Battery storage

SMA says its new product will offer digital services such as monitoring and automatic notifications to perform maintenance as well as offering an emergency supply system. According to analysts, the varied applications of new inverters signal an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Autarsys reports the roll-out of two off-grid battery systems in Madagascar. Thanks to crowd investment, its order books are full. Streamlining the process of investment, the Germany-based start-up will cooperate with crowd investment platforms, Greenvesting and Ecoligo.

The latest report by Mercom Capital finds VC investment in battery storage companies rising five-fold year-over-year to $299 million in 12 deals.

Overall, 24 exhibitors from the upcoming Energy Storage Europe event in Germany’s Düsseldorf submitted proposals to the pv magazine Storage Highlights’ jury. They were ranked in the following categories: Relevance to industry; USP; Market impact; Contribution to the energy transition; and Innovation. Read on to discover how they fared.

Australia is on the cusp of a residential battery storage boom. The Climate Council published the forecast last week in its Fully Charged: Renewables and Storage Powering Australia report. BNEF confirms with pv magazine that as a result of the rapid growth, Australia sits alongside Germany as the fastest growing market for residential battery storage.

Investors throughout the world made 406 investments in large-scale renewables in 2017, collectively valued at roughly €40.1 billion (US$49.5 billion), but solar is set to grow more in terms of capacity than any other clean-energy technology over the next half decade, according to a new report. Battery storage will play a crucial role in this, it found.

As the conclusion of a 15-month rule-making, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will require grid operators to value the contributions of energy storage, and begins a process to look at how aggregated distributed energy resources can compete in wholesale markets.

Fossil fuel sources received the most back-up generation power capacity, according to the provisional results of the latest Capacity Market Auction, released today by the U.K.’s National Grid. The country’s Renewable Energy Agency (REA) has criticized the results, stating the government is blocking new renewable energy projects.

Moixa has partnered with Japanese trading house, Itochu to market its GridShare platform in Japan. The latter has also invested £5 million in the U.K. residential battery developer to fund further international expansion. The U.S. and Europe are on its radar.

An academic event held last week in the U.K. presenting the results of two major research projects on energy storage provided an update on the current and future directions of battery storage technology and development.