South Africa’s state-owned utility Eskom has unveiled its Distributed Battery Storage Programme at an event this week, committing to solar-plus-storage and energy storage projects totalling 1400MWh.

Four energy storage projects that have been proposed as an alternative to expensive transmission and distribution (T&D) network upgrades, totalling 38.5MWh of capacity, have been awarded to developer EsVolta by California utility Southern California Edison (SCE).

Simply Energy, the Australian retail arm for ENGIE, will aggregate 6MW of Tesla household batteries together with 2MW of demand response at commercial premises in Adelaide in a project supported by the government-backed Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

A project in Jamaica, pairing utility-scale solar with battery energy storage at a microgrid could become “a model for other countries in the Caribbean and beyond”, the head of the country’s main utility has said.

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.

In our latest video feature, we discussed the policy and regulatory space for energy storage in the UK with two leading members of the Solar Media Energy Storage Alliance.

Energy storage-themed sessions at Solar Energy UK were extremely well attended and discussions were by all accounts lively and fascinating. Andy Colthorpe took the opportunity to go into some of the topics in more depth with some of the speakers.