Only large scale and intelligent energy storage can realistically solve the issue of variable renewable electricity generation. Patrick Clerens, Secretary General at the European Association for Storage of Energy and a member of the advisory board for Electrify Europe, argues that we can make it happen – but only if we get the incentives right.

Swiss vertically-integrated battery and energy storage system and equipment maker Leclanché has followed sonnen in netting a significant amount of investment to go into the second half of 2018, securing CHF75 million (US$76 million) from its main existing investor.

Shell, which has just participated in an investment round for sonnen, is one of the big players in the incumbent energy industry that “really acts” on clean energy, rather than just talking about it, sonnen’s CEO has said.

News in brief from around the world of energy storage.

South Somerset District Council in the south west of England will pay for, and build, its own 25MW battery energy storage facility.

Shell has continued to scale-up its interest in distributed energy by participating in a €60 million (US$70.23 million) investment round by German battery storage firm sonnen.

Australian firm Carnegie Clean Energy has raised AU$5.3 million (~US$4 million) to grow its solar PV, battery energy storage and wave energy businesses.

Philadelphia Solar, a vertically-integrated PV company headquartered in Jordan, said this morning it has reached financial close on a project to bring battery storage to a large-scale solar farm in the Middle East kingdom.

Axiom Exergy, a US manufacturer of energy storage units that use stored energy for cooling buildings and produce, has netted close to US$8 million from investors including Shell’s venture capital unit and Tesla battery guru JB Straubel.

Israel-headquartered SolarEdge launched a software platform for aggregating household energy storage units – and other distributed energy equipment – into virtual power plants, last week. The company’s solution has already been chosen for a VPP project in Australia by AGL, one of the country’s biggest utilities. The commercial launch of the VPP platform direct to customers is now underway. Andy Colthorpe spoke with Lior Handelsman, one of SolarEdge’s founders and vice president of marketing and product strategy.