The importance of technologies and services that enable effective energy storage including software and systems integration, is set to grow more than 30 times over in the next nine years, a new report claims.

Research into energy storage and related technologies has been given a boost in the US in the past few days, with a major utility company committing funding in Indiana for renewables integration and New York’s governor announcing the creation of a research facility.

US provider of energy storage control systems and turnkey storage projects Greensmith has launched simulation and modelling software that the company claims will educate customers on decisions that can “make or break ROI (return on investment)”.

After reports that it will build facilities to rival the capacity of Tesla’s ‘Gigafactory’, Chinese battery and EV-maker BYD (‘Build Your Dreams’) faces a similarly ambitious task to scale up demand, an analyst has told PV Tech Storage.

Bosch looks likely to become the latest big name to participate in a government-funded micro-grid trial, with the company proposed to receive almost US$3 million from California’s energy policy planning agency.

The short-term outlook for residential solar-plus-storage in the UK will be “challenging”, but simple regulatory changes of the kind the renewables industry is already asking for might make a real difference, according to one analyst.

Demand Energy, an energy storage company, and EnerSys, an industrial battery solutions company, have partnered with a luxury New York property developer to install 1MW of aggregated renewable energy across properties.

While solar and energy storage are not inextricably linked, at least not yet, storage helps households make the most of their solar power and one day could help grid networks make their final leap of faith. In the first of two blogs from the Energy Storage Europe conference and exhibition in Düsseldorf this week, PV Tech Storage talks to experts and industry figures as they tackled some of the biggest issues facing storage and renewable energy.

Kyocera is targeting the German market for self-consumed solar electricity, with the Japanese company preparing to launch a home energy storage system in May.

The increasing amount of PV installed in combination with electrical storage options is bucking the trend in the opposite direction for overall residential solar installations in Germany.