The North American subsidiary of international investor-owned energy supplier E.ON has begun construction on its first energy storage project.

From the outside, the VPP looks like a single power production facility that publishes one schedule of operation and can be optimised from a single remote site. From the inside, the VPP can combine a rich diversity of independent resources into a network via the sophisticated planning, scheduling, and bidding of DER-based services. Peter Asmus examines the role energy storage can play within this architecture.

Seeking to delve beyond headlines, hype and overarching market forecasts, renewable energy veteran and executive recruitment specialist David Hunt spoke with some of the energy storage industry’s leading figures to understand how the various market segments are growing and how things could develop from here.

The participation of venture capital (VC) investors seems to have cooled, while project funding has conversely seen a sharp rise, in the latest quarterly report into funding and mergers and acquisitions from Mercom Capital.

India’s largest utility NTPC has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for the setting up 50MW of solar power projects combined with battery energy storage near Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

After some hesitation, India’s energy storage market looks to be propelling itself into the big leagues with tenders and private projects on the way, Harsh Thacker of the India Energy Storage Alliance writes.

Strategic planning of Chinese industry at a state level could see electrical energy storage installations grow in importance, rocketing to as much as 24GW by 2020, according to one analysis firm.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has committed up to A$18 million (US$13.7 million) in funding to build the first phase of a A$120 million solar-wind-storage project by Windlab and Eurus that will deliver renewable energy on demand.

Two large-scale solar plants planned for the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido will be paired with utility-scale energy storage, in order to meet regulations set out by the region’s electricity authority.

Tax breaks and greater efforts by industry to engage consumers should be used to grow the storage market in place of government subsidy, according to sonnen’s UK director.