Dr Rahul Walawalkar is president and MD of Customized Energy Solutions and an executive director of the India Energy Storage Alliance. A proud evangelist for renewables and advanced energy storage technologies, Andy Colthorpe asked him about what 2017 meant for India’s storage industry and what’s getting him enthused – or apprehensive – about 2018.

ELM FieldSight has partnered with power conversion specialist Ideal Power on a number of microgrid and related projects, designing and supplying the control system that makes the system tick, balancing the different distributed energy sources plugged into it. Vice president of operations Jason Petermeier shared his thoughts on recent projects, not-so-recent projects and where microgrids are heading.

Islands are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of natural disasters such as hurricanes. John Merritt of Ideal Power looks at some of the emerging solutions to building more resilient energy systems through the deployment of microgrids that combine multiple energy generation and storage technologies.

A project in Jamaica, pairing utility-scale solar with battery energy storage at a microgrid could become “a model for other countries in the Caribbean and beyond”, the head of the country’s main utility has said.

Mis-selling, insurance risk and the failure of associated costs to fall alongside sell prices could hold back greater battery storage deployment in Britain, a panel discussion has revealed.

RES (Renewable Energy Systems) has confirmed the expected capacity and output of a photovoltaics-linked energy storage system being developed for a railway in Canada which will use lithium-ion batteries.

A new study from Navigant Research into the strategy and execution of various lithium-ion battery providers in the utility-scale energy storage industry identified Korean companies LG Chem and Samsung SDI as “leaders” of a rapidly-growing sector.

A subsidiary of Enel is jointly developing a large-scale lithium-ion battery system project with wind power developer ENERTRAG, in what will be the multinational utility’s first energy storage project in Germany.

The Indian Budget has seen a hike in customs duty for lithium-ion batteries from 10% to 20%.

Energy storage in the state of South Australia has continued its prolific pace of development with the announcement of two new grid-scale projects and a sizeable commercial and industrial (C&I) installation.