The US-based solar division of Japan’s Kyocera and energy service start-up STEM have become the latest partnership to offer integrated solar-plus-storage to commercial customers in the US, beginning with sales in three states including California.

Many in solar and other renewable energy industries are looking ahead to a future defined by self-consumption of on-site generated power and energy storage. As a key part of that, the role of the inverter is changing.

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’.

Lithium iron phosphate battery-based energy storage systems from German manufacturer Automatic Storage Device Sonnenspeicher (ASD) will be installed in new houses from WeberHaus, which makes prefabricated homes for the German market.

India’s growing energy storage industry shares the enthusiasm of its solar counterpart in welcoming the Modi government’s aims and ambitions, according to one industry veteran.

A ‘double zero energy’ home with energy storage and solar PV systems has been launched in the US, as a result of the partnership between solar manufacturer and developer SunPower and homebuilder KB Home.

German mechanical engineering company Manz has supplied a lithium-ion battery production line to a research centre for the commercial production of the batteries, initially for the e-mobility sector, at the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Wuerttemberg (ZSW) in Ulm.

One of the U.S.‘s largest investor-owned energy utilities, Consolidated Edison (Con Edison), is planning to spend US$200 million on demand reduction technologies. Con Edison has filed a proposal with the New York Public Utilities Commission for a Brooklyn/Queens Demand Management Program (BQDM) that it hopes can defer the US$1 billion cost of building a new substation and expanding two existing ones.

Energy storage might not be cost effective in Germany as a method of helping the transition to a higher grid penetration of renewable energy, until that penetration level reaches as high as 90%, according to a leading think tank.

French battery manufacturer and designer Saft has been contracted to supply a 1MW/3MWh lithium-ion storage system at an educational facility in California, aimed at mitigating the impact of variable solar generation.