Australia’s Labor Party has pushed the solar industry into the election campaign spotlight vowing to turn thousands of schools into virtual power plants.

The capabilities of virtual power plants (VPPs) to provide capacity as well as frequency regulation services to the grid in Australia will be demonstrated through a new integration trial.

A green bond has been issued in Australia that will give people the chance to invest in energy storage for the first time.

Maoneng Australia has said energy storage can improve the reliability of solar and “minimise the technical and commercial impacts” of electric system modernisation, as the developer broke ground on a 255MW solar project in New South Wales, Australia.

Perth-based Hybrid Systems and BayWa r.e. have reaped the lion’s share of the first round of a programme to roll out ‘standalone power systems’ (SPS) across Western Australia.

Both major parties in the election race for the Australian state of New South Wales have put forward plans focusing on solar and storage for households, with some mixed but mostly positive reaction from the industry.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has approved A$6 million of funding for the country’s first compressed air energy storage (CAES) project.

A megawatt-scale energy storage system will be rented out to power a gold mine in Western Australia by Aggreko, the mobile power solutions company which bought up energy storage provider Younicos last year.

Eni Australia, a subsidiary of Italian oil and gas firm Eni, which has been active in Australia since 2000, has acquired a 33.7MW construction-ready solar-plus-storage project in the Northern Territory of Australia, from Katherine Solar, a joint venture between Australia’s Epuron and UK-based firm Island Green Power.

In the previous instalment of this blog, we looked at how our respondents from across the energy storage industry had viewed 2018’s biggest challenges. This time out we look at what some of 2018’s biggest successes were.