Major Japanese business and government entities have extended their involvement in energy storage with the announcement of the country’s first virtual power plants, an investment in a US frequency regulation project and partnerships on technology.

Varta Storage, the energy storage division of consumer, automotive and industrial battery manufacturer Varta, is poised to enter the UK and Ireland residential battery markets through a new exclusive deal with Waxman Energy, as ‎global storage head Gordon Clements told our sister site Solar Power Portal the UK is “the next market that will start to open up” for the technology.

While the global energy storage industry has continued its pace of rapid growth during the past year, well-established markets remain highly concentrated in specific regions of the world. Alex Eller of Navigant Research discusses many of the factors influencing growth trends for energy storage at both utility-scale and distributed levels.

Stem’s virtual power plants (VPPs) have been utilised to provide emergency demand response services in California during a major heatwave.

In less than 10 years, distributed solar-plus-storage systems will reach 27.4GW worldwide and be worth more than US$49.1 billion, with Asia and Western Europe leading the way, a new report from Navigant Research has forecast.

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.

Geothermal power and renewable energy developer Ormat Technologies has signalled its intent to join demand response and energy storage markets with the purchase of Viridity Energy.

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.