Solar Citizens has welcomed South Australia’s Liberal Party’s AU$100 (£59.1 million) commitment to support solar households in shifting to battery storage yet opposed them scrapping the 50% renewable goal as a missed opportunity.

Queensland’s tender for 400MW of large-scale renewables and 100MW of energy storage has received 115 proposals from 79 different entities spanning a wide range of technologies, according to the state’s energy minister Mark Bailey.

While it may seem like an obvious choice for US states to include energy storage into their Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) commitments, in reality, standalone targets and mandates for energy storage procurement have been preferred.

UK electrical distribution system operator Northern Powergrid has begun using a £4 million (US$5.27 million) battery paid for by consumers to sell services to National Grid, despite plans from the national regulator Ofgem to prevent distribution network operators (DNOs) from doing so in future.

The largest grid-connected energy storage system in Massachusetts will be used to determine the value of the technology throughout the US Commonwealth territory, supported by a Department of Energy Resources (DOER) grant.

Energy storage could be considered the “great hope” for the renewable energy industry in Britain, according to the head of policy at the Renewable Energy Association (REA).

Senator Martin Heinrich has proposed granting tax relief for purchasers of energy storage systems, in a similar way to how the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) is applied to residential solar PV purchases.

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.

Two US Senators introduced a bill in Congress at the beginning of this week that would require the national Secretary of Energy to establish research and demonstration programmes and deployment strategies for energy storage, if passed.