A programme by utility Con Edison to reduce stress on the electrical grid at low cost to consumers in two districts of New York will get its first microgrid at a low-income housing complex.

The soon-to-be-merged Tesla and SolarCity have completed a solar-plus-storage microgrid on an island in American Samoa that will reduce the local population’s reliance on costly and cumbersome diesel imports.

German manufacturer Tesvolt will supply 3MWh of energy storage to 25 villages in Mali, Africa, which the company claims will allow the currently diesel-reliant residents to drastically reduce electricity costs.

Energy storage designer and manufacturer SimpliPhi Power Energy has completed installing a ‘plug and play microgrid’ for an off-grid solar-plus-storage project with Pure Power in California.

Duke Energy has proposed installing a microgrid — powered by renewable energy — to power a communications tower in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the borders of Tennessee and North Carolina.

Chinese inverter manufacturer Sungrow has supplied its inverter and battery storage technologies to a large-scale solar-plus-storage microgrid project in a remote area of Tibet.

A solar power plant owned by Vermont utility Green Mountain Power saved the utility’s quarter of a million customers US$200,000 in one hour by drastically reducing peak demand.

Utility and network needs are rapidly changing and some are adopting both batteries and ultracapacitors to meet these needs. David Lentsch of Maxwell Technologies looks at some of the various approaches.

Two large-scale solar plants planned for the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido will be paired with utility-scale energy storage, in order to meet regulations set out by the region’s electricity authority.

An Australian island will soon host the world’s first renewable energy microgrid that integrates wave energy, solar PV and energy storage technologies.