Visitors have until this coming Monday to pre-register before doors open for this year’s Solar & Storage Live exhibition and conference in Birmingham, England.

While headlines about energy storage in Australia have been dominated by news of batteries in large-scale utility projects and the residential sector, the country’s government and renewable energy agency have identified numerous possibilities for developing pumped hydro storage assets.

Following an announcement earlier this month that Alfen will build the Czech Republic’s first large-scale battery energy storage system (BESS), the Dutch grid-scale system integrator has just completed a megawatt-scale project in Belgium.

Seeking ways to optimise the use of clean energy, California network operator CAISO (California Independent System Operator) is considering the introduction of a load-shifting product that would incentivise storing peak energy for later use.

Britain could be the best “scale-up” market in the world when it comes to deploying energy storage batteries, leaning on years of experience in solar PV, the chief of one manufacturer has said.

UK-based renewables developer Anesco says the inclusion of battery storage has been central to the economic viability of the country’s first subsidy-free solar farm, a 10MW site the company has just unveiled in the east of England.

The secretary of India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) Anand Kumar has stressed the importance of energy storage to the overall renewables sector and invited industry to come and set up battery manufacturing in India.

Solar entrepreneur and financier Jigar Shah probably requires little introduction. The SunEdison founder and former CEO is now president at Generate Capital, a project financing venture for sustainable infrastructure investment. Shah spoke with Andy Colthorpe about Generate Capital’s latest solar-plus-storage projects for a school district in California, as well as sharing his thoughts on the economics of energy storage today.

Shifting responsibility for product safety onto manufacturers, rather than installers, of residential energy storage systems would be a positive step forward for Australia’s industry, the country’s Clean Energy Council has said.

Australian battery company Redflow Limited has repeated its largest-ever sale of its ZBM2 zinc-bromine flow batteries after receiving an international order worth about US$600,000.