Thailand-headquartered renewable energy group BCPG will invest US$24 million into vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) manufacturer VRB Energy, aimed at accelerating VRB’s utility-scale VRFB business.

This edition of news in brief from around the world in energy storage focuses on solar-plus-storage updates from Africa.

ABB will add at least 80MW of battery storage to Philippines energy company SMC Global Power Holdings’ planned US$1 billion portfolio in the country.

Power and energy systems technology group Wärtsilä has completed work on two large-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) projects in the Philippines.

Battery energy storage system (BESS) and controls technology will be provided to a “smart industrial park” project in Thailand by Hitachi ABB Power Grids.

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

In the first part of this interview with Swell Energy CEO Suleman Khan we heard about how Swell Energy has been working to ‘productise’ the virtual power plant proposition: making it attractive to utilities and to their end-customers and then wrapping that into a long-term agreement. This time out, we speak to Suleman about some of the finer details of the VPP proposition and where he thinks the market is heading.

Wärtsilä’s GEMS energy management system platform has grown alongside the energy storage sector for more than a decade. We caught up with Andrew Tang, vice president of Energy Storage and Optimisation at Wärtsilä Energy to learn about the importance of software for the uptake of energy storage.

Wärtsilä Corporation’s CEO has said that “activity in the energy storage market held up well” in 2020 despite a difficult year for the company due to prevailing market conditions around the COVID-19 pandemic.