The potential for storage to help stabilise the grid has finally been recognised in the UK, where battery projects took all of the 200MW on offer in a recent frequency response tender. David Pickup looks at the evolving role of storage in the future grid and how further policy support can help it flourish.

Solar storage batteries for households in Australia enjoyed a more than 1000% percent rise in the number of annual installations from 2015 to 2016, according to a new industry report.

Energy technology company JLM Energy announced Thursday that it has signed off on an agreement with Soligent Distribution — the largest pure-play solar distributor in the Americas.

An energy trade association which includes Apple, energy storage maker AES and solar giants SunPower and First Solar in its leadership has welcomed the proposal by US energy regulator, FERC, to remove barriers to participation in wholesale markets for energy storage and distributed energy resources (DERs).

Residential energy storage company sonnen announced Wednesday that is close to completing a new North American Innovation Center which will merge the company’s US manufacturing operations with product research and development.

There have been modest year-on-year increases in the number of PV installers in Germany and the UK offering energy storage to their customers, according to a survey by EUPD Research.

Last year was a “seminal year” for energy storage, where the technology moved from “dream to reality”, according to impact investor Nancy Pfund, one of the earliest backers to Tesla and SolarCity.

The complexities of combining batteries and solar microgrids are explained by Sam Duby, who is co-founder and director of research and development at mini-grid technologies company SteamaCo Ltd and consults for TFE Consulting. TFE Consulting is a strategy consulting firm focusing on accelerating the energy transition in emerging markets and is active in Africa, India, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

There is a significant opportunity for energy storage under the Trump administration, the US Energy Storage Association has said.

Financial services giant Morgan Stanley has anticipated that the US energy storage market will grow faster than current consensus expectations, while Deloitte has earmarked the technology for exponential growth – although not perhaps this year.