Sonnen is looking to sign up 2,000 Australian customers this year for SonnenFlat, where households sign up to pay a monthly ‘flat rate’ for power while their batteries are used to benefit the local grid.

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.

Distributed energy technologies such as solar and battery-based energy storage could save Australia AU$101 billion (US$75 billion) by 2050 and completely eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report from CSIRO and Energy Networks Australia (ENA).

Software platforms are emerging as a crucial element in the rapidly expanding energy storage industry. Alex Eller of Navigant Research explains the crucial role software plays in underpinning the value of energy storage systems.

A plan by utility Con Edison to save US$1 billion on infrastructure spending in New York’s Brooklyn and Queens neighbourhoods will get 13MWh of energy storage from Green Charge.

From the outside, the VPP looks like a single power production facility that publishes one schedule of operation and can be optimised from a single remote site. From the inside, the VPP can combine a rich diversity of independent resources into a network via the sophisticated planning, scheduling, and bidding of DER-based services. Peter Asmus examines the role energy storage can play within this architecture.

The future for Tesla-SolarCity could lie in aggregating rooftop PV with stationary energy storage, EVs and other distributed energy resources, the head of energy storage market analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has said.

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.

Moves by the US’ Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to assess electricity storage’s potential role in wholesale markets and in maintaining a low-cost, reliable network have been welcomed by the Washington-headquartered Energy Storage Association.

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.