French power giant EDF has acquired a 50% stake in the Togo-focused unit of off-grid renewable energy specialist BBOXX, with EDF adding its financial clout to speed up solar home system deployments and its technical expertise to improve the energy storage offering.

South Africa’s state-owned utility Eskom has unveiled its Distributed Battery Storage Programme at an event this week, committing to solar-plus-storage and energy storage projects totalling 1400MWh.

An agreement to buy 75% of Korean battery manufacturer Kokam gives SolarEdge a level of vertical integration that could make the PV company a ‘one-stop-shop’ for customers, while SolarEdge could diversify into areas outside solar energy.

Smart energy and inverter company SolarEdge will acquire the South Korean battery manufacturer Kokam.

Rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented change is required to limit climate change to 1.5C, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned.

First developed by NASA, flow batteries are a potential answer to storing solar – and wind – for eight to 10 hours, far beyond what is commonly achieved today with lithium-ion. In the second of a two-part special report, Andy Colthorpe dives deeper into questions of bankability, market segmentation and manufacturing strategies with four very different providers of flow energy storage technology.

While the relationship between renewable energy and energy storage is a close one, combining storage with natural gas is also an important stepping stone measure in the transition to 100% renewables, Energy-Storage.news has heard.

Using energy storage – and often renewables – could see mines, cement companies, data centres and other large industrial operations in emerging markets reduce their electricity costs drastically, the CEO of Greensmith has said.

Virtual power plants, flow batteries and the economics of lithium-ion battery degradation are the focus of three feature-length articles, available now in the latest edition of Solar Media’s quarterly journal PV Tech Power.

Just a few months after Mozambique’s first ever large-scale PV project reached financial close and construction work began, the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) has awarded a grant to pay for a feasibility study for a new project of up to 100MW capacity.