After approving investment for the acceleration of energy storage deployment in developing countries to the tune of US$1 billion a few months ago, the World Bank has now approved a US$300 million loan to do the same in China.

Energy storage has moved out of an early, marketing and awareness phase, and real business is being done throughout Europe, Energy-Storage.news heard yesterday at the annual ees Europe show Munich, Germany.

Secretary of state João Galamba tells Energy-Storage.news of plans to boost dispatchable renewables as government works to drive a PV surge within a decade.

UK editor Liam Stoker writes in a blog for the energy transition and smart power site this week that National Grid’s Distributed Resource Desk – a new platform for managing distributed resources on its network – is starting to enable wider participation in the BM.

SA Water, which delivers water to more than one-and-a-half million people in South Australia, has picked out local contractor Enerven to execute the roll-out of PV and battery storage across 70 of its facilities in the next 18 months.

Arlington Energy, a clean energy investment group, has announced plans to build out a 1GW portfolio of energy storage and gas peaker projects across the UK after securing initial funding of £200 million (US$255 million) from an offshore fund of institutional investment.

The UK’s government has shied away from supporting large volumes of solar and other distributed energy technologies through subsidies, but commercial and industrial energy storage and solar-plus-storage could be a huge market opportunity in Britain and abroad.

The UK’s transmission system operator National Grid’s redesigned Capacity Market targets around 50GW of reserves up to 2023 and could be an early step towards longer duration energy storage batteries.

Halfway through 2018 and large-scale battery storage in the UK has reached over 450MW installed capacity, with around 250MW being completed this year alone. This is made up of projects bigger than 1MW, including larger behind the meter projects that have begun to emerge.

California-based energy storage technology developer Gridtential announced that it has closed US$11 million in financing led by 1955 Capital, with assistance from East Penn Manufacturing, Crown Battery Manufacturing, Leoch International and Power-Sonic Inc., as well as an existing investor in The Roda Group.