Mercom Capital Group’s second quarter 2015 report into VC funding in the energy storage, smart grid and energy efficiency sectors made for interesting reading for the battery and storage space. As PV Tech Storage noted on 21 July from the report, VC funding almost doubled over the first quarter of the year and the sector saw Arnold Schwarzenegger put his money where his green credentials are, bringing some celebrity investor gloss to the proceedings. PV Tech Storage spoke to Mercom Capital chief Raj Prabhu to delve deeper into the statistics.

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.

Makers of flow batteries have redoubled their efforts to make the technology the leading choice for utility-scale storage applications, with one installing the largest such system to date in Europe and North America just a few days ago.

Energy storage developer Imergy Power Systems has announced the installation of a 30kW, 120kWh ESP30 vanadium flow battery to be tested with PV systems at the SunEdison and Global Academy of Technology (GAT) solar research and testing centre in Bangalore, India.

There is a greatly expanded amount of energy storage on offer at the European edition of the Intersolar trade exhibition and conferences this year, including the Electrical Energy Storage (EES) Europe show hosting its own conference for the first time. Andy Colthorpe took the opportunity to canvas opinions on the big trends and topics from a number of industry figures.

Renewables-powered energy systems that work independently of the grid at warehouse locations in India will be provided with flow battery-based energy storage solutions by US company Imergy.

Lessons learned from solar could help develop financing solutions for energy storage that could be “key” to unlocking the potential of the technology, strongly benefiting PV in the process, Jigar Shah has said.

SunEdison co-founder Jigar Shah will deliver a keynote address at next week’s Energy Storage Association annual conference and exhibition in Texas. Other organisations and companies speaking at the event represent a bona fide “who’s who” of the US energy storage market landscape.

US utility Dominion Resources is to install zinc iron redox flow batteries made by Vizn Energy onto a micro-grid to test their suitability for integrating solar onto a local circuit.

A US energy company is testing power-to-gas systems that store energy from renewable energy production, including solar power, during times of excess supply.