Australia’s budget includes nearly AU$25 billion for clean energy to ease cost of living pressures as well as help fight climate change.

The first battery energy storage system (BESS) in New York City using Tesla Megapacks, a 12MWh system in the Bronx by NineDot, has been inaugurated.

The new edition of our quarterly journal PV Tech Power, volume 29, is now available to download, including our comprehensive cover story on solar’s critical next decade.

Horizon Power, an electricity supplier owned by the state government of Western Australia has begun commissioning community battery storage to allow nine remote towns to use more rooftop solar power. 

A five-year long project to trial the use of energy storage at community-scale in a Western Australian suburb achieved an 85% reduction in consumption of energy from the grid at peak times for participating households. 

This edition of news in brief from around the world in energy storage focuses on small-scale but potentially significant deployments. 

Batteries will be mounted on electricity poles across the low voltage distribution network and aggregated as a virtual power plant (VPP), in a project which will trial their ability to integrate more renewable energy in two regions of Victoria, Australia. 

The city council of Melbourne, Australia, has committed AU$300,000 from its 2021 budget to fund a pilot scheme which could lead to the rollout of 5MW of community battery storage systems by 2024.

Over a gigawatt of battery storage has been proposed in a plan to enable the wider rollout of renewables by Powercor, owner and operator of an electricity distribution network serving more than 800,000 customers in the Australian state of Victoria.