While a project to run a Spanish island off renewable energy which gathered media attention this week might only have successfully met the region’s energy demand continuously for four hours, the project is nonetheless “very significant”, an expert with the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has said.

News in brief: Australia gets its largest battery storage system to date, Tesla man persuaded to go back to Sonnenbatterie and Gildemeister installs PV-linked flow battery systems in Czech Republic.

Highview Power Storage, a UK company which makes energy storage systems based on liquid air technology, has said that work is well underway on a 5MW demonstration project in the north-west of England.

Tesla’s much-hyped battery announcement in April raised important questions over what business models will drive the deployment of stationary battery storage. As Andy Colthorpe reports, one answer is the virtual power plant, in which residential and commercial battery systems are aggregated to provide grid services.

German utility firm RWE has launched a power-to-gas storage system, which it claims has achieved efficiencies as high as 86%.

Solar cell and battery hybrid technology could become a commercial success as long as it clears the “valley of death” out of academia, a scientist working on the project has claimed.

The latest claimant to the crown of ‘largest flow battery installation in North America and Europe’ has emerged, with the award of a 2MW project in Canada to US manufacturer Vizn Energy.

Competition generated in part by the transport sector has catapulted lithium to its position as storage technology frontrunner, according to Volker Wachenfeld, senior vice president for hybrid and energy storage integration at SMA Solar Technology.

Following the announcement of a ‘virtual power plant’ pilot in Australia, Sunverge energy storage systems have been selected for another trial project to test the capabilities of customer-sited storage, this time in the US.

Through a brief history of batteries and some findings from his own team’s work, Volker Wachenfeld of SMA Solar Technology answers a frequently asked question in energy storage; how can compatibility with the existing variety of batteries in the market be put into practice?