On a visit to heat battery maker Sunamp’s office, Scotland’s energy minister Fergus Ewing outlined aims to collaborate with his counterparts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland on nationwide storage strategy, while Sunamp CEO Andrew Bissel says greater understanding of heat source batteries is needed for the technology to be included.

While a project to run a Spanish island off renewable energy which gathered media attention this week might only have successfully met the region’s energy demand continuously for four hours, the project is nonetheless “very significant”, an expert with the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has said.

News in brief: Australia gets its largest battery storage system to date, Tesla man persuaded to go back to Sonnenbatterie and Gildemeister installs PV-linked flow battery systems in Czech Republic.

GE has provided its largest storage system to date, a 30MW for Coachella energy Storage Partners (CESP).

Tesla’s much-hyped battery announcement in April raised important questions over what business models will drive the deployment of stationary battery storage. As Andy Colthorpe reports, one answer is the virtual power plant, in which residential and commercial battery systems are aggregated to provide grid services.

Following the announcement of a ‘virtual power plant’ pilot in Australia, Sunverge energy storage systems have been selected for another trial project to test the capabilities of customer-sited storage, this time in the US.

Through a brief history of batteries and some findings from his own team’s work, Volker Wachenfeld of SMA Solar Technology answers a frequently asked question in energy storage; how can compatibility with the existing variety of batteries in the market be put into practice?

Construction has begun on what is claimed to be the world’s first modular large-scale battery storage system, a 5MW device at a research university in Aachen, Germany.

Ministers from both Scotland and Wales have said energy storage solutions are integral to the “future direction” of energy use in the UK as they warned against cuts to renewable energy subsidies.

Australia’s Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) released a hefty report on global energy storage and how it relates back to the domestic situation last month. Tom Kenning investigated one of the report’s main conclusions – that the value for energy storage in Australia, initially at least, will most likely be found behind-the-meter.