It’s Solar Power International this week and bigger than ever is its co-located sister show Energy Storage International in Anaheim, California. Here are some of the reasons why we’re excited to attend.

Scotland’s first utility-scale battery storage facility has been officially opened today, having begun delivering sub-second balancing services to National Grid at the end of June under a bespoke agreement secured before the hotly contested Enhanced Frequency Response (EFR) auction of 2016.

California’s Governor Jerry Brown has passed the state’s 2045 zero-carbon electricity target into law, offering a major boost to the energy storage sector in the process.

Up to 140MW of capacity will be procured under the first ever tender for Ireland’s new frequency response and balancing programme, with projects to go live by September 2021.

Over 370MW of energy storage projects, along with 1.25GW of solar, have been successfully moved into the ‘first batch’ of projects to be processed under a new connections procedure, brought in to tackle the surging levels of smaller projects aiming to connect.

Known historically for its oil and in the present day for deploying large amounts of wind energy and latterly for deploying batteries at wind farms, the US state of Texas is less well known for solar-plus-storage projects.

Energy storage projects were under construction across four provinces of China, amounting to 340.5MW of new capacity during the first half of this year in the country, according to the China Energy Storage Alliance (CNESA).

Following news yesterday of the first grid-scale solar-plus-storage system on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, two more modestly-sized projects show the potential diversity of applications for energy storage in the US state.

Minnesota electric cooperative Connexus Energy has confirmed recent press reports that it is building 15MW / 30MWh of battery energy storage, while another not-for-profit, Vermont Electric Cooperative, will build a 1.9MW / 5.3MWh system in its service area.

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.