News in brief: A battery park in Germany will be capable of restarting the local grid in the event of a blackout, a public square in Haiti will be lit at night with solar energy, and a revived Solarmax will target its new range of storage and inverter solutions at several European markets this year.

Ireland-based renewable energy and storage firm Gaelectric has formally filed a planning application and environmental impact assessment for its 330MW compressed air energy storage (CAES) project in Northern Ireland.

French manufacturer Leclanche will supply battery storage systems to a 13MW capacity storage project with 53MWh of storage duration in Ontario to be used for voltage control and in providing reactive power support to the grid.

The US Department of Energy is to fund six projects trialling the combination of solar and energy storage.

Flow battery manufacturer ViZn Energy Systems has won a contract to provide a 128kW/320kWh system for a US department of energy project.

News in brief: Nissan commits to longer range EV batteries from UK plant, a first in energy storage financing for Green Charge, American Vanadium plans acquisition of Gildemeister, Ceres and Honda developing solid oxide fuel cell stacks for power equipment.

SMA is aiming to tackle the market for retrofitting energy storage systems in to existing home PV installations, with a new AC-coupled version of its Sunny Boy inverter suitable for high voltage batteries.

News in brief: SolarEdge’s Powerwall-compatible StorEdge self-consumption solution is now available internationally; AES completes another 10MW project in Holland which will provide grid services; and Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation’s Willey Battery Utility is the latest energy storage system to join PJM’s frequency regulation market.

Placing a battery onto the grid is an economic investment. Matthew Hunt from the UK’s Chargesync discusses strategies for extracting the maximum value from devices and systems through optimising performance.

UK solar developers WElink Energy and British Solar Renewables (BSR) have signed a £1.1 billion (US$1.6 billion) deal with China National Building Materials Group (CNBM) to develop solar energy projects and zero-carbon homes in the UK.