Europe’s telecommunications sector has the potential to deploy 15GWh of distributed energy storage (DES), halving its energy costs and helping the energy transition, Finnish telecoms firm Elisa said discussing its new DES solution with Energy-Storage.news.

Jennifer Downing, senior advisor to the Loan Programs Office at the US Department of Energy (DOE) and author of a recent report into virtual power plant technology, speaks to Energy-Storage.news.

Virtual power plant (VPP) projects using home batteries have been launched and extended in Texas, Vermont and California.

Xcel Energy has launched scheme in Colorado, rewarding customers for allowing utility to use battery storage to provide grid services.

Germany and US residential battery storage and VPP provider sonnen’s network of batteries in Germany has reached 250MWh, and will hit 1GWh in the next few years, it said.

Leap, a provider of software to aggregate distributed energy resources into VPPs, has raised US$12 million equity investments.

As distributed energy resources such as residential solar rooftop increase in the next decade, aggregation into virtual power plants could save US utilities up to US$35 billion, according to The Brattle Group.

Work is set to begin “within weeks” on a BESS project at the site of a coal power plant in New South Wales, Australia.

Finland telecommunications firm Elisa has received €3.9 million from the government to form a VPP using batteries which could be the largest of its kind in Europe.

Peak Power, an Ontario-based C&I-focused energy storage and software firm, has secured a US$200 million financing agreement with Madison Energy Investments (MEI).