There have been modest year-on-year increases in the number of PV installers in Germany and the UK offering energy storage to their customers, according to a survey by EUPD Research.

Last year was a “seminal year” for energy storage, where the technology moved from “dream to reality”, according to impact investor Nancy Pfund, one of the earliest backers to Tesla and SolarCity.

The complexities of combining batteries and solar microgrids are explained by Sam Duby, who is co-founder and director of research and development at mini-grid technologies company SteamaCo Ltd and consults for TFE Consulting. TFE Consulting is a strategy consulting firm focusing on accelerating the energy transition in emerging markets and is active in Africa, India, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

There is a significant opportunity for energy storage under the Trump administration, the US Energy Storage Association has said.

Financial services giant Morgan Stanley has anticipated that the US energy storage market will grow faster than current consensus expectations, while Deloitte has earmarked the technology for exponential growth – although not perhaps this year.

Listed funds in the UK which own a significant portion of the country’s utility-scale solar PV assets are not currently convinced by battery storage’s feasibility, but remain primed to deploy the technology at scale when the time is right.

Energy storage deployments in emerging markets could grow 40% annually over the next five years, from 2GW today to 80GW, but barriers include the lack of access to low-cost capital, a new report from the International Finance Corporation has found

Industry insiders have criticised a lack of encouragement for green energy projects after battery storage won just over 10MW of combined capacity in the latest capacity market auction, well down on the success enjoyed by the technology in December’s T-4 bidding process.

Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) and Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC) have been awarded a US$3.24 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to demonstrate the use of energy storage to stabilise high penetrations of solar energy into Texas’ electric grid.

Australia will launch a new large-scale energy storage funding round, the country’s prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has revealed.