A research project aimed at validating technologies for the “industrial scale” storage and dispatch of solar generated electricity in Switzerland has received CHF2 million (US$2.17 million) in funding from a local government agency.

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin has acquired energy storage company Sun Catalyx, which was founded by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor and has recently been developing flow batteries for grid storage.

TÜV SÜD has developed a certificate for renewable energy storage systems (RESS), which the testing house claims will “provide reliable information on the safety, performance and service life of stationary energy storage systems”.

SunPower CEO Tom Werner says that the idea of solar power users combining their systems with battery storage to become fully independent of the grid is “naïve”, echoing the views of one of SolarCity’s founders.

Reborn Chinese manufacturer Suntech is to spend US$25 million to acquire a 30% equity interest in US energy storage company, Powin Energy.

Samsung SDI will supply its lithium-ion batteries to a Japanese company building a 1MW solar farm, with the deal expected to then go on to furnish an initial 20 solar farms with batteries.

The Canadian province of Ontario is preparing to install a variety of new energy storage technologies after finalising details of a 34MW commercial-scale storage trial.

A team at Harvard is pursuing a metal-free battery chemistry based on organic molecules called Quinones. The technology potentially offers an abundant and safe material to use for scaling up flow batteries, but according to the energy storage team at Lux Research in Boston, there are significant limitations based on project cost.

One of the largest investor-owned utilities in the USA is looking to use a series of measures that are likely to include customer-side energy storage in order to stave off the need for US$1 billion worth of infrastructure investment.

India looks to be the latest country to examine installing energy storage at the top level, with the Power Grid Corporation of India (PGCIL) actively seeking demonstration projects and the country’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) inviting comments from stakeholders ahead of similar plans.