News in brief from around the world in energy storage: this edition rounds up some recent big solar-plus-storage stories from sister site PV Tech.

Pumped hydro project, Oven Mountain, has been declared to be Critical State Significant Infrastructure by the NSW Government.

Energy Renaissance’s AU$28 million lithium-ion battery factory is to be located in Tomago in the Hunter region of Australia.

Mobile energy solutions provider Aggreko has completed one of the largest renewable energy microgrids in the world, at the Granny Smith gold mine in Western Australia.

North America is currently leading the world for utility-scale energy storage deployments, but could be overtaken by the second-largest market, the Asia-Pacific region, as early as 2023, according to forecasting and analysis by Guidehouse Insights.

The government of Western Australia has issued a Request for Information (ROI) for parties interested in working on a 100MW / 200MWh battery energy storage project at the site of a decommissioned power station.

The past few days have seen various announcements across the lithium-ion battery production value chain in Europe, Australia and the US.

Energy storage systems based around vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) are being developed for residential use in Australia by partners Australian Vanadium (AVL) and Gui Zhou Collect Energy Century Science and Technology.

An agreement to support the manufacture and sale of vanadium flow batteries has been struck between Australian Vanadium and Enerox, which makes and markets systems under its CellCube brand.

Thousands of residents of social housing in Adelaide, South Australia, will get Tesla PV panels and battery storage in their homes if they join a virtual power plant (VPP) project run by the state.