Luxury car brand Rolls Royce, yet to make significant strides towards electrification of its vehicles, has nonetheless made an investment in the clean and distributed energy sectors, acquiring a stake in a microgrid solutions developer.

Islands around the world provide ideal conditions for trialling new approaches to energy provision. David Pratt reports on how cutting-edge renewable energy, storage and smart grid technologies are being rolled out to geographically isolated communities. Part 2 of this feature article continues with a look at how some of these projects could provide real-time lessons for the global clean energy transition.

Islands around the world provide ideal conditions for trialling new approaches to energy provision. David Pratt reports on some of the work going on globally to bring the benefits of cutting-edge renewable energy, storage and smart grid technologies to the world’s geographically isolated communities. To be continued later this week on Energy-Storage.news.

Tom Kenning of PV Tech/Energy-Storage.news visited a village in the heart of the North Indian plains where Uttar Pradesh borders Bihar, to see how a bold mix of biomass, solar and energy storage technologies is transforming local businesses by providing round-the-clock clean energy at prices cheaper than those of the main grid – all the while helping to solve India’s long struggle with power theft.

Despite the growing interest and deployment figures for lithium-ion batteries for stationary energy storage, its ‘predecessor’ lead acid still has a strong role to play in enabling more and more people to go solar, a representative of Trojan Battery has argued.

This week the editorial teams of Solar Media’s international brands, PV Tech and Energy-Storage.news, will be among those travelling to Munich for the Intersolar Europe trade show, which once again includes the electrical energy storage Europe (ees Europe) event.

Increasingly, solar energy and behind-the-meter battery storage assets are being deployed on an ‘as-a-service’ basis and system integrator Younicos has decided to replicate the strategy for microgrids.

Close on heels of its recent announcement on forming a new global unit focused on the hybrid and energy storage market, Indian EPC Sterling and Wilson has won a captive solar-diesel-storage microgrid project in Africa. Energy-Storage.News caught up with Vish Iyer, global head of business development, strategy and marketing for the Hybrid and Energy Storage division at Sterling and Wilson, to find out more.

A community microgrid in Chicago will be supplied with lithium-ion battery storage from aerospace and defence giant Lockheed Martin, allowing it to be ‘islanded’ from the local grid network.

Technology provider ABB has inaugurated a microgrid solution at its Vadodora manufacturing facility in Gujarat, India.