Tesla Inc. today showed off recent activities in the virtual power plant (VPP) space at Tokyo’s Smart Grid Expo, with a view to bringing them at scale into the country’s rapidly changing energy market.

For Japan, the famous 4Ds of the energy transition – creating a distributed, decarbonised, decentralised and digitised grid – will involve a huge scaling up of smart solutions on a market basis, various sources have told Energy-Storage.news.

Kyocera has officially launched a residential energy storage system using an advanced manufacturing process that supplier 24M claims can reduce some of the key costs of lithium battery making by as much as 50%.

A solar-plus-storage sysem is to power the manufacturing of electric vehicles at Mitsubishi Motors Corporation’s (MMC) Okazaki Plant in Japan.

A consortium featuring Mitsubishi and Japanese utility Chubu is set to buy out European energy major Eneco as Mitsubishi targets further European growth.

Experience of managing 10,000 home batteries in Japan paves the way for mass EV smart charging and further international expansion.

In what is unlikely to become a regular feature of Energy-Storage.news, but seems apt nonetheless, this edition rounds up news from some of the latest behind-the-meter orchestras of small-scale resources in the past few weeks.

Japanese developer Eurus Energy and Australian-headquartered wind developer Windlab have signed an MoU with Kenyan authorities to develop an 80MW solar-plus-wind-plus-storage facility.

Tokyo’s main power company is using blockchain distributed ledger technology to assess how customers on its new renewable energy tariffs could use solar, batteries and electric vehicles to trade energy via the grid.

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.