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.

What has driven the recent boom in Germany’s household energy storage installation figures? What value do customers expect when adding a storage system to their homes? And more importantly, what are energy storage providers doing to sustain and accelerate growth, which can eventually unlock a true mass market? Florian Mayr of Apricum takes a closer look.

UK renewable electricity supplier Solo Energy is set to launch a ‘free battery’ business model to UK homeowners after a successful pilot on the remote Scottish islands of Orkney.