The residential energy storage market in the US has just enjoyed one of its biggest growth spurts so far, although action is mostly centred in specific states with supportive policies and conditions.

The US is expected to remain the world’s biggest market for energy storage until 2022, with China its closest rival, GTM Research has said.

While energy storage system price declines have slowed down in recent times in the US, standardisation of design and engineering will be among the key drivers in bringing down balance-of-system hardware and EPC costs.

With energy storage deployments in the US up almost 50% year-on-year, according to GTM Research analysis, the next big question for the industry might be who gets to own all of the assets.

What does it mean to be all things to all people? Does it overstretch resources to breaking point, or does it give you a chance to cast a wider net and capture market share? Vivint Solar recently joined Tesla in a race to offer whole packages including solar, storage, EV charging and other components to US customers. We talked to GTM Research’s Brett Simon on some of the dynamics of those parallel strategies.

While lithium-ion is rapidly racing ahead to become the “de facto grid storage solution” and is the most popular technology choice by far, vendors of other types of batteries are also targeting the market, with varying degrees of success.

It has been the US’ busiest quarter to date for behind-the-meter energy storage installations, driven in part by residential adoption in the advanced markets of California and Hawaii, GTM Research has found.

The requirement of nine hours of energy storage duration at a project touted as a possible replacement for a new natural gas plant in California makes it tough for the newer technology to compete on cost, an analyst has said.

Despite a bill to create a rebate programme for energy storage systems purchased in California being dropped from a recent round of legislative decision-making, the state’s industry still has a “bright future”, commentators have said.

Energy storage in the US has just enjoyed its greatest quarter for megawatt-hours deployed, up almost 1000% from the equivalent period last year, installing 233.7MWh.