Elon Musk’s Tesla has done the rest of the storage industry a big favour by putting a price point on lithium-ion batteries, according to the CEO of Sonnenbatterie’s North American operations.

Last week the US Energy Storage Association (ESA) hosted its annual conference and exhibition in Dallas, Texas. Andy Colthorpe spoke to Jim McDowall of battery and energy storage system provider Saft, which won the show’s Outstanding Acheivement Award.

While debates over renewable energy targets continue to rage at the political level in Australia, Panasonic has signed a deal with three utility companies to pair its energy storage systems with rooftop solar.

Battery and storage system maker A123 will double its production output to 1.5GW through a capital expansion plan worth more than US$300 million, the initial phase of which the company says has already begun.

Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and renewable energy developer Gaelectric have announced a joint test project to evaluate utility-scale storage to facilitate the integration of renewables onto the grid.

We often hear about the so-called ‘synergy’ between EVs and energy storage in the home. Not merely the fact that the majority of both applications for storage tend to have a lithium-ion battery-driven heartbeat at their core, but a lot has been made of the fact that the two industries could spur each other on to both lower costs and increased adoption. One company in the UK has taken on some of the challenges involved in integrating these and other related technologies.

US utility Duke Energy has teamed up with battery provider LG Chem and storage software provider Greensmith to build a 2MW lithium-ion battery-based energy storage system in Ohio.

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.

To hit the best possible cost reduction outcomes, lithium-ion battery producers will have to scale-up to go beyond 1GWh of production capacity, but will hit a ceiling when they reach 10GWh, a new report claims.

Invenergy has brought a 31.5MW energy storage facility online to provide frequency regulation for the grid, near to 230MW of renewable energy generation assets.