schools and railways in South Australia will be powered by an electricity retailer started up by billionaire steel trader Sanjeev Gupta, following the signing of an agreement between the state government and Gupta’s SIMEC ZEN Energy.

German renewables company Wirsol has tabled plans for two subsidy-free ground-mounted solar parks in the UK, for which energy storage is expected to be included in “phase two of the build-out”.

Battery storage and smart technologies are to be rolled out to homes in the Irish town of Dingle as part of a new trial to test their potential to support the use of variable renewable energy supply resources and smart connection to the Irish electricity grid.

German-American system integrator and technology provider Younicos has completed a two-phase operation to upgrade a lead acid energy storage system for lithium batteries, at the 36MW Notrees facility in Texas.

Major Japanese business and government entities have extended their involvement in energy storage with the announcement of the country’s first virtual power plants, an investment in a US frequency regulation project and partnerships on technology.

Massachusetts, one of the few US states thus far to put consideration of energy storage into long-term planning decisions for electric utilities, will support 26 projects with US$20 million in grants.

Construction on Australia’s first utility-scale wind, solar and energy storage hybrid project to be connected to the national grid is about to start near Hughenden in northwest Queensland.

Nuclear generation company Exelon and chemical company Albemarle, which has lithium mining facilities, are investigating opportunities in the energy storage space, having partnered with battery energy storage investor Volta Energy Technologies to do so.

The latest confirmed initiative supporting the restoration of power in Puerto Rico is the donation of 6MW of batteries from AES, which has suggested microgrids and large-scale solar could be the answer to long term stability issues.

A 250-home ‘virtual big battery’ was switched on in Canberra, Australia last week, allowing residents to sell solar-generated power at a significantly higher price than available to them through feed-in tariff (FiT) policies.