While planning a better future for California’s energy system will take time and lies in the hands of many, many stakeholders from regulators to government to citizens and corporations, here are a few more of the recent moves forwards in clean energy in the state.

North America is currently leading the world for utility-scale energy storage deployments, but could be overtaken by the second-largest market, the Asia-Pacific region, as early as 2023, according to forecasting and analysis by Guidehouse Insights.

A community choice energy provider run by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission in California has signed contracts for battery storage with EDF Renewables and NextEra Energy totalling 260MWh, to be deployed in combination with solar PV.

Agreements to deploy 1GWh of novel aqueous zinc battery energy storage in Texas and 500MWh in California have been struck by technology provider Eos Energy Storage, marking a massive scale-up in expected installations for the systems.

Transmission and distribution network operator Hokkaido Electric Power has contracted Sumitomo Electric Industries to supply a grid-scale flow battery energy storage system for a wind farm in northern Japan.

Despite the fundamental drivers remaining unchanged, Covid-19 will certainly leave its mark on the post-pandemic energy storage world. Florian Mayr at cleantech advisory and consultancy group Apricum examines how the energy storage industry can best adapt to the “next normal”.

One of the first large-scale solar farms in Japan so far to be equipped with battery storage in order to meet the requirements of a local grid operator and utility, has been completed on the island of Hokkaido.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has signed a loan deal for its first wind energy-plus-battery storage project in Thailand, which is also the country’s first private sector initiative to combine the two technologies at scale.

Despite a subdued year in 2019 and a challenging start to 2020 caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, the outlook for energy storage remains strong, says Julian Jansen of market research group IHS Markit, taking a deep dive across segments and geographies.

An auction for 700MW of grid energy capacity in Portugal is being configured to allow bids from solar and also solar-plus-storage projects to participate on a competitive basis, with guaranteed payments for energy storage co-located projects to use a capping mechanism in the event of ‘price spikes’.