Residential PV system owners who signed up to Japan’s feed-in tariff policy for 10-year contracts, that will soon expire, may be able to find new ways to benefit from their solar using battery storage.

The rise of grid trading and off-peak tariffs, rather than the closure of the feed-in tariff and potentially the export tariff, will see the domestic storage market experience “huge growth” over 2019 according to SolaX’s European product manager ahead of next week’s Solar & Storage Live conference and exhibition in England.

UK energy regulator Ofgem has published guidance outlining how developers and asset owners can add storage to their subsidised solar installations without losing accreditation to the Renewables Obligation (RO) and Feed-in Tariff (FiT).

A 250-home ‘virtual big battery’ was switched on in Canberra, Australia last week, allowing residents to sell solar-generated power at a significantly higher price than available to them through feed-in tariff (FiT) policies.

UK gas and electricity market regulator Ofgem has made a “game changer” decision for UK energy storage, by confirming that solar farms are able to retain accreditation under the government Renewables Obligation (RO) when supplying electricity to batteries.

UPDATED: The Queensland government plans to remove the premium feed-in tariff (FiT) from PV consumers on its Solar Bonus Scheme who install energy storage batteries.

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.

A renewable energy auction which could take Australia’s capital Canberra over the line in meeting a long-term “90% renewables” target will also lead to the deployment of 5,000 residential and commercial battery storage systems.

A spokesman for Solar Frontier has said that a retrofit market for up to half a million home energy storage systems could open up in Japan from the year 2019, as agreements made under a subsidy scheme for solar in existence before the current feed-in tariff begin to reach the end of their terms.

Volker Wachenfeld of SMA explores some technical and policy factors driving growing use cases for refurbishing home PV systems to add energy storage, and the markets where this is already gaining traction as an idea.