AGL Energy has invested US$20 million in energy storage manufacturer Sunverge, as Australia’s biggest utility set up a fund worth ten times that to help meet its climate change commitments.

Energy Storage News spoke to UK veteran PV installer Martin Cotterell about selling energy storage systems responsibly, and making customers at commercial and industrial (C&I) and domestic level aware of the options available to them.

Hawaii’s electricity regulator and main utility have recognised that customer-sited distributed energy resources (DERs), including rooftop PV and energy storage, can provide essential grid services and better visbility for network operators, the VP of Stem Inc’s Hawaii operations has told Energy Storage News.

The UK solar industry is moving towards a market led by power purchase agreements (PPAs) and wider use of storage technology in the wake of subsidy cuts.

A spokesman for Solar Frontier has said that a retrofit market for up to half a million home energy storage systems could open up in Japan from the year 2019, as agreements made under a subsidy scheme for solar in existence before the current feed-in tariff begin to reach the end of their terms.

Volker Wachenfeld of SMA explores some technical and policy factors driving growing use cases for refurbishing home PV systems to add energy storage, and the markets where this is already gaining traction as an idea.

Secure financing for energy storage is likely to be the main driver for its deployment, the chief of the UK’s biggest solar developer has said, echoing views given to Energy Storage News by analysis firm Lux Research.

News in brief: A battery park in Germany will be capable of restarting the local grid in the event of a blackout, a public square in Haiti will be lit at night with solar energy, and a revived Solarmax will target its new range of storage and inverter solutions at several European markets this year.

Research firm IHS recently reported that as of the end of 2015, there was a global pipeline of 1.6GW of battery or flywheel-based grid storage projects in place. Andy Colthorpe spoke to principal analyst Marianne Boust, who explained why last year truly saw a “change in stakeholder mentality” in favour of energy storage and why 2016 will be another record-breaking year.

Misconceptions over the true value of energy storage are developing because of a “narrow focus” on the initial costs of the technology, a report has concluded.