Africa’s largest private equity firm has led a round of financing for Off Grid Electric to fuel the microgrid provider’s expansion in the continent, with investors including an arm of General Electric (GE).

Flow batteries will take another major step towards widespread bankability with Lockheed Martin Energy launching its own system before the end of the year.

Major oil company Shell and European utility ENGIE are among investors to have pumped US$20 million into Husk Power Systems, a developer of microgrids which is expanding its efforts in Asia and Africa.

Autarsys GmbH is planning to develop an energy storage system and PV project in Mam Rashan, a refugee camp in the Dohuk district of northern Iraq near the Syrian and Turkish borders.

A “hybrid power plant”, controlling the grid for an entire island and its inhabitants, has been created with the addition of a management and control platform from energy storage system integrator Greensmith.

Legislation proposed in Florida could see solar and energy storage become part of the go-to solution for providing energy resiliency against natural disasters and helping restore power in their aftermath.

Dr. Rahul Walawalkar of the Indian Energy Storage Alliance also predicts at least two lithium-ion cell manufacturing plants of 500MWh+ capacity to start construction in India this year.

Well, we seem to say it at the end of every year, but 2017 seemed a lot busier than 2016, 2016 was busier and more exciting than the year before that, and so on! There have been some hints already on what the industry and its observers expect to see in 2018 and we do not doubt energy storage will continue in its rise to become a flexible cornerstone of the world’s electricity infrastructure. In the meantime, let’s reflect on the top news stories of last year, as reported by Energy-Storage.News and based on readership statistics from you:

Since the launch of the site almost four years ago, Energy-Storage.News (and PV Tech Storage as it was previously known), has consistently brought you high-quality blogs from both guest contributors and our team of journalists and experts here at Solar Media. Here’s just a selection of some of the best guest blogs we ran from January to June, 2017:

The digital ledger system blockchain has been both praised and misunderstood in equal measure and its relationship to the physical world of electrons is at its earliest stages of exploration. In the latest ‘Storage & Smart Power’ section of PV Tech Power, Carsten Reincke-Collon, CTO of Younicos looks at how energy storage and management software will interact with blockchain-led or blockchain-like systems of data processing and recording.