What is thought to be Canada’s first virtual power plant (VPP), aggregating the capabilities of a small fleet of solar PV-plus-storage systems with energy management software, has been deployed in Ontario.

Sonnen, Germany’s market leader in residential energy storage, recently launched its operations in Britain. We met up with Martin Allman, the company’s UK country director, to hear about key aspects of the company’s strategy.

Roundup: Activist-entrepreneur Danny Kennedy seeks innovative solutions for international showcase, Statoil and Scotland look at batteries for offshore wind, Tesla stops selling 10kWh Powerwall.

For over a decade, net metering has been a crucial component of the economic puzzle for renewable energy, allowing both residential and commercial rooftop PV owners to realise favourable returns on their solar equipment investment. John Merritt of Ideal Power Conversion looks at some of the arguments and counter-arguments and says solar-plus-storage could be the natural successor to the policy – starting at commercial and industrial (C&I) level.

Puerto Rico’s financially troubled electric power authority PREPA will install a large-scale battery park at a 10MW PV farm, to help integrate the farm’s output and other renewables.

Recharge A/S, an investment fund specialising in renewables, will take a 50.1% stake in a €24 million (US$26.7 million) micro grid on a remote Portuguese island that could prove the validity of such projects as an asset class.

The Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) has invited expressions of interest for what may be India’s first utility-scale energy storage project to be combined with a solar and wind hybrid project at Rangreek in the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh.

The head of an Australian solar installer has criticised Tesla’s marketing of its residential energy storage devices, claiming that potential end customers have been given unrealistically low expectations on the system’s pricing.

German solar integration specialist Belectric has begun serial production of its ‘Energy Buffer Unit’ (EBU) battery system.

In the simplest terms, if 2014 was the year of test deployments and proving storage can work, 2015 was a year of getting things done. But what are the big trends likely to drive the space on in 2016? Lux Research closely tracks the energy storage industry, in combination with solar, in terms of its synergy with EVs and in its own right. Andy Colthorpe spoke with Lux analyst Cosmin Laslau to get his views and predictions on what we can expect to see this year.