Tesla’s Powerwall home energy storage system will join the US market at a “remarkably low price”, according to one analyst PV Tech has spoken to following the announcement from Silicon Valley last night.

Prices for Tesla’s stationary storage systems for homes, businesses and off-grid communities, to be packaged and sold in partnership with SolarCity, will begin at US$3,000, thought to be as little as a third of the price of comparable products previously available on the market.

The hotly anticipated announcement tomorrow of two products in the Tesla’s stationary storage range, teased and trailed by a series of cryptic and not-so-cryptic tweets and interview snippets, has led to mainstream media taking an interest in the stationary storage sector and what it could offer like no other news we’ve heard to date. And there hasn’t even been any actual news yet. Andy Colthorpe spoke to energy storage expert Cosmin Laslau at Lux Research, about what to expect.

An energy storage project aimed at enabling the grid integration of 1MW of solar and 4.5MW of wind on the Portuguese island of Graciosa will be supplied with batteries by Leclanché.

Sonnenbatterie, considered to be one of the market leaders in Germany’s emerging solar-plus-storage sector, claims the new version of its Sonnenbatterie Eco battery storage system has as much as double the potential lifespan of previous models.

After reports that it will build facilities to rival the capacity of Tesla’s ‘Gigafactory’, Chinese battery and EV-maker BYD (‘Build Your Dreams’) faces a similarly ambitious task to scale up demand, an analyst has told PV Tech Storage.

Japan-headquartered trading company Marubeni Corporation has entered into an agreement with EnerG2 to secure exclusive Asia distribution rights to the Seattle-based manufacturer’s advanced carbon materials, intended for energy storage devices.

Energy storage-themed sessions at Solar Energy UK were extremely well attended and discussions were by all accounts lively and fascinating. Andy Colthorpe took the opportunity to go into some of the topics in more depth with some of the speakers.

Lithium iron phosphate battery-based energy storage systems from German manufacturer Automatic Storage Device Sonnenspeicher (ASD) will be installed in new houses from WeberHaus, which makes prefabricated homes for the German market.

French battery manufacturer and designer Saft has been contracted to supply a 1MW/3MWh lithium-ion storage system at an educational facility in California, aimed at mitigating the impact of variable solar generation.