A programme to modernise New York’s energy system will lead to the state’s biggest ‘virtual power plant’, with PV system owners invited to join a pilot of aggregated solar-plus-storage systems.

A trial project using 1.1MWh of lithium-ion battery storage to harness power from rooftop solar systems has been installed in the Western Australia suburb of Alkimos.

Lichtblick, a retailer of ‘green electricity and green gas’ headquartered in Germany, is looking to take its concept for integrating multiple distributed generation sources into a single network into international markets.

Adobe is among the participants earning revenues from what is claimed to be an energy storage industry first – a trial rewarding California storage system users for conferring benefits to the grid.

Tesla’s much-hyped battery announcement in April raised important questions over what business models will drive the deployment of stationary battery storage. As Andy Colthorpe reports, one answer is the virtual power plant, in which residential and commercial battery systems are aggregated to provide grid services.