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.

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.

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.

The developing economies of the world are largely located in geographical regions that have abundant renewable energy resources, be they solar, wind, hydro or in some cases geothermal, yet paradoxically at the individual and rural community level, access to energy is often a very real issue. Establishing a continuous chain of temperature controlled cold environments from the point of harvest to the marketplace and on into the home, a ‘cold chain’, is what is required in order to avoid produce spoilage and to connect farmers with higher value market options in distant urban centres or overseas.

The Australian Energy Storage Council, a new industry representative body has been launched for energy storage in Australia, backed and co-founded by the Australian Solar Council.

Australian solar and energy storage company ZEN Energy has received a AUS$200,000 (US$184,000) grant from local government toward the development and commercialisation of its energy storage technologies.

The Swiss and Chinese power engineering firms ABB and BYD have revealed a collaboration to develop new storage technologies.