Make no mistake – headlines in the mainstream press this week around Australia, climate change and energy are not positive. But enthusiasm at state level, where arguably politicians have closer relationships with their constituents, appears to run counter to apathy or even obstructionism from the top.

European energy company Vattenfall is combining a 22MW wind power plant with 38MW of solar PV at a hybrid project in the Netherlands, integrating the capacity with 12MWh of batteries from carmaker BMW.

Battery storage assets were called into action last week after the UK suffered country-wide power outages following a transmission system stress event.

Of the four projects, all in California, one has already closed financing.

Georgia Power is set to boost its state’s battery energy storage sector, with the company’s plan to own and operate 80MW of battery energy storage unanimously approved by the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC).

Australia may be one of the leading major economies in terms of renewable deployments, but it’s woefully underprepared at a network level to actually make the transition…

Standalone energy storage can challenge new gas peaker plants as a “mainstream” option in the US right now, Fluence has said.

The pipeline of projects currently stands at 11GW, and although it is unlikely that this will all be built, we currently see nearly 800MW of projects at the ‘under construction/ready to build’ stage.

A solar-plus-storage project in Brazil trialling different batteries, a 22MW solar farm with 2.4MW of battery storage in Senegal and NGK Insulators’ recent, huge project using sodium sulfur batteries in Abu Dhabi are among the nominees in this year’s Solar & Storage Live Awards: International project category.

Thanks to “innovative business models” and the combination of PV with batteries, Japan’s “solar boom” is far from over, market expert Izumi Kaizuka of RTS PV has said.