President Obama has announced a raft of activity focussing on the development, investment and regulatory framework for energy storage.

SolarEdge and SMA’s launches of inverters compatible with Tesla’s Powerwall and LG Chem’s new range mark a “growing trend” towards higher voltage batteries for residential PV systems, an IHS analyst has said.

The Clean Energy and Solar Power Portal Awards sponsored by Trina Solar, an annual celebration of the PV industry from Energy-Storage.News’ UK-based publisher, Solar Media, will include residential energy storage as a category for the first time this October.

Andy Colthorpe and Ben Willis profile some of the companies and technologies making waves in the fast-changing world of stationary energy storage, in a feature article which originally appeared in the seventh issue of PV Tech Power.

Involvement from billionaire Peter Thiel in Stem’s Series C indicates a shared belief among investors that “distributed, intelligent storage is going to absolutely revolutionise the electric grid over the coming decades”, the company’s marketing director has said.

A programme to modernise New York’s energy system will lead to the state’s biggest ‘virtual power plant’, with PV system owners invited to join a pilot of aggregated solar-plus-storage systems.

The power capacity of global installed in front of the meter energy storage is expected to reach 21.6GW in 2025, according to a new report by Navigant Research, with one of the firm’s analysts calling this exponential growth dramatic, but also realistic.

While parallels are often drawn between the solar and storage industries, financing energy storage projects is a lot more complex than simply “transposing” learnings from solar to batteries.

Energy storage developers have an opportunity to prove the benefits of storage systems compared to fossil fuel technologies in what will be one of the fastest energy storage procurements in history pending in California, according to industry commentators and analysts.

Another period of growth in US energy storage was enjoyed in the first quarter of 2016, up by 127% year-over-year compared to the equivalent period in 2015, GTM Research has found.