Energy storage in the US is being propelled forward by falling costs and increasingly favourable markets and policy. But for the full value of storage to be realised, numerous regulatory and fiscal barriers must still be surmounted, writes Matt Roberts.

Third parties and utilities will finance around 84% of the market for grid-tied stationary battery energy storage by 2025, according to a report from Navigant Research.

Battery manufacturer and developer NEC Energy Solutions is to supply Southern California Edison (SCE) with its first grid energy storage pilot system under a procurement programme established last year.

US-Canadian energy storage project developer Convergent Energy and Power has secured third-party project financing for 12MW of energy storage projects in Canada that will provide grid services.

Tesla-SolarCity could become an energy equivalent to an Uber or AirBnB, with a merger between the two creating “an integrated sustainable energy company, which does not own any centralised generation assets”, one expert has commented.

The North American subsidiary of international investor-owned energy supplier E.ON has begun construction on its first energy storage project.

From the outside, the VPP looks like a single power production facility that publishes one schedule of operation and can be optimised from a single remote site. From the inside, the VPP can combine a rich diversity of independent resources into a network via the sophisticated planning, scheduling, and bidding of DER-based services. Peter Asmus examines the role energy storage can play within this architecture.

Seeking to delve beyond headlines, hype and overarching market forecasts, renewable energy veteran and executive recruitment specialist David Hunt spoke with some of the energy storage industry’s leading figures to understand how the various market segments are growing and how things could develop from here.

The participation of venture capital (VC) investors seems to have cooled, while project funding has conversely seen a sharp rise, in the latest quarterly report into funding and mergers and acquisitions from Mercom Capital.

India’s largest utility NTPC has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for the setting up 50MW of solar power projects combined with battery energy storage near Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.