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.

Utility-scale energy storage project developer / owner esVolta will execute a 15MW / 60MWh battery project to serve California cities that have formed their own ‘community choice’ energy supplier.

Australian state governments of Western Australia and the Northern Territory have budgeted for measures to support renewables in the past few days, primarily through supporting batteries at large-scale, residential and community level.

In the past couple of weeks, national and state government organisations in Australia have announced various stages of development for solar projects with a range of advanced and innovative storage solutions attached.

Two community energy suppliers in California followed up an agreement to buy power from a large-scale solar-plus-storage farm with another, project developer EDF Renewables has announced.

Two community energy groups in California have partnered to buy the energy output of a 150MW solar farm with 180MWh of battery energy storage from Recurrent Energy, the US-based utility-scale solar project developer subsidiary of Canadian Solar.

Roundup: A third of US PV installers offer storage and 26% more could join them this year, China’s BYD signs up with UAE’s Masdar, Sunvault and Aboriginal Power’s ‘self-sustaining’ community project.

Sonnenbatterie, Germany’s market leader for residential energy storage, has launched an energy trading platform that the company believes could make it as big as existing utility companies, rebranding itself as Sonnen in the process.

The emerging availability of storage and smart-grid technologies allows communities to meet their energy demands locally. As Andrew Jones of S&C Electric writes, community-owned micro-grids will become an increasingly important element of the future energy system.