The Philippines has turned its focus onto transitioning its energy sector to larger shares of renewable energy. Carlos Nieto of ABB writes about how the company delivered a 60MW battery storage project in alignment with that aim.

It is “unacceptable” for a rural electricity supplier to use solar to prevent load-shedding, but batteries or other grid-independent electricity sources could be used, Eskom said.

Energy storage provided a gigawatt of power to the grid in California during a wildfire in July last year, helping to keep the lights on.

Swell Energy, a US company specialising in virtual power plant (VPP) projects aggregating residential solar PV and battery storage, has launched a distributed energy resources management system (DERMS) software platform. 

Texas households in rented accommodation will be able to subscribe to a solar-plus-storage virtual power plant (VPP) equipped with SolarEdge hardware and cloud-based software services.

Approval is being sought for a 400MW advanced compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) project with eight hours of storage to be built in California by technology provider Hydrostor. 

SunPower has launched its ConnectedSolutions virtual power plant (VPP), enabling customers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut to earn “hundreds of dollars a year” for allowing utility access to their stored energy during peak demand.

Powin Energy has installed battery energy storage systems (BESS) in Israel and Taiwan which, while small by comparison to some of the company’s recent US projects, mark entry into new territories for the Oregon-headquartered system integrator.

Vertically integrated solar PV company SunPower and residential battery storage provider sonnen have each started up programmes to deploy solar-plus-storage for communities in California and New York respectively.