Financing has been secured for two projects that will add nearly a gigawatt-hour of battery storage at California solar power facilities this year, by renewable energy company Terra-Gen and private asset management firm Capital Dynamics.

Update 2 August 2021 (2): The fire was declared under control at 3:05pm local time today, CFA said.

Specialist international investment manager Amber Infrastructure Group has reached commercial close on the development of a 50MW/100MWh utility-scale battery energy storage project in Lancashire, a county in northern England.

Tesla has reported more than 200% year-on-year increases in both solar and energy storage deployments for the second quarter of this year, during which time the company also produced and delivered more than 200,000 vehicles.

Tesla Energy has begun an initiative to install its V3 solar roof tiles and Powerwall 2 residential battery storage systems for what has been dubbed a “solar neighbourhood” at homes in a new development in Austin, Texas.

Infrastructure service provider Lumea has opened up a process to tender for a 300MW grid-connected battery project near Melbourne, Australia, intending to build the project without government funding.

After local opposition to the construction of a new gas peaker plant in Oxnard, California, a battery storage plant that was chosen instead has gone online just nine months after construction began.

Green Mountain Power, a utility company in Vermont, has begun using Tesla Powerwall energy storage systems in customers’ homes as a frequency regulation resource to benefit the regional grid.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the company is already achieving “good margins” on the residential Powerwall product, but that “some additional work is needed” for its utility-scale Megapack to do so.

In the first part of this interview with Swell Energy CEO Suleman Khan we heard about how Swell Energy has been working to ‘productise’ the virtual power plant proposition: making it attractive to utilities and to their end-customers and then wrapping that into a long-term agreement. This time out, we speak to Suleman about some of the finer details of the VPP proposition and where he thinks the market is heading.