Last week the US Energy Storage Association (ESA) hosted its annual conference and exhibition in Dallas, Texas. Andy Colthorpe spoke to Jim McDowall of battery and energy storage system provider Saft, which won the show’s Outstanding Acheivement Award.

We often hear about the so-called ‘synergy’ between EVs and energy storage in the home. Not merely the fact that the majority of both applications for storage tend to have a lithium-ion battery-driven heartbeat at their core, but a lot has been made of the fact that the two industries could spur each other on to both lower costs and increased adoption. One company in the UK has taken on some of the challenges involved in integrating these and other related technologies.

The hotly anticipated announcement tomorrow of two products in the Tesla’s stationary storage range, teased and trailed by a series of cryptic and not-so-cryptic tweets and interview snippets, has led to mainstream media taking an interest in the stationary storage sector and what it could offer like no other news we’ve heard to date. And there hasn’t even been any actual news yet. Andy Colthorpe spoke to energy storage expert Cosmin Laslau at Lux Research, about what to expect.

One firm exploring the possibilities of contributing to grid stability by installing energy storage at solar farms is German PV plant technology provider Belectric. The company will install two large-scale energy storage projects in the UK and connected an energy storage system at a large-scale solar power plant in Germany late last year. The system at Alt Daber is the first such installation in Europe to operate on the primary operating reserve market. Andy Colthorpe interviewed Belectric’s UK managing director Duncan Bott and Tim Mueller, chief executive of Belectric’s solar research and innovation subsidiary, Adensis, about the Alt Daber project earlier this year.

PV Tech Storage interviews John Jung of Greensmith, an energy storage system and software provider which claims to have been involved with one third of all storage deployed in the US last year. Jung discusses ‘killer apps’, opening up new business models in new markets, software and battery agnosticism.

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.

The New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY BEST), like much of the storage industry worldwide, appears primarily concerned with two things – technological development and looking at how policy, regulatory bodies and other factors can help shape viable markets. Andy Colthorpe spoke to John Cerveny, director of resource management of the association about what makes New York’s storage market tick.

Tesla’s much talked about Gigafactory should be up and running in 2017. PV Tech Storage spoke to analyst Dean Frankel of Lux Research about some of the details and talking points of the EV maker’s ambitious plan to hit ‘500,000 battery packs by 2020’.

PV Tech Storage speaks to Wolfram Walter of German storage designer and manufacturer ASD Sonnenspeicher about a subject close to home, his home. Walter built a battery system for his own PV array, turning it into a business and turning his prized Porsche into a PV-friendly EV along the way.