A former Tesla head of products has said that his new start-up’s redesign of the humble electrical panel offers “breakthrough interaction with home batteries,” and can streamline both labour and component costs of energy storage installations.

Leclanché is undergoing a “strategic reorganisation” of the company and said it has secured funding for its manufacturing and R&D activities while also announcing a pivot towards becoming a “green tech software and systems integration company”.

Another three developers with more than a gigawatt-hour of wins in Hawaiian Electric’s (HECO’s) massive solar-plus-storage and standalone energy storage tenders have gone public with size and location details of their proposed projects.

News in brief from around the world in energy storage.

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.

The contract is for the 35MW hybrid York solar farm designed and constructed by developer GRIDSERVE, which was completed late last year.

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.

The European Union’s European Investment Bank (EIB) has affirmed its commitment to supporting a “pan-European battery industry”, while plans of the UK’s first full cycle battery cell gigafactory have been unveiled.

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.