Australia’s National Energy Guarantee (NEG), which has been waived through for a final decision in August, would significantly harm the country’s large-scale renewables pipeline, with just 1.5GW expected to be completed by 2025 despite the current 16GW pipeline, according to the head of the country’s solar and storage council.

South Australia state-run firm SA Water plans to deploy 152MW of solar PV and 35MWh of energy storage over the next two years in order to reach its target of zero net electricity costs by 2020.

News in brief from around the world of energy storage.

Edify Energy and Wirsol Energy have connected the 60MW Gannawarra Solar Farm in northwest Victoria to the grid, with a storage retrofit expected before the summer.

Australia-headquartered engineering and professional services company WorleyParsons said its first EPC contract for a battery storage project in the US shows how the energy sector is moving from “mega projects” to “portfolios of smaller projects”.

Bulgana Green Energy Hub, a renewable energy project powering commercial crop farms in Victoria, Australia, including large-scale wind and battery energy storage, will be designed and constructed by Siemens Gamesa.

Simply Energy, the Australian retail arm for ENGIE, will aggregate 6MW of Tesla household batteries together with 2MW of demand response at commercial premises in Adelaide in a project supported by the government-backed Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

Tesla and Fluence are to supply the south-east Australian state of Victoria’s first two large-scale, grid-connected energy storage batteries, one of which will be connected to an existing solar farm.

The first solar-plus-storage microgrid in Asia to use Tesla’s Powerpack energy storage system is designed to end power reliability issues for a Philippines community, long used to losing light and productivity to brownouts.