A boom in the use of electric vehicles will help push the energy storage market to US$50 billion by 2020, a study by Lux Research has concluded.

Energy storage has been touted as the enabler of high levels of intermittent renewables in the electricity system – the silver bullet or Holy Grail for solar and wind. A key attribute for the technology’s deployment will be scalability, writes Melissa Lott.

A remote town in Canada which lies 55km away from the nearest electrical substation, was supplied with a battery system aimed at shoring up the reliability of its electricity supply.

Toshiba is to provide a 1MWh lithium-titanate battery for an energy storage system being developed by University of Sheffield in the UK.

California governor, Jerry Brown, is expected imminently to sign off new legislation extending a funding programme said to be a vital lifeline for the state’s nascent energy storage sector.

Sunverge, a California-based provider of distributed energy storage and control systems, has closed a US$15 million funding round that it said would support its expansion.

Certification for safety and other technical standards must become uniform in the market for residential energy storage systems which can combine with PV systems, according to an expert at technological research institute Fraunhofer ISE.

This year’s Intersolar Europe event in Munich will have an area dedicated energy storage. As the event gets underway, Andy Colthorpe spoke to Bryan Ekus of the International Battery and Energy Storage Alliance to get his views on an increasingly important technology.

The deployment of solar storage units in German is set to boom over the next few years in what has been hailed a “quiet revolution” for the PV industry.

Some home energy storage systems, such as those increasingly used with PV, have potential safety flaws that could lead to an increased risk of fire, according to a study by German researchers.