Johnson Controls has sold off its power business, including its design and production of automotive batteries, to focus on management solutions for buildings and HVAC systems for industrial customers.

Two community energy groups in California have partnered to buy the energy output of a 150MW solar farm with 180MWh of battery energy storage from Recurrent Energy, the US-based utility-scale solar project developer subsidiary of Canadian Solar.

Quoting an expected doubling in installed PV capacity over the next five years, a partnership between Chinese battery storage system maker BYD and European PV inverter company SMA is targeting the USA market, identifying it – along with Africa – as having “high growth potential” for the pair’s products.

As well as Elon Musk remarking that the company may have had its “best ever quarter” for solar since the SolarCity takeover, Tesla’s energy storage deployments have enjoyed a ramp up, while a fellow exec hinted the stationary battery business is constrained by cell supply.

The UK’s government has shied away from supporting large volumes of solar and other distributed energy technologies through subsidies, but commercial and industrial energy storage and solar-plus-storage could be a huge market opportunity in Britain and abroad.

Smart energy and inverter company SolarEdge will acquire the South Korean battery manufacturer Kokam.

CPS Energy, a utility serving residents of San Antonio, Texas, has just broken ground on the first solar-plus-storage project it will own outright.

Lithium-ion battery energy storage will be deployed at a 10MW solar farm in a remote part of Siberia, as a pilot to investigate the potential for the technologies to combine in the region.

UK Power Reserve, a British developer of flexible electricity assets, has confirmed that battery storage solutions from Fluence will be used to build out its entire 120MW portfolio of projects.

First developed by NASA, flow batteries are a potential answer to storing solar – and wind – for eight to 10 hours, far beyond what is commonly achieved today with lithium-ion. In the second of a two-part special report, Andy Colthorpe dives deeper into questions of bankability, market segmentation and manufacturing strategies with four very different providers of flow energy storage technology.