Andy Colthorpe met Enphase vice president of products and strategic initiatives, Raghu Belur at PV Expo in Tokyo last week. The company’s co-founder explained why he felt Enphase will offer the market a reinvention of behind the meter home energy storage, specific criteria for differentiating energy storage products and what made Japanese battery vendor Eliiy Power the right fit for the Energy Management System.
SunEdison has made a significant first step into the grid-scale energy storage market, with the acquisition of US startup Solar Grid Storage.
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), one of Japan’s major electric utility and transmission providers, will conduct a microgrid demonstration project on a remote Japanese island, incorporating solar, storage, wind and diesel.
Energy storage is likely to be worth “tens of billion dollars in the next five to 10 years” across a number of global regions, according to executives at solar microinverter firm Enphase.
An ‘electricity trading’ scheme to be launched by Reposit Power in Australia for residential energy storage system owners has been described by an analyst as “one of the most interesting examples” of software as a differentiator in the energy storage marketplace.
Energy storage and microgrid software specialist Geli Energy and storage system maker Imergy Power Systems will collaborate on a California Energy Commission-funded microgrid project which could save a college district US$75,000 a year in energy bills.
EOS Energy Storage has placed an order totalling more than 1MW from NASDAQ-listed power converter specialist Ideal Power, while both companies have launched new products since the start of the year.
Another large-scale project to test the grid-stabilising capabilities of battery-based energy storage systems will be launched at a solar farm in England, led by the National Grid, which is responsible for the UK’s electrical transmission network infrastructure.
Two providers of large-scale battery systems for energy storage have announced expansion plans this month, with Vizn Energy opening new headquarters in Texas, and Younicos forming three separate new business units to address “rapid growth” in the market.
The head of a company selected by the UK government to deploy residential energy storage under a pilot scheme believes that his network of installers could deploy 10,000 units, equivalent to 30MWh of storage per month.
