Over the past couple of weeks, various flow battery makers have touted new sales and supply chain agreements as the fledgling sector fights for a share of the stationary energy storage market.

Trade associations the Australian Solar Council and counterpart the Energy Storage Council have merged together to form the national Smart Energy Council.

Verv, an energy monitoring and AI company, has laid claim to launching the UK’s first energy trading community at a housing estate in Hackney, East London.

The rise of energy storage will enjoy a similarly meteoric trajectory to that enjoyed by solar PV deployment in the past and could reach 305GWh of installations by 2030, BNEF has predicted.

Start-up Romeo Power has opened a lithium battery pack factory in Los Angeles, aimed at the EV and stationary energy storage markets, aiming to ramp up to 4GWh production capacity by next year.

While energy storage can be considered “critical” to Australia’s transformation to a distributed, low carbon energy mix, a lack of investment and planning for the technology could have negative consequences for the network.

The goal of the project, as with the rest of Centrica’s activities in Cornwall, is to harness renewables and smart energy technologies to free up capacity on the local grid and provide flexibility to the distribution network operator or the national grid.

Younicos has completed the installation and commissioning of an upgraded 3MW battery-based energy storage system on Kodiak Island, Alaska. Younicos replaced the previously installed lead-acid systems with advanced lithium-ion batteries — expanding the system’s operational lifetime while boosting performance.

Gavilan College has selected SunPower to deploy a fully integrated solar and storage project on its campus in Gilroy, California.

We often hear about California’s leading position in solar and latterly in energy storage. Perhaps lesser known than direct policy support for energy storage and renewable technologies is the way California’s network operator (CAISO) is starting to reconfigure how it procures demand response, with a positive impact for energy storage – and particularly behind-the-meter assets, as Ted Ko, policy director of Stem, explains.