Involvement from billionaire Peter Thiel in Stem’s Series C indicates a shared belief among investors that “distributed, intelligent storage is going to absolutely revolutionise the electric grid over the coming decades”, the company’s marketing director has said.

Germany-based utility E.ON has invested in US energy storage software, systems and service company Greensmith, bringing the storage specialist’s Series C round of growth financing to US$18.3 million.

Sharp Electronics will add software modelling the performance of energy storage systems to its commercial storage offering, with software an area industry figures and experts have highlighted as one of the most critical areas of competition and progress in the sector.

The importance of technologies and services that enable effective energy storage including software and systems integration, is set to grow more than 30 times over in the next nine years, a new report claims.

PV Tech Storage interviews John Jung of Greensmith, an energy storage system and software provider which claims to have been involved with one third of all storage deployed in the US last year. Jung discusses ‘killer apps’, opening up new business models in new markets, software and battery agnosticism.

Energy storage is likely to be worth “tens of billion dollars in the next five to 10 years” across a number of global regions, according to executives at solar microinverter firm Enphase.

Two providers of large-scale battery systems for energy storage have announced expansion plans this month, with Vizn Energy opening new headquarters in Texas, and Younicos forming three separate new business units to address “rapid growth” in the market.