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.

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.

Government policy and regulation offer the biggest barriers to the deployment of battery energy storage in the UK according to a cross-party group of MPs focussed on energy storage, which claims 12GW of batteries could be deployed by 2021 under the right circumstances.

Energy storage inverter and power conversion company DynaPower has delivered its first ever DC-to-DC converters to large-scale solar-plus-storage projects in the US, while Ideal Power has attained UL certification for two of its products.

ENGIE company Green Charge has been chosen to install 2 MWh of energy storage at iFLY Indoor Skydiving’s San Diego and Ontario facilities in southern California.

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.

Developer Convergent Energy & Power has installed a commercial and industrial (C&I) energy storage system in Ontario for an injection-moulded plastics company, sized with 8.5MWh of batteries.

Sunverge Energy has signed off on deals with three electric utilities in Arizona, Florida and Vermont that will expand the company’s customer base for its storage system and Virtual Power Plant (VPP) platform.

Northern Powergrid, one of the six distribution network operators (DNOs) responsible for delivering power across regions of the UK, is to plough £1.9 million (US$2.53 million) into the creation of a smart energy grid across its network, allowing its eight million customers to trade power and services using their home solar, battery systems and electric vehicles (EVs).