The government of Victoria, Australia, has opened a round of funding for ‘neighbourhood-scale’ battery storage.

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.

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.

Electricity distributor Ausgrid has launched its first community battery project in Sydney

New ways to increase the numbers of people that can benefit from battery storage are being tried out in Melbourne, Australia, by one of the city’s electricity distribution network owners, in partnership with an energy non-profit.