Described as a project of ‘strategic importance’ for India’s entire energy sector, the country’s first grid-scale lithium-ion battery energy storage system officially went into service this week.

Solar-plus-storage systems in ordinary households will provide 20MW of energy capacity in New England, with Sunrun announcing the award of a contract from the state’s ISO (independent system operator).

A 100MWh battery energy storage system has been integrated with 400MW of wind energy, 200MW of PV and 50MW of concentrated PV (CPV) in a huge demonstration project in China.

A 6MW / 6MWh containerised energy storage system will help provide power to all 19,000 inhabitants of a tiny Caribbean island, installed by Wartsila, via its recently-acquired energy storage system integrator subsidiary Greensmith.

While the likes of California, Massachusetts and New York make headlines as the leading US states for energy storage policy, initiatives from the ground up in New Hampshire, Georgia and Michigan have been announced already this year.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our series looking back on last year’s challenges, milestone and successes and looking ahead to a busy 2019. After featuring a range of views from industry participants and experts, now it’s my turn to throw out some predictions for the year ahead…

VRB Energy, a maker of flow batteries headquartered in Canada and owned by a metal resources and mining company, said the first phase of a 40MWh flow battery project in China has now been commissioned.

Britain’s government is seeking to remove a significant hurdle for utility-scale co-located storage sites, enabling projects with combined capacities in excess of 50MW to proceed without requiring government consent.

Iowa’s Maharishi University of Management has completed and powered up a new solar power plant featuring both single-axis tracking and vanadium redox flow battery energy storage.