Last week the US Energy Storage Association (ESA) hosted its annual conference and exhibition in Dallas, Texas. Andy Colthorpe spoke to Jim McDowall of battery and energy storage system provider Saft, which won the show’s Outstanding Acheivement Award.

While debates over renewable energy targets continue to rage at the political level in Australia, Panasonic has signed a deal with three utility companies to pair its energy storage systems with rooftop solar.

Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and renewable energy developer Gaelectric have announced a joint test project to evaluate utility-scale storage to facilitate the integration of renewables onto the grid.

A small number of regional markets are leading the way for energy storage deployment in the US, but this is likely to change in the near future, an analyst from GTM Research has said.

We often hear about the so-called ‘synergy’ between EVs and energy storage in the home. Not merely the fact that the majority of both applications for storage tend to have a lithium-ion battery-driven heartbeat at their core, but a lot has been made of the fact that the two industries could spur each other on to both lower costs and increased adoption. One company in the UK has taken on some of the challenges involved in integrating these and other related technologies.

US utility Duke Energy has teamed up with battery provider LG Chem and storage software provider Greensmith to build a 2MW lithium-ion battery-based energy storage system in Ohio.

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.

Invenergy has brought a 31.5MW energy storage facility online to provide frequency regulation for the grid, near to 230MW of renewable energy generation assets.

One analyst has predicted that 12,500 residential PV storage systems could be installed in Germany in 2015, more than the total number of systems installed with support from a government scheme in its first two years.