Stem Inc is developing what it claimed is the first virtual power plant in South America, aggregating behind-the-meter distributed energy facilities in Chile.

A five-year long project to trial the use of energy storage at community-scale in a Western Australian suburb achieved an 85% reduction in consumption of energy from the grid at peak times for participating households. 

Electric school buses in the US could be turned into a virtual power plant (VPP) resource, through a new partnership between student transport supplier Zum Services and artificial intelligence-driven distributed energy software company AutoGrid.

Stem Inc said that its portfolio of aggregated battery energy storage systems was called into action to help balance electricity networks across four different states and provinces in the US and Canada during heat waves in June.

There are perhaps four or five US states which have become prolific in their deployment of battery energy storage systems, but it’s also interesting to hear about what’s happening in regions where that development is still at an earlier stage.

As society moves away from centralised fossil fuel generators to increasing shares of distributed renewable energy resources, the idea that customers’ homes could become host to virtual power plants (VPPs), joining the dots between electricity supply and demand across the grid, has gradually gathered traction. Andy Colthorpe speaks with Suleman Khan CEO of Swell Energy, which has raised nearly half a billion dollars in financing for solar-plus-storage VPPs in 14,000 homes across California, New York and Hawaii.

Wärtsilä Corporation launched its newest modular energy storage system solution at a ‘critical municipal infrastructure’ project performing grid services and reducing peak demand for a city in Virginia, US.

News in brief from around the world in energy storage.

Reducing peak demand for commercial and industrial (C&I) electric utility customers in Ontario remains a big opportunity for using battery energy storage to reduce costs and decarbonise, three partner companies working on a 2MWh project have said.

A battery energy storage system (BESS) has been selected as a proven and resilient solution to help power a mainland US military facility, saving money on electricity costs and being delivered on a commercial basis.