A former Tesla head of products has said that his new start-up’s redesign of the humble electrical panel offers “breakthrough interaction with home batteries,” and can streamline both labour and component costs of energy storage installations.

Leclanché is undergoing a “strategic reorganisation” of the company and said it has secured funding for its manufacturing and R&D activities while also announcing a pivot towards becoming a “green tech software and systems integration company”.

Another three developers with more than a gigawatt-hour of wins in Hawaiian Electric’s (HECO’s) massive solar-plus-storage and standalone energy storage tenders have gone public with size and location details of their proposed projects.

News in brief from around the world in energy storage.

Sunverge CEO Martin Milani talks about the system architectures and technologies that can make residential storage virtual power plants economically viable and useful to the local electricity network. As told to Andy Colthorpe.

The contract is for the 35MW hybrid York solar farm designed and constructed by developer GRIDSERVE, which was completed late last year.

There was a near-70% increase in capacity of operational energy storage projects in China paired with solar energy from 2018 to 2019, according to figures recently published by the China Energy Storage Alliance (CNESA).

Battery energy storage deployed at Cleve Hill, the largest solar farm planned in the UK to date, will be installed and operated in line with a safety plan agreed with local fire services and the national Health and Safety Executive.

A £31 million (US$38.06 million) demonstrator project in the UK, integrating heat, transport and energy is to progress despite COVID-19 restrictions.

While utility Hawaiian Electric (HECO) stands poised to announce the finalists of its recent massive procurement of solar-plus-storage and standalone energy storage projects, developers with winning bids seem determined to steal the utility’s thunder.