Two initiatives have got underway in Europe, one in Germany and the other in Britain, aimed at accelerating battery development for electric vehicles and stationary storage respectively, while vacuum cleaner company Dyson has pledged a US$1.44 billion commitment to batteries – for cordless cleaning devices.

Placing a battery onto the grid is an economic investment. Matthew Hunt from the UK’s Chargesync discusses strategies for extracting the maximum value from devices and systems through optimising performance.

Lilia Xie of Lux Research spoke with the founders of 24M, which claims to have reduced lithium cell costs by 50% over existing technologies and is targeting US$100 per kWh by 2020.

Many in solar and other renewable energy industries are looking ahead to a future defined by self-consumption of on-site generated power and energy storage. As a key part of that, the role of the inverter is changing.

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’.

Tesla’s lithium-ion ‘Gigafactory’ will be built in Nevada, after company officials including chief executive officer Elon Musk appeared alongside the US state’s governor at a press conference held yesterday afternoon.

US space exploration agency NASA is considering proposals for four different energy storage systems, submitted by academic institutions and private companies that could power its future robotic and human missions to space.

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has inaugurated a test centre at its northern campus that will pair a 1MW solar array to 100kWh of lithium-ion battery-based energy storage.