A city in Bolivia which is currently powered entirely by diesel generators will be the home of a 5MW solar-diesel hybrid power plant fitted with battery storage, which inverter supplier SMA claims is the largest of its kind in the world.

PV Tech Storage speaks to Wolfram Walter of German storage designer and manufacturer ASD Sonnenspeicher about a subject close to home, his home. Walter built a battery system for his own PV array, turning it into a business and turning his prized Porsche into a PV-friendly EV along the way.

US space exploration agency NASA is considering proposals for four different energy storage systems, submitted by academic institutions and private companies that could power its future robotic and human missions to space.

PV Tech Storage interviews Paul Bundschuh of Ideal Power, whose company will supply Sharp’s new Smartstorage system with power converters and has also developed a three-port hybrid battery converter to better enable grid-resilience and micro grids.

The Canadian province of Ontario is preparing to install a variety of new energy storage technologies after finalising details of a 34MW commercial-scale storage trial.

A team at Harvard is pursuing a metal-free battery chemistry based on organic molecules called Quinones. The technology potentially offers an abundant and safe material to use for scaling up flow batteries, but according to the energy storage team at Lux Research in Boston, there are significant limitations based on project cost.

The first grid-connected energy storage facility in Canada, in the country’s leading solar province, Ontario, is now operational.

Earlier this year New York governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled plans for an “energy modernisation initiative that will fundamentally transform the way electricity is distributed and used in New York State”. This will include the creation of a leading energy storage marketplace, argues Bill Radvak, chief executive officer of American Vanadium, whose company recently installed a vanadium flow battery storage system for New York’s Metropolitan Transport Authority in Manhattan.

An antenna tower in Australia serving a broadcaster will be the site of a solar-plus-storage project funded by the German government and designed to deliver power 24 hours a day.

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has inaugurated a test centre at its northern campus that will pair a 1MW solar array to 100kWh of lithium-ion battery-based energy storage.