While redesigning California’s energy system will take some time, in the past couple of weeks alone, Energy-Storage.news has become aware of numerous initiatives and projects, both publicly and privately-driven, that are seeking to modernise, add resilience to and lower the emissions of the California grid.

South Africa’s Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy is conducting a fairly unique procurement programme for 2GW of energy capacity, to come from a “range of energy source technologies”. Clean Horizon head of market analysis, Corentin Baschet, spoke to Andy Colthorpe about what the “almost technology agnostic” tender aims to do and the type of companies and projects likely to be successful in it.

Distributed energy resources (DERs) will be able to participate in US wholesale energy markets following a “landmark” new ruling from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

The dynamics of balancing electricity supply and demand on the grid have been deeply affected by the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s certainly not the only reason why the UK’s electricity system operator is introducing a new service called Dynamic Containment. What is it and why is the UK already replacing its firm frequency response (FFR) and other ancillary services?

“Intelligent energy platform” company Kaluza is claiming a UK first as it provides one of the country’s distribution network operators (DNOs) with flexibility from domestic batteries and transport solutions using one platform.

Lynn Jurich, CEO at major US residential solar installation and leasing company Sunrun has spoken of the big opportunity for aggregated solar-plus-storage systems to provide grid services and in doing so help lower the cost of installations.

The UKs largest council-owned battery storage site, the 30MW Fideoak Mill site, is now fully operational and able to participate in delivering multiple revenue-generating services.

Anesco, the developer of a subsidy-free solar farm in England which has onsite battery energy storage, has sold the plant on to hybrid solar solutions company GRIDSERVE.

There’s a race to develop new technologies – and adapt existing ones – that can either be complementary to lithium batteries, or even compete with them. Representatives from three technology providers offer up some case studies, data, insights and opinions on where they think the market could go.

California investor-owned utility (IOU) Pacific Gas & Electric has begun work constructing a 182.5MW / 730MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) project at a substation in California.