A team of teachers volunteering to educate refugees and displaced peoples among the camps of Calais in northern France, will power a mobile school with a solar-plus-storage system.

News in brief: Japan’s northern island tackles grid constraints for renewables with 60MWh battery; AES switches on large-scale storage in Northern Ireland; telecoms appear to be a good fit for Imergy’s flow batteries.

A UK electricity distribution network operator has signed a contract with Renewable Energy Systems (RES) to deliver an energy storage system co-located with large-scale solar, which will be used to develop ways to commercialise services to the grid.

Production and deliveries of Tesla’s stationary storage systems have now begun, while a company spokesman said it welcomes new competitors such as Faraday Future to the EV space – in line with Tesla’s stated values to accelerate clean energy deployment.

The former VP of Solar Grid Storage has predicted average Balance of Systems (BoS) costs for energy storage will drop from around US$670 to less than US$400 per kilowatt in the next five years.

Japanese financial services company Orix Corporation has invested in UniEnergy Technologies (UET), a US company delivering large-scale energy storage based around its own vanadium flow batteries.

Over two weeks at the beginning of December, unseasonal rains brought Chennai to a standstill. Rahul Walawalkar argues that energy storage-backed mircrogrids are an investment that would add resiliency of supply to extreme weather-affected areas as well as improving overall access to electricity.

German storage manufacturer sonnen will begin selling residential storage systems in the US before Christmas.

Off Grid Electric, a company specialising in providing electrification to rural communities, has created a US$45 million investment vehicle, bringing its total raised this year in equity and debt financing to US$70 million.

A document setting out new policy directions on solar support says the UK government has recognised the potential of energy storage but has decided the feed-in tariff would not be an appropriate mechanism to incentivise uptake.