News in brief from around the world of energy storage.

A project demonstrating the integration of energy storage onto grid networks in Hubei, China, will see the first phase of a 10MW / 40MWh project built by Pu Neng, a vanadium flow battery manufacturer.

Primus Power, a flow battery maker which claims its systems can cost less than half the price of lithium-ion energy storage over its lifetime, is establishing manufacturing lines in China.

With the rise of solar-plus-storage applications round the world, Frank Qiao, sales director at Growatt New Energy, talks to PV Tech about some of the key inverter trends and new products.

While the global energy storage industry has continued its pace of rapid growth during the past year, well-established markets remain highly concentrated in specific regions of the world. Alex Eller of Navigant Research discusses many of the factors influencing growth trends for energy storage at both utility-scale and distributed levels.

San Diego, California’s ultracapacitor-based energy storage manufacturer Maxwell Technologies has signed a stock purchase agreement with China’s SFIC Fund Management – a significant investor in China’s storage industry – at US$6.32 per share.

California-headquartered grid-scale electrical energy storage company Primus Power has secured US$32 million in equity financing from a range of investors including a well-known Saudi family, to help accelerate its EnergyPod 2 storage system.

A large-scale energy storage system designed and developed by Narada Power for GCL Silicon has successfully been put into service. The system now stands as the first commercialised energy storage system in China.

Turnkey energy storage system provider Demand Energy has commissioned a solar-plus-storage microgrid in Costa Rica at a medical manufacturing facility.

China’s deployment of energy storage looks set to continue an upward trajectory, with almost 600MW in the pipeline as of the third quarter this year.