John Grimes of Australia’s Energy Storage Council reports back from a recent visit to China, where he took a look at the processes and state of play of some of the country’s battery manufacturers.

There is a greatly expanded amount of energy storage on offer at the European edition of the Intersolar trade exhibition and conferences this year, including the Electrical Energy Storage (EES) Europe show hosting its own conference for the first time. Andy Colthorpe took the opportunity to canvas opinions on the big trends and topics from a number of industry figures.

British energy storage company OXIS has claimed that the advent of economically viable solar PV and energy storage technology represents a paradigm shift in developing countries.

Aggregating connected energy storage systems to create ‘virtual power plants’ is likely to become a big part of the next phase of storage, according to the executive director of the US-based Energy Storage Association.

Clean energy entrepreneur and activist Jeremy Leggett has said “out of date thinking” is behind a push to make clean energy competitive with fossil fuels within 10 years that was launched today by prominent UK academics.

A small number of regional markets are leading the way for energy storage deployment in the US, but this is likely to change in the near future, an analyst from GTM Research has said.

Lessons learned from solar could help develop financing solutions for energy storage that could be “key” to unlocking the potential of the technology, strongly benefiting PV in the process, Jigar Shah has said.

SunEdison co-founder Jigar Shah will deliver a keynote address at next week’s Energy Storage Association annual conference and exhibition in Texas. Other organisations and companies speaking at the event represent a bona fide “who’s who” of the US energy storage market landscape.

The UK is lagging behind many other countries in both private and public investment into the deployment of modern electricity storage. Despite some measures which represent a good start, the new British government needs to act to remove the “roadblock” to this activity, blogs Anthony Price.

One analyst has predicted that 12,500 residential PV storage systems could be installed in Germany in 2015, more than the total number of systems installed with support from a government scheme in its first two years.