The opening keynote address at Intersolar North America next week will be delivered by Tesla’s chief technical officer (CTO) JB Straubel.

Some news in brief from around the world of energy storage this week: UK residential storage company chases scale with crowdfunder, Younicos could hire 150 more employees by 2017, and Southern California Edison is set to flick the switch on a grid-stabilising storage system from NEC ES.

Residential solar will be sold almost exclusively in bundled energy systems that include storage and energy management components within a “couple of years” the CEO of Enphase has predicted.

24M, a battery company that claims it can achieve 50% cost-savings over existing Li-ion technology and hit US$100 per kWh by 2020, is positioning itself as a ‘disruptor’ of the energy storage space, an industry analyst has said.

ASD Sonnenspeicher is preparing to put a new piece of battery technology on the market that allows cells to be connected in parallel, with the company claiming it could have a transformative effect on energy storage, batteries and EVs.

A New York-based project proving the ability of solar paired with storage to provide power in the event of natural disasters and other causes of grid outages is now underway at City University of New York (CUNY).

Makers of flow batteries have redoubled their efforts to make the technology the leading choice for utility-scale storage applications, with one installing the largest such system to date in Europe and North America just a few days ago.

So-called ‘second life’ batteries taken from Nissan’s Leaf electric vehicle (EV) will be deployed in commercial-scale energy storage systems in regions including the US, following a deal involving Green Charge Networks.

The vice-president for marketing and product strategy at one of only two inverter suppliers to Tesla says it has promised customers that it can “get the battery within six months”.

Making safe lithium-ion based home energy storage systems is not really a challenging prospect, but standards need to be adopted across the whole industry, German research and education institution Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has said.