The UK’s government has shied away from supporting large volumes of solar and other distributed energy technologies through subsidies, but commercial and industrial energy storage and solar-plus-storage could be a huge market opportunity in Britain and abroad.

The small island nation of Palau in the western Pacific Ocean has moved a step closer to having what is said to be the largest ever microgrid spanning diesel, solar and battery energy storage.

New York plans to incentivise commercial and industrial (C&I) solar-plus-storage projects, kicking off by making $40 million funding available to support 50MW of storage paired with solar from early November.

The rise of grid trading and off-peak tariffs, rather than the closure of the feed-in tariff and potentially the export tariff, will see the domestic storage market experience “huge growth” over 2019 according to SolaX’s European product manager ahead of next week’s Solar & Storage Live conference and exhibition in England.

CPS Energy, a utility serving residents of San Antonio, Texas, has just broken ground on the first solar-plus-storage project it will own outright.

Cloud-aggregated virtual power plants using residential or C&I battery storage as part of a smart energy management system can benefit the grid, integrate renewables and EVs and hopefully add a powerful long-term value proposition for home storage. Andy Colthorpe and David Pratt report on how some of the UK’s first VPP projects are proving the concept.

Rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented change is required to limit climate change to 1.5C, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned.

Nevada could cost-effectively deploy between 750MW and 1,000MW of energy storage by 2030, according to an economic study commissioned by the state’s rulemakers to investigate the potential for the technology.

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi made an official commitment towards the launch of the country’s first National Energy Storage Mission yesterday at a ministerial event also attended by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres.

First developed by NASA, flow batteries are a potential answer to storing solar – and wind – for eight to 10 hours, far beyond what is commonly achieved today with lithium-ion. In the second of a two-part special report, Andy Colthorpe dives deeper into questions of bankability, market segmentation and manufacturing strategies with four very different providers of flow energy storage technology.