Investment by UK tech entrepreneur and inventor James Dyson into battery company Sakti3 was among the biggest deals in the sector in the first quarter of this year, a new report has found.

An academic based in north east England has called on the UK government to give energy storage “its own asset class with accompanying rules for appropriate regulatory treatment” as well as investing in the technology in order to enable future energy bill savings.

Remaining on the grid while using solar paired with batteries is likely to become a more economically attractive option for commercial and residential customers in key US markets, a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) claims.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The use of energy storage to increase renewables integration and provide stability to the grid requires the removal of regulatory barriers, rather than increased direct funding, according to one expert on the German market.

The deployment of energy storage in the US is set to triple in 2015 compared to 2014, according to a new report by GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association (ESA).

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries accounted for 90% of all proposed grid storage projects in 2014, according to a new study by Lux Research.