Residents of Ballyferriter village on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry are to join the project this month with the installation of domestic energy storage units in 20 homes.

An extra AU$100 million (US$70.76 million) of funding could be put into a rebate scheme for households buying energy storage systems in South Australia, after a peer-to-peer lending group stepped in.

Regulatory changes at the national level coupled with policy programmes in leading states will drive residential and commercial energy storage to new heights, according to various sources at this week’s Energy Storage International in California.

Installations of sonnen’s latest hybrid battery storage units are underway, alongside new residential solar arrays, as part of a Local Energy Market (LEM) being built by one of the UK’s largest energy companies to test the capabilities of a virtual marketplace of distributed energy resources.

Following news yesterday of the first grid-scale solar-plus-storage system on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, two more modestly-sized projects show the potential diversity of applications for energy storage in the US state.

Cheap solar electricity will be traded between neighbouring residents in apartment blocks in Western Australia, enabling peer-to-peer trading of electricity in a project supported by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

What has driven the recent boom in Germany’s household energy storage installation figures? What value do customers expect when adding a storage system to their homes? And more importantly, what are energy storage providers doing to sustain and accelerate growth, which can eventually unlock a true mass market? Florian Mayr of Apricum takes a closer look.

In the second part of our interview with Valts Grintals, analyst at Delta-ee we discuss why behind-the-meter energy storage, including commercial and industrial (C&I) and residential installations, contributed so much to the market’s recent success.

Australia’s energy and environment minister has hailed the country’s accelerating residential energy storage sales as a report has emerged from Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel which says the “financial equation is straightforward” for adding batteries to home PV systems.

PV manufacturers Hanwha Q Cells and Sunpower have both signed deals to bring home energy storage to residential solar customers in Europe and in the US respectively.