France’s government has launched a tender for 50MW of projects combining solar power with energy storage systems on Corsica and its overseas islands territories.

Tesla’s grand entrance to the stationary storage market has been (largely) welcomed but question marks remain over the company’s business model. Andy Colthorpe gauges the latest reaction and explores the options facing Elon Musk.

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.

Following February’s Guest Blog which looked at factors- barriers, boundaries and benefits- that can influence its widespread adoption, SMA’s Aleksandra-Sasa Bukvic-Schaefer and Volker Wachenfeld focus on the discussions behind designing and implementing home solar-plus-storage.

Investment bank Citigroup is predicting a 240GW global battery storage market worth US$400 billion by 2030 as increased deployment creates a “virtuous circle” of falling costs.

A community-owned utility company in California is preparing to install a large-scale battery system that could enable the addition of around 50MW of solar generation capacity to the local grid.

The German solar industry association, BSW Solar, has created an extensive report on safety for lithium-ion battery-based energy storage systems for home use, and plans to publish an English language version next week.

Putting value on energy storage in the UK capacity markets could help pay for deploying the technology more widely, according to the country’s secretary of state for energy and climate change.

Imergy Power Systems, the California-based energy storage specialist, has received an order for four of its ESP5 vanadium flow batteries from Hawaiian renewables firm, Energy Research Systems.

Toshiba is trialling a PV hybrid storage system in Japan for use in emergency situations.