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

Battery Energy Storage Solutions (BESS), an investor and would-be asset owner in the UK, has raised more than £50 million (US$66.18 million) of outside investment, setting its sights on making energy storage project acquisitions in Britain.

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.

Panellists at the opening day of Solar and Off-Grid Renewables Southeast Asia event in Bangkok warned that investors who come on board quickest are going to gain a huge advantage as solar-plus-storage starts to become viable at scale.

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.

UK renewables and battery developer Anesco has warned that the looming de-rating of battery storage in the Capacity Market risks scaring investors away from the technology.

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.

Eelpower has commissioned a 10MW battery energy storage system (BESS) in England, backed with both frequency response and capacity market contracts, in the first of a new pipeline of projects being planned by the company over the next decade.

Melbourne-headquartered mining giant BHP, in partnership with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), has projected 500MW of potential capacity combining solar, wind and energy storage at its old North American mining sites.