The CEO of US virtual power plant provider Swell Energy has said that New York utility company Con Edison has been “very progressive” in recognising the value that aggregated home battery systems paired with solar can offer.

Retail power company Vistra Energy has followed up its recent completion in California of the world’s biggest battery storage facility by proposing a new facility in the state with twice the rated output.

A 50MW / 75MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) project in Western Sydney, Australia, will receive AU$21.5 million (US$15.35 million) in assistance from the federal and state governments towards its total cost of AU$61.9 million.

Rosatom, Russia’s biggest electricity provider and the country’s supplier of nuclear fuel for power plants, has opened an energy storage business unit baed around lithium-ion batteries.

New York Power Authority (NYPA) said work has begun on the state’s second grid-scale battery storage facility connected to the transmission network, with the system set to remain owned and operated by New York State.

The first grid-scale battery energy storage project in the Canadian province of Alberta is on-track to go into operation this month, while TransAlta, the company behind the project, has expedited plans to retire a coal plant citing “future market conditions”.

Eskom, the state-owned electricity utility of South Africa, has begun tendering for a battery energy storage system (BESS) of minimum size and capacity 80MW / 320MWh.

Developer Agilitas Energy, which won a competitive solicitation to implement a non-wires solution to help an overworked substation for utility Con Edison (Coned) in New York said it has picked a site for its energy storage project.

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.