Solar Photovoltaic (PV) power plants are changing the landscape of the electric power industry. The smart inverter is well-known for its versatility to integrate PV resources into the utility in a ‘grid-friendly’ manner. BESS deployment on the power grid facilitates this highly variable energy penetration by reducing the intermittency of PV resources. However, finding new applications of solar-storage combination would be needed to make it a cost-effective and reliable solution. In this context, voltage and frequency regulation, power quality and bulk-grid support applications are addressed in this work. At first, a droop-based BESS control is developed for grid-connected and islanded modes. Then, a distributed approach for regulating the voltage profile is proposed which utilizes volt-var control of smart inverter. Frequency regulation and coordination using frequency-watt control feature is also presented. After that, it is shown that power quality in terms of selective harmonic compensation, may be extended to be effective even under grid side fault events. A novel reconfigurable and flexible voltage control strategy is also proposed and shown to be effective to mitigate voltage fluctuations in a distribution network. As a bulk grid support application, low voltage ride through technique is discussed in detail. A novel inverter reference current calculation is proposed based on the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimal conditions. Different case scenarios are investigated with its intended application. The results found for each application demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical formulations presented and finally, provide future research challenges in this area.