Two initiatives have got underway in Europe, one in Germany and the other in Britain, aimed at accelerating battery development for electric vehicles and stationary storage respectively, while vacuum cleaner company Dyson has pledged a US$1.44 billion commitment to batteries – for cordless cleaning devices.

Puerto Rico’s financially troubled electric power authority PREPA will install a large-scale battery park at a 10MW PV farm, to help integrate the farm’s output and other renewables.

Energy Storage News visited the offices and production facilities of Sunamp, a maker of heat batteries, in East Lothian, Scotland to hear how the systems are made and how they were developed.

Ontario’s successes in creating and fostering a market and industry for energy storage owes a lot to policy makers taking a coherent, long-term view of its entire energy sector, according to a representative of Canada’s only energy storage trade association.

Recharge A/S, an investment fund specialising in renewables, will take a 50.1% stake in a €24 million (US$26.7 million) micro grid on a remote Portuguese island that could prove the validity of such projects as an asset class.

The head of an Australian solar installer has criticised Tesla’s marketing of its residential energy storage devices, claiming that potential end customers have been given unrealistically low expectations on the system’s pricing.

The Japanese city in which the manufacturing bases of lithium-ion battery makers including Panasonic, Hitachi Maxcell and GS Yuasa are located will play host to the world’s biggest energy storage battery and system testing facility to date.

In the simplest terms, if 2014 was the year of test deployments and proving storage can work, 2015 was a year of getting things done. But what are the big trends likely to drive the space on in 2016? Lux Research closely tracks the energy storage industry, in combination with solar, in terms of its synergy with EVs and in its own right. Andy Colthorpe spoke with Lux analyst Cosmin Laslau to get his views and predictions on what we can expect to see this year.

Roundup: EV registrations leaped 68% in 2015, EDF goes to PJM and SolarCity launches solar, storage and heat in integrated offering in Hawaii.

UK manufacturers and distributors are offering many different forms of training in energy storage installation for residential and small commercial level all over the country, in expectation that solar installers will want to add energy storage to their product ranges and skillsets.