As might be expected, California’s main utilities led the way in 2016 for US state-by-state deployment of energy storage, with Southern California Edison installing as much as 40% of the national total, according to a new survey.

News in brief from this week in energy storage around the world.

Canadian utility Alectra Energy Solutions, which has over a million customers in Ontario, will offer large-scale energy storage to commercial and industrial operations in its service area, having formed a partnership with developer AMP.

A distributed infrastructure subsidiary of Southern Company, one of the US’ biggest utilities, has formed a partnership with Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) to execute behind-the-meter distributed energy projects.

Nevadan legislators have passed a number of bills to incentivise energy storage in the state for approval from governor Brian Sandoval.

Finnish power equipment firm Wärtsilä has immediately followed up its launch of hybrid and standalone energy storage systems with the acquisition of system integrator and software specialist Greensmith Energy Management Systems (Greensmith).

According to the latest GTM Research figures, energy storage is coming into its own and is no longer confined to a handful of US states. 21 states now have 20MW of storage projects proposed, in construction or deployed. Further, 10 states have pipelines of more than 100MW.

EDF Renewable Energy has created a new business unit, Distributed Electricity and Storage (DES), which will focus on distributed solar and storage projects up to 30MW.

The Southern California Public Power Authority (SCPPA), an organisation comprising the municipal utilities of 10 cities and one irrigation district, has ordered a potential 1MW of ice battery storage systems from Ice Energy.

Financial services giant Morgan Stanley has anticipated that the US energy storage market will grow faster than current consensus expectations, while Deloitte has earmarked the technology for exponential growth – although not perhaps this year.