The global residential solar PV energy storage market will rise tenfold to 900MW by 2018, according to a study by analysis firm IHS.
The growth will be driven by the increasing attractiveness of PV for self-consumption as well as by subsidies and increasing interest from homeowners in becoming more independent of the electricity grid, the study ‘Energy Storage in PV Report – 2014’ reports.
Despite the optimism, IHS has revised downward by 50% a 2013 forecast for the key markets of Italy, Germany and the UK for the period from 2014 to 2017.
“The outlook for PV in many major residential solar markets where energy storage is likely to be adopted has weakened considerably during the last year, largely because of reduced government incentives,” said Sam Wilkinson, research manager for energy storage at IHS Technology and added that high-costs of storage systems are also a barrier.
However, prices will drop for lithium-ion by 15% in 2015, driving adoption of residential PV storage.
“The three key variables that determine whether it’s economical to add energy storage to a residential PV system to increase self-consumption are the value of the feed-in tariff, the expense of buying electricity from the grid, and the cost of energy storage products. And all of these metrics are moving in the right direction,” Wilkinson said.
IHS predicts that Germany, Australia, the UK and Italy will represent 40% of the 900MW global market by 2018, whereas Japan will have 200MW of the 900MW installed.
The full “Energy Storage in PV Report – 2014” report can be downloaded here.
