The head of the Smart PV division of Chinese technology giant Huawei has said that the high end residential energy storage market will be the company's entry point into a technology that helps integrate solar to the grid.

Chen and his team took the decision to add energy storage to Huawei’s product portfolio as a key part of the Smart PV division’s industrial strategy, shortly after Chen took over as head of the division in late 2019.

With renewables becoming “very competitive” on cost against other generation and grid parity projects now being built in China as well as in other regions, the age of subsidised PV in many markets is gone. Guoguang Chen acknowledges that these dynamics driving the increasing share of solar on the grid will have an impact on network stability.

“The consensus reached is that storage products must be launched right now. Renewable power is uncontrollable and cannot be stored, so what can we do with it? Storage products give the answer. Solar-storage will further bring down power and storage costs to introduce more PV power supply cases. Guided by the company’s overall strategy, Huawei is moving away from its original PV-focus to develop integrated grid solutions,” Chen said.

With the Huawei residential storage system to be launched officially later this year in China and commercial scale products in the first half of next year, the company showcased a ’24/7’ clean power solution for households at the SNEC 2020 industry exhibition in Shanghai in early August. The smart storage component of that whole-home solution is a 5-30kWh lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery storage system called LUNA2000, featuring built-in energy optimisation capabilities.