A boom in the use of electric vehicles will help push the energy storage market to US$50 billion by 2020, a study by Lux Research has concluded.

Sunverge, a California-based provider of distributed energy storage and control systems, has closed a US$15 million funding round that it said would support its expansion.

Certification for safety and other technical standards must become uniform in the market for residential energy storage systems which can combine with PV systems, according to an expert at technological research institute Fraunhofer ISE.

This year’s Intersolar Europe event in Munich will have an area dedicated energy storage. As the event gets underway, Andy Colthorpe spoke to Bryan Ekus of the International Battery and Energy Storage Alliance to get his views on an increasingly important technology.

The deployment of solar storage units in German is set to boom over the next few years in what has been hailed a “quiet revolution” for the PV industry.

Some home energy storage systems, such as those increasingly used with PV, have potential safety flaws that could lead to an increased risk of fire, according to a study by German researchers.

Hawaii is inviting proposals for up to 200MW of storage in the face of regulatory demands and unprecedented distributed generation challenges. As Dean Frankel writes, the process could offer some answers to the conundrum of integrating higher volumes of renewable energy generation.

Swiss inverter manufacturer, SolarMax, is to launch a range of PV self-consumption and storage technologies at Intersolar Europe next month.

Global PV company Hanwha Q Cells and energy storage company Systems Sunlight have teamed up to construct a hybrid power system for telecommunications provider MTN Cyprus.

Fees being charged to interconnect residential storage systems to the grid in California are “arbitrary” and “punitive”, while some may even be illegal, according to US installer SolarCity.