Three virtual power plant (VPP) programmes have been announced in California and Colorado. Two of them will use Tesla’s Powerwall battery. Another is attempting to change customer habits to save energy and money.

The Spanish government has progressed plans to launch a competitive auction for renewable generation and energy storage in two regions where coal plants have been retired, totalling 829MW of capacity.

Energy storage deployment in the US is growing at a phenomenal pace. But the appetite for storage is much greater than the ability to build, and getting grid interconnection rights is often the biggest hurdle.

Horizon Power, an electricity supplier owned by the state government of Western Australia has begun commissioning community battery storage to allow nine remote towns to use more rooftop solar power. 

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has signed a loan deal for its first wind energy-plus-battery storage project in Thailand, which is also the country’s first private sector initiative to combine the two technologies at scale.

The CEO of ‘intelligent energy storage’ provider Stem Inc, has said a recently-awarded project in Japan will lean on business models the company has used in the US, while artificial intelligence (AI) technology makes that same transference possible.

An influential German think tank and a national energy storage industry association have both said that long-term solutions need to be found for residential solar-plus-storage owners’ part-time reliance on the grid.

Utility-scale solar projects in a region of Japan affected by fears of grid capacity constraints have been supplied with energy storage, aimed at mitigating the potential effects of output curtailment.