John Grimes of Australia’s Energy Storage Council reports back from a recent visit to China, where he took a look at the processes and state of play of some of the country’s battery manufacturers.

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.

Clean energy entrepreneur and activist Jeremy Leggett has said “out of date thinking” is behind a push to make clean energy competitive with fossil fuels within 10 years that was launched today by prominent UK academics.

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.

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.

SolarEdge, one of only two companies at present to produce Tesla Powerwall-compatible inverters, will launch its expanded range of residential and commercial solutions at Intersolar Europe next month.

Ecotricity, a UK-based supplier of renewable and clean energy, will trial a home energy storage box later this year.

More details have emerged on inverters for Tesla’s new home battery system, to be made by Fronius and SolarEdge, while the EV-maker’s energy storage will be installed at demonstration and commercial projects for US utility Edison International.