The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) is funding trial deployments of two different non-lithium battery technologies at microgrids in Western Australia.

Thanks to “innovative business models” and the combination of PV with batteries, Japan’s “solar boom” is far from over, market expert Izumi Kaizuka of RTS PV has said.

Australia’s Labor Party has pushed the solar industry into the election campaign spotlight vowing to turn thousands of schools into virtual power plants.

Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) has issued a sizeable solar-plus-storage tender for the island archipelago of Lakshadweep involving 20MWac of floating solar projects coupled with 60MWh of battery energy storage systems.

Firm spies potential for more than 4.5GW of flexible power capacity in the UK alone and a home energy management industry which it expects to be worth more than US£2 billion (US$2.58 billion) a year by 2025.

‘Europe’s largest’ energy storage pilot project at an industrial site, combining 2MWp of rooftop solar with a total of 4.2MWh of energy storage across a lithium-ion battery system and two flow batteries has been inaugurated in Belgium.

JLM Energy, a US maker of residential ’microstorage’ systems that pair with individual solar panels, is leaning on its US$25 million project finance fund to develop larger storage projects for commercial businesses.

Israel-headquartered SolarEdge launched a software platform for aggregating household energy storage units – and other distributed energy equipment – into virtual power plants, last week. The company’s solution has already been chosen for a VPP project in Australia by AGL, one of the country’s biggest utilities. The commercial launch of the VPP platform direct to customers is now underway. Andy Colthorpe spoke with Lior Handelsman, one of SolarEdge’s founders and vice president of marketing and product strategy.

Voltstorage, a German company founded in Munich in 2016, is launching a vanadium-redox-flow (VRF) energy storage system aimed at the residential market.

Tesla has reported a significant year-on-year increase in business for its stationary energy storage systems, but more attention has been focused on delays in Model 3 deliveries and a decline in solar installs.