In the second part of his exploration of the areas of the world taking a lead in supporting the deployment of storage, Andy Colthorpe looks at Germany, Japan and Puerto Rico.

The New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY BEST), like much of the storage industry worldwide, appears primarily concerned with two things – technological development and looking at how policy, regulatory bodies and other factors can help shape viable markets. Andy Colthorpe spoke to John Cerveny, director of resource management of the association about what makes New York’s storage market tick.

Energy storage-themed sessions at Solar Energy UK were extremely well attended and discussions were by all accounts lively and fascinating. Andy Colthorpe took the opportunity to go into some of the topics in more depth with some of the speakers.

Hawaii is inviting proposals for up to 200MW of storage in the face of regulatory demands and unprecedented distributed generation challenges. As Dean Frankel writes, the process could offer some answers to the conundrum of integrating higher volumes of renewable energy generation.

SolarCity looks likely to resume its programme of deploying residential energy storage systems in California, following a preliminary ruling by the state’s Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) appeared to rule in the company’s favour.

Representatives of battery and energy storage companies including AES Corporation and FIAMM believe the priority for the nascent energy storage industry should be to standardise technologies, along with developing a regulatory framework that recognises the value of storage.

Energy storage technologies are not the “silver bullet” they have sometimes been hyped as, but nonetheless have a crucial role to play in a decarbonised electricity system, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).