A large scale ‘battery park’ has gone online in West Meklenberg, Germany, designed to stabilise grid frequency in an area where a large amount of power generation comes from wind and other renewable energy.

The Australian Energy Storage Council, a new industry representative body has been launched for energy storage in Australia, backed and co-founded by the Australian Solar Council.

Australian solar and energy storage company ZEN Energy has received a AUS$200,000 (US$184,000) grant from local government toward the development and commercialisation of its energy storage technologies.

The Swiss and Chinese power engineering firms ABB and BYD have revealed a collaboration to develop new storage technologies.

An unnamed utility in California is preparing to test a grid storage system and look at the potential value streams it could provide, according to NEC Energy Solutions, which is providing the system.

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.