Sunverge CEO Martin Milani talks about the system architectures and technologies that can make residential storage virtual power plants economically viable and useful to the local electricity network. As told to Andy Colthorpe.

Storage system providers EnerSys and NeoVolta have made significant changes to their Boards of Directors and Advisors respectively, while US large-scale energy storage independent power producer (IPP) Key Capture Energy has appointed a new director of technology.

Sunverge has been active in the market since 2011 and Martin Milani became chief executive officer (CEO) in late 2017, taking over from company founder Ken Munson. One of the pioneers of using aggregated residential energy storage systems to create virtual power plants (VPPs), here’s some of the backstory and where the company is going these days, as told to Andy Colthorpe.

While utility Hawaiian Electric (HECO) stands poised to announce the finalists of its recent massive procurement of solar-plus-storage and standalone energy storage projects, developers with winning bids seem determined to steal the utility’s thunder.

This week’s roundup of news in brief from around the world in energy storage focuses on recent products and services launches.

The number of sites pairing renewable energy with energy storage in the US more than doubled from 2016 to 2019 and the trend is expected to continue, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

From a full week of webinars and panel discussions, there was a huge amount of ground covered. Here are some more of our takeaways and links to some of the news and views we’ve already posted.

Utility PG&E has asked the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for approval of five large-scale battery projects, each with four-hours duration, that will take the investor-owned utility (IOU) past 1,000MW of battery energy storage in its service area.

With the award of funding from the California Energy Commission, advanced energy hardware and software including solar-plus-storage, blockchain and EV charging stations will help demonstrate the feasibility of decarbonising a disadvantaged community in Los Angeles.

Why the real competition is fossil fuels, which battery optimisation strategies yield the best returns and bringing safety rules and guidelines to the attention of first-responders are among the topics discussed on the latest special episode of the Solar Media podcast.