The UK’s energy retail market is witnessing an exodus of customers leaving the so-called Big Six for independent suppliers, who are attracting them with home solar systems and a battery to match. Liam Stoker uncovers what’s behind the trend for new energy suppliers taking to domestic PV

National Grid, in its capacity as the UK’s Electricity System Operator (ESO), last week launched a new ‘Distributed Resource Desk’ in its control room in a move hailed as a “huge step forward” for electricity flexibility markets.

‘Energy resilient infrastructure upgrades’ planned for a US military facility will involve the deployment of 20MW of solar PV, 4MW / 8MWh of battery storage and 4MW of gas-fired backup generation in a project worth US$133.5 million.

Australia-headquartered engineering and professional services company WorleyParsons said its first EPC contract for a battery storage project in the US shows how the energy sector is moving from “mega projects” to “portfolios of smaller projects”.

Business models used by Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS), including creating “Hybrid Electric Buildings” with energy storage, take the industry to a “new level”, VC investor Nancy Pfund has said.

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.

South Korean corporate industrial holdings company Doosan has acquired Seattle-based 1Energy Systems, which develops the software platform needed to automatically integrate distributed energy resources (DER) into the grid.

The future for Tesla-SolarCity could lie in aggregating rooftop PV with stationary energy storage, EVs and other distributed energy resources, the head of energy storage market analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has said.

Lichtblick, a retailer of ‘green electricity and green gas’ headquartered in Germany, is looking to take its concept for integrating multiple distributed generation sources into a single network into international markets.

Hawaii’s electricity regulator and main utility have recognised that customer-sited distributed energy resources (DERs), including rooftop PV and energy storage, can provide essential grid services and better visbility for network operators, the VP of Stem Inc’s Hawaii operations has told Energy Storage News.