Tesla has announced the first programme to aggregate the capabilities of hundreds of its residential and commercial stationary storage systems in a partnership with Vermont utility Green Mountain Power.

Power equipment manufacturer Wärtsilä has launched hybrid and standalone energy storage systems, targeting areas where it sees “high market potential”, including remote microgrids and solar PV integration.

In the first of a two-part blog series on the energy storage response to the infamous Aliso Canyon gas leak in California, Energy-Storage.News sets the scene of how the California Energy Commission and chosen system suppliers got their heads around solving a mammoth power shortage with many, many batteries, in a race against time.

The government of Victoria in Australia plans to invest AU$20 million (US$15.2 million) in large-scale energy storage initiatives across the state to reach 100MW by the end of 2018.

In a major energy strategy upheaval, the South Australian government is providing significant funding to support energy storage projects, starting with a 100MW grid-connected battery that will be the largest in the country.

Swedish start-up Northvolt, which is run by two former Tesla Motors executives, plans to build a huge lithium-ion battery factory in the Nordic region, giving Tesla and Panasonic’s Nevada Gigafactory a close rival within Europe in terms of size.

UK firm Open Energi’s Dynamic Demand technology has been integrated with Europe’s first grid-scale Tesla Powerpack installation in Somerset, UK, in preparation for the site entering the firm frequency response (FFR) tendering market.

Electric car maker turned ‘integrated sustainable energy company’ Tesla installed 98MWh of energy storage in the final quarter of 2016, according to its financial results released last week.

From Energy-Storage.News’ publisher comes The Global Energy Storage Opportunity, a special online-only supplement magazine that looks at some of the exciting recent developments in all segments from microgrids and residential to grid-scale and commercial.

Last year was a “seminal year” for energy storage, where the technology moved from “dream to reality”, according to impact investor Nancy Pfund, one of the earliest backers to Tesla and SolarCity.