California’s Governor Jerry Brown has passed the state’s 2045 zero-carbon electricity target into law, offering a major boost to the energy storage sector in the process.

Sweden’s first commercial wind power developer Eolus has entered the US solar-plus-storage market, announcing the acquisition of a mega-project currently in development.

Up to 140MW of capacity will be procured under the first ever tender for Ireland’s new frequency response and balancing programme, with projects to go live by September 2021.

US-based energy storage technology provider Powin Energy has claimed it has a pipeline close to 500MWh of projects under contract, including recent awards totalling 70MWh for customers in North and Central America and in Italy.

Macquarie Capital Korea, a subsidiary of investment firm Macquarie Group, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the county office of Goesan in South Korea to finance a significant solar-plus-storage project, while it has also invested in what is said to be the largest energy storage project base in the country.

Over 370MW of energy storage projects, along with 1.25GW of solar, have been successfully moved into the ‘first batch’ of projects to be processed under a new connections procedure, brought in to tackle the surging levels of smaller projects aiming to connect.

The US deployed 42% megawatts more energy storage in the second quarter of this year than in the first, with residential installations overtaking utility deployments for the first time.

Using energy storage – and often renewables – could see mines, cement companies, data centres and other large industrial operations in emerging markets reduce their electricity costs drastically, the CEO of Greensmith has said.

US utilities deployed more than 520MWh of energy storage on their networks in 2017, bringing the country’s cumulative installed capacity of grid-connected energy storage systems to over 1GWh, trade organisation Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) has found.

Virtual power plants, flow batteries and the economics of lithium-ion battery degradation are the focus of three feature-length articles, available now in the latest edition of Solar Media’s quarterly journal PV Tech Power.