Panasonic has given the first indication of the expected size of its investment in collaborator-competitor Tesla’s battery Gigafactory, which according to the company’s president could be up to US$1.6 billion.

Making safe lithium-ion based home energy storage systems is not really a challenging prospect, but standards need to be adopted across the whole industry, German research and education institution Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has said.

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.

Battery manufacturer Leclanché and a maker of ceramic separators and electrodes owned by Electrovaya have signed a deal to scale up their respective efforts in the lithium-ion battery space.

After reports that it will build facilities to rival the capacity of Tesla’s ‘Gigafactory’, Chinese battery and EV-maker BYD (‘Build Your Dreams’) faces a similarly ambitious task to scale up demand, an analyst has told PV Tech Storage.

German storage system manufacturer Sonnenbatterie, which announced this week the close of a US$10 million equity funding round, said it sees “high growth potential” for its products in Australia, the UK and Italy.