- **Battery costs dropped <$100/kWh** - making residential storage economical without subsidies
- **Wildfire blackouts** created backup power demand (California, Texas, Australia)
- **Net metering changes** made batteries more valuable for solar owners (NEM 3.0 in CA)
- **Regulatory enablers** - FERC Order 2222 (US), VPP mandates in Europe, grid modernization funds
- **Software maturity** - cloud platforms, IoT integration, ML optimization algorithms now production-ready
- **Financing evolution** - solar securitization model now applies to storage, institutional capital available
- **Grid stress visible** - rolling blackouts, near-misses prove need for distributed capacity
- **Renewable penetration** - high solar/wind creates arbitrage opportunities (negative pricing daytime, scarcity evening)