Two recent reports, one from credit rating and investment advisory agency Moody’s, the other from technology and tech market analysts Navigant Research, appear to show divergent views on the potential of distributed energy storage, including residential solar-plus-batteries.

The US market for solar-plus-storage is predicted to grow more than twentyfold in the next three years, rapidly expanding from US$42 million in value this year to US$1 billion by 2018, according to GTM Research.

Integrated US photovoltaic energy company SunPower’s solar panels will be sold as part of a package that includes energy management software and energy storage capabilities to residential customers in the US and Australia from early next year.

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a US non-profit organisation which is funded by electric utilities, will test and evaluate a battery storage system paired with a 1MW solar array in Cedartown, Georgia.

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.

Energy storage-themed sessions at Solar Energy UK were extremely well attended and discussions were by all accounts lively and fascinating. Andy Colthorpe took the opportunity to go into some of the topics in more depth with some of the speakers.

The US Department of Energy’s Sunshot initiative has announced US$15 million in funding to aid the integration of solar into the electrical grid infrastructure using energy storage systems.

The US-based solar division of Japan’s Kyocera and energy service start-up STEM have become the latest partnership to offer integrated solar-plus-storage to commercial customers in the US, beginning with sales in three states including California.

Sunworks, the installation arm of PV manufacturing start-up, Solar3D, has begun offering battery storage systems in its solar power projects.

A research project aimed at validating technologies for the “industrial scale” storage and dispatch of solar generated electricity in Switzerland has received CHF2 million (US$2.17 million) in funding from a local government agency.