News in brief: Australia gets its largest battery storage system to date, Tesla man persuaded to go back to Sonnenbatterie and Gildemeister installs PV-linked flow battery systems in Czech Republic.

Highview Power Storage, a UK company which makes energy storage systems based on liquid air technology, has said that work is well underway on a 5MW demonstration project in the north-west of England.

GE has provided its largest storage system to date, a 30MW for Coachella energy Storage Partners (CESP).

Tesla’s much-hyped battery announcement in April raised important questions over what business models will drive the deployment of stationary battery storage. As Andy Colthorpe reports, one answer is the virtual power plant, in which residential and commercial battery systems are aggregated to provide grid services.

German utility firm RWE has launched a power-to-gas storage system, which it claims has achieved efficiencies as high as 86%.

Solar cell and battery hybrid technology could become a commercial success as long as it clears the “valley of death” out of academia, a scientist working on the project has claimed.

The latest claimant to the crown of ‘largest flow battery installation in North America and Europe’ has emerged, with the award of a 2MW project in Canada to US manufacturer Vizn Energy.

Construction has begun on what is claimed to be the world’s first modular large-scale battery storage system, a 5MW device at a research university in Aachen, Germany.

Ministers from both Scotland and Wales have said energy storage solutions are integral to the “future direction” of energy use in the UK as they warned against cuts to renewable energy subsidies.

Australia’s Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) released a hefty report on global energy storage and how it relates back to the domestic situation last month. Tom Kenning investigated one of the report’s main conclusions – that the value for energy storage in Australia, initially at least, will most likely be found behind-the-meter.