Energy storage technology is now used in 44% of US microgrids with 92% of that storage commissioned since 2012, according to GTM Research’s latest report.

Some news in brief from around the world of energy storage this week: UK residential storage company chases scale with crowdfunder, Younicos could hire 150 more employees by 2017, and Southern California Edison is set to flick the switch on a grid-stabilising storage system from NEC ES.

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.

So-called ‘second life’ batteries taken from Nissan’s Leaf electric vehicle (EV) will be deployed in commercial-scale energy storage systems in regions including the US, following a deal involving Green Charge Networks.

Making safe lithium-ion based home energy storage systems is not really a challenging prospect, but standards need to be adopted across the whole industry, German research and education institution Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has said.

The International Renewable Energy Agency has published a technology roadmap aimed at accelerating the deployment of electrical storage for renewable energy.

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.

To hit the best possible cost reduction outcomes, lithium-ion battery producers will have to scale-up to go beyond 1GWh of production capacity, but will hit a ceiling when they reach 10GWh, a new report claims.

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.