California governor, Jerry Brown, is expected imminently to sign off new legislation extending a funding programme said to be a vital lifeline for the state’s nascent energy storage sector.

Sunverge, a California-based provider of distributed energy storage and control systems, has closed a US$15 million funding round that it said would support its expansion.

The deployment of solar storage units in German is set to boom over the next few years in what has been hailed a “quiet revolution” for the PV industry.

Some home energy storage systems, such as those increasingly used with PV, have potential safety flaws that could lead to an increased risk of fire, according to a study by German researchers.

Swiss inverter manufacturer, SolarMax, is to launch a range of PV self-consumption and storage technologies at Intersolar Europe next month.

Germany’s Fraunhofer ISE institute is leading a research project into the development of solutions for a ‘super grid’ that would allow intercontinental transmission of power from renewable energy plants in Africa to Europe.