As demand for lithium-ion batteries from the solar energy industry grows, high standards of manufacturing processes are as important as cell design and materials, representatives of PI Berlin have said.

Canadian Solar has highlighted the increasing importance of adding energy storage to PV projects and the “significant growth opportunities in the solar-plus-storage market” while reporting its latest quarterly financial results.

Lynn Jurich, CEO at major US residential solar installation and leasing company Sunrun has spoken of the big opportunity for aggregated solar-plus-storage systems to provide grid services and in doing so help lower the cost of installations.

Combining energy storage with generation helps to unlock the core value of batteries and other storage, the US Energy Storage Association (ESA) has said, while data is now available on the status of installed and proposed utility-scale hybrid power plant projects throughout the country.

News in brief from around the world in energy storage.

Q CELLS will acquire US energy storage software company Geli, as the solar company targets becoming a complete provider of “smart energy solutions”.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading using distributed battery storage in Japanese households could be a scalable business once prohibitive rules change in a couple of years’ time, a provider of renewable energy equipment in the country has said.

A newly released standard creates nationally applicable guidance for DER manufacturers on how grid support functions in their products will be tested. Brian Lydic, chief regulatory engineer at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC), talks about what this means for enabling the grid modernisation that will be needed to support high levels of renewable energy and energy storage.

Anesco, the developer of a subsidy-free solar farm in England which has onsite battery energy storage, has sold the plant on to hybrid solar solutions company GRIDSERVE.

AES Corporation reaffirmed its 2020 financial guidance in presenting its latest quarterly results, which showed a total backlog of renewables and energy storage contracts of 6.2GW, while the company said it will reduce generation from coal to less than 30% of its total capacity by the end of this year.