We often hear about California’s leading position in solar and latterly in energy storage. Perhaps lesser known than direct policy support for energy storage and renewable technologies is the way California’s network operator (CAISO) is starting to reconfigure how it procures demand response, with a positive impact for energy storage – and particularly behind-the-meter assets, as Ted Ko, policy director of Stem, explains.

Australia has launched new interactive maps of the electricity grid specifically to support decentralised usage of distributed energy resources (DERs) including battery storage, renewable energy and smart demand management.

Stem’s virtual power plants (VPPs) have been utilised to provide emergency demand response services in California during a major heatwave.

Demand response provider Limejump has added Britain’s largest battery storage system to its aggregation assets after winning a contract from UK Power Networks (UKPN) to take on the commercial operations of Smarter Network Storage, also known as ‘The Big Battery’.

US utility Southern California Edison (SCE) is looking to acquire distributed energy projects to help strengthen the grid in the Goleta area of Santa Barbara, California.

A UK energy demand response start-up using machine learning and artificial intelligence to manage a portfolio of storage assets and provide real-time energy reserves to the grid is set to launch within weeks.

A plan by utility Con Edison to save US$1 billion on infrastructure spending in New York’s Brooklyn and Queens neighbourhoods will get 13MWh of energy storage from Green Charge.

From the outside, the VPP looks like a single power production facility that publishes one schedule of operation and can be optimised from a single remote site. From the inside, the VPP can combine a rich diversity of independent resources into a network via the sophisticated planning, scheduling, and bidding of DER-based services. Peter Asmus examines the role energy storage can play within this architecture.

German energy storage hardware and services provider sonnen has launched a new product for the commercial energy storage market using power conversion systems from Ideal Power.

A utility in California is investigating how energy storage technology for keeping food and other goods refrigerated could help counter the challenge posed by the famous “duck curve” of PV energy supply and demand.