US residential solar installer Sunrun is deploying aggregated rooftop solar-plus-batteries in partnership with utility Southern California Edison (SCE), in a demonstration project of the systems’ capabilities to run as a virtual power plant (VPP).

A project demonstrating aggregated solar-plus-storage in Louisiana involving energy storage company SimpliPhi Power, technology partner Heila and local utility SWEPCO has started off small, but is “expected to transition into a larger network of distributed systems, soon”.

QCELLS has invested AU$5 million (US$3.45 million) in SwitchDin, an Australian distributed energy resources (DERs) software company that offers capabilities including virtual power plant aggregation and microgrid-forming.

A £31 million (US$38.06 million) demonstrator project in the UK, integrating heat, transport and energy is to progress despite COVID-19 restrictions.

With the award of funding from the California Energy Commission, advanced energy hardware and software including solar-plus-storage, blockchain and EV charging stations will help demonstrate the feasibility of decarbonising a disadvantaged community in Los Angeles.

Residential energy storage provider Sunverge has won out in a competitive bidding process to provide systems and software for a proposed virtual power plant (VPP) project in Maryland in the US.

Three European Transmission System Operators (TSO) have collaborated to launch a new, blockchain-based flexibility platform, Equigy.

A roundup of news in brief from one of the world’s hottest markets for energy storage – Australia.

Home batteries in a South Australia delivered significant revenues from their first six months of participation in a virtual power plant to help balance the grid, even with only an initial 1MW – 2MW of aggregated customer systems participating.

Blockchain technology and a digital trading platform enables sonnen’s latest virtual power plant (VPP) project in northeast Germany to store wind energy that would otherwise be curtailed and ‘lost’.