Tesla Inc. today showed off recent activities in the virtual power plant (VPP) space at Tokyo’s Smart Grid Expo, with a view to bringing them at scale into the country’s rapidly changing energy market.

In today’s episode, ESN’s Andy Colthorpe and Liam Stoker explore the way grids are changing in the Middle East to accommodate clean energy, the role virtual power plants are playing in Italy, and the contrasting role coal is playing in Germany and bush fire-stricken Australia.

Susan Kennedy has stepped down as CEO of Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS), with chief product officer Seyed Madaeni appointed to take her place.

In what is unlikely to become a regular feature of Energy-Storage.news, but seems apt nonetheless, this edition rounds up news from some of the latest behind-the-meter orchestras of small-scale resources in the past few weeks.

At 4:52pm on Friday 9 August 2019, the UK suffered its first wide-scale blackout in more than a decade. More than 1.1 million consumers were plunged into the dark as rail lines screeched to a halt, traffic lights failed and even airports reported problems. Liam Stoker looks at the root causes, and how battery storage came to the rescue.

The business models and technologies underpinning the development of stationary energy storage markets are evolving rapidly. Dr. Kai-Philipp Kairies, Jan Figgener and David Haberschusz of RWTH Aachen University look at some of the key trends driving the sector forwards, in a paper which first appeared in PV Tech Power’s Energy Storage Special Report 2019.

Assets are up for sale following the bankruptcy of EnSync, a networked smart home solutions provider from the US which has been using battery energy storage to aggregate connected systems for energy trading and other services.

The capabilities of virtual power plants (VPPs) to provide capacity as well as frequency regulation services to the grid in Australia will be demonstrated through a new integration trial.

A Tesla Powerpack energy storage system with 7MWh capacity has been deployed for a train company in Japan, adding backup power capabilities to trains and adding the system to an ongoing virtual power plant project.

A contract with utility Southern California Edison (SCE) has led to Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) supplying 2GWh of grid services from just 60MWh of energy storage during 2018, with one analyst dubbing the feat an “impressive milestone”.