Australia-headquartered flow battery maker Redflow is continuing with a strategy of selling devices into the telecoms sector, agreeing on a second deal to repower mobile phone towers for a South African provider.

South Africa’s state-owned utility Eskom has unveiled its Distributed Battery Storage Programme at an event this week, committing to solar-plus-storage and energy storage projects totalling 1400MWh.

A mining operation in South Africa will start managing the cost of its consumed energy with the deployment of eight flow batteries from Primus Power.

A test and demonstration facility operated by South Africa’s main utility Eskom will trial Primus Power’s flow batteries, after a local developer was awarded a grant for the project by the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA).

South Africa’s main utility Eskom said it has identified a need for as much as 2,000MW of energy storage on its networks, and has opened a testing facility to find the technologies most suitable.

Tom Tipple, regional VP for Imergy Power Systems, a flow battery maker headquartered in Fremont, California, recently visited the PV Tech Storage offices to share his thoughts on the global market for energy storage.