Hitachi ABB Power Grids has signed a collaboration agreement on battery energy storage for renewable energy projects in the Americas, with Atlas Renewable Energy.

US$300 million in new funding from Manulife Investment Management will enable CleanCapital, a clean energy investment platform mostly focused on distributed solar, to also provide “long-term, flexible capital” to energy storage developers.

To reduce strain on the grid as renewable power and demand both grow, two New York utility companies have awarded contracts for flexible demand management to commercial and industrial (C&I) energy management specialist CPower.

Energy storage developer Convergent Energy + Power has signed a long-term agreement with grocery store chain Tops Friendly Market for three large-scale community solar-plus-storage facilities in upstate New York.

Powin Energy yesterday officially launched its first high voltage battery storage product, with the Oregon-headquartered battery energy storage solutions provider claiming that 500MWh of customer orders have already been contracted for it.

The Americas region is on track to leapfrog Asia-Pacific in terms of deployed energy storage by 2025, before accounting for more than half of global capacity by the end of the decade, new analysis from Wood Mackenzie suggests.

Energy storage technology provider Fluence and battery gigafactory startup Northvolt will collaborate to develop “next-generation battery technology for grid-scale storage applications,” the companies said today.

Three new battery energy storage system (BESS) projects from the US that may not individually make headlines for their relative size, but nonetheless prove the value and flexibility of batteries for the grid.

Corporate funding into the battery storage sector in the first quarter of this year totalled US$4.7 billion across 17 deals, a huge leap from the equivalent period of last year, according to a new report from Mercom Capital.

Hydrogen increasingly looks likely to have a role to play in achieving decarbonisation targets worldwide, and investments and innovation are scaling up. But costs remain high and for clean hydrogen to be most effective at integrating high shares of renewable energy, storage is a vital piece of the puzzle, writes Georgina Ainscow, a Senior Patent Attorney at Reddie & Grose, a firm of European and United Kingdom patent, trade mark and design attorneys.