This calendar year is almost finished and Solar Media Towers will shut down for a short break between 25th December and January, but we’re already looking ahead to a New Year – a New Decade – of the energy transition.

A Singapore-headquartered start-up which recently completed microgrid projects including solar and battery energy storage, for luxury resorts in South East Asia, says it wants to take the tech and its concepts into a number of other sectors.

While recycling of lithium and other materials such as cobalt from batteries will greatly increase in the coming years, the potential availability of second life batteries should not be underestimated, according to new research and data.

By the middle of the 2020s, using hybrid ‘portfolios’ of batteries and renewable energy sources will economically outperform existing gas power plants, while the combination of technologies is already cost-competitive with building new gas plants, a new report from the US-based Rocky Mountain Institute has said.

Singapore has targeted 200MW of energy storage beyond 2025 and 2GW of solar by 2030, but will continue to rely on natural gas for the next 50 years.

Australian renewables investor Lyon Group has penned an agreement with China Huadian Corporation which will see the duo co-develop and invest in power-plus-battery energy storage systems across Australia, China and other Asian markets.

Australian technology firm Power Ledger is to launch an eight-month pilot project of its peer-to-peer energy trading technology after penning an agreement with Malaysia’s Sustainable Energy Development Authority (SEDA).

The pilot project, which comprises two 1MW components, has been billed by its backers as the country’s first grid-scale distributed battery system.

Latest attempt to draft FiT rates comes under fire for absence of energy storage in its remit.

Energy Storage Special Report 2019, from the editorial teams behind Energy-Storage.news and PV Tech, brings you no less than seven feature articles and technical papers looking at everything from the policy and regulatory initiatives that still need to happen, to bankability and profitability of ESS, system technologies and architecture, all the way to recycling and end-of-life care for batteries.