Canadian startup e-Zn has raised money to store clean energy far longer than currently available batteries allow by using cheap and abundant zinc. The company received CAD $2 million (USD $1.5 million) in non-dilutive grant funding from Sustainable Development Technology Canada, a federally funded body charged with vetting and funding cleantech hardware innovation.

A companion bill to the National Climate Bank Act is expected to be introduced in the House, which could provide a huge boon to the solar and the solar-plus-storage markets.

Storage's trajectory differs from the early growth dynamics of solar power in a crucial respect: It transcends the geographic boundaries, dictated by sunshine and policy, that constrained solar's rise.

Early this month, three community-choice aggregators and one municipal utility serving much of California’s San Francisco Bay Area launched a 30-megawatt distributed energy storage-plus-solar solicitation. It breaks ground on multiple fronts.

New York State Energy Research and Development Authority's (NYSERDA) Market Acceleration Bridge Incentive Program for energy storage is getting a record amount of participants, NYSERDA CEO Alicia Barton announced at the Energy Storage North America conference on Thursday.

A major rain and wind storm struck the state at the close of October, knocking out power to some 115,000 customers. Among those affected, 1,100 homes managed to keep the lights on thanks to pilot programs specifically designed to promote resilient backup power with energy storage.

Utilities are eyeing vehicle-to-grid technology as a way to help fortify the grid and reduce operating costs while meeting renewable-energy goals, making use of the batteries in vehicles that spend more than 90% of their lives off the road and unused.

Opportunity zones, part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, allow investors to place their capital gains in legally established funds for projects in economically distressed areas defined by the federal government. A secondary attribute, appealing to clean energy developers, is that opportunity zone funds can be used for solar, microgrids, electric vehicle charging stations and energy storage.

Europe’s energy storage sector is on the cusp of big new opportunities, but first, it will need to get comfortable with merchant risk. Large-scale systems are seeing new potential revenue streams at the EU level and in some markets at the national level as well. But exploiting such opportunities will require navigating increased risks, said Rory McCarthy, senior storage analyst at Wood Mackenzie.