A regulatory framework put in place by Italy’s grid operator TERNA has enabled Enel X to aggregate residential energy storage systems to pool their capabilities.

Kyocera has officially launched a residential energy storage system using an advanced manufacturing process that supplier 24M claims can reduce some of the key costs of lithium battery making by as much as 50%.

Commercial energy storage ‘pioneer’ Stem Inc and NEC have announced a master supply agreement and wide-ranging partnership that will see the latter’s equipment and solutions used in solar-plus-storage projects in Stem’s pipeline.

Iberdrola has switched on a multi-megawatt battery energy storage system (BESS) in rural Spain that will enable up to five hours of backup power to local networks in the event of an outage.

Power shut-offs affecting millions in California, enacted by utilities Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and Southern California Edison to prevent wildfires and their spreading, are a “draconian” measure and don’t address the real problems, SimpliPhi Power CEO Catherine Von Burg has said.

The business models and technologies underpinning the development of stationary energy storage markets are evolving rapidly. Dr. Kai-Philipp Kairies, Jan Figgener and David Haberschusz of RWTH Aachen University look at some of the key trends driving the sector forwards, in a paper which first appeared in PV Tech Power’s Energy Storage Special Report 2019.

Energy Storage Special Report 2019, from the editorial teams behind Energy-Storage.news and PV Tech, brings you no less than seven feature articles and technical papers looking at everything from the policy and regulatory initiatives that still need to happen, to bankability and profitability of ESS, system technologies and architecture, all the way to recycling and end-of-life care for batteries.

Despite the huge strides energy storage has made, significant hurdles remain before the technology in its many guises can be claimed to have fulfilled its massive potential. E-S.n editor Andy Colthorpe assesses the key successes and ongoing challenges for this indispensable part of the future power system.

Make no mistake – headlines in the mainstream press this week around Australia, climate change and energy are not positive. But enthusiasm at state level, where arguably politicians have closer relationships with their constituents, appears to run counter to apathy or even obstructionism from the top.

Australia may be one of the leading major economies in terms of renewable deployments, but it’s woefully underprepared at a network level to actually make the transition…