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.

As society moves away from centralised fossil fuel generators to increasing shares of distributed renewable energy resources, the idea that customers’ homes could become host to virtual power plants (VPPs), joining the dots between electricity supply and demand across the grid, has gradually gathered traction. Andy Colthorpe speaks with Suleman Khan CEO of Swell Energy, which has raised nearly half a billion dollars in financing for solar-plus-storage VPPs in 14,000 homes across California, New York and Hawaii.

While 2020 may have been and gone, the strange times we’re collectively experiencing certainly have not. Looking back at least gives us an opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned during the past year or so and Aaroh Kharaya, product manager at solar PV and battery storage quality assurance, supply chain management and engineering services firm takes us through his top takeaways from a time that we may otherwise seek to forget.

While it is better known for putting lithium-ion batteries in phones, tablets and computers, consumer technology company Apple said it is building a 240MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) at a solar PV plant in California.