Latest Battery Energy Storage News Global July'21

Latest Battery Energy Storage News from around the World

1. Recycling: While the U.S. is making some strides toward manufacturing batteries, they are limping behind in the race for raw materials. China currently has over 80% of the world’s lithium refining capacity, over 60% for cobalt, and more than a third of global nickel refinement, said the report.Recycling and repurposing of materials is one way U.S. companies are staying competitive in this tightening supply chain. The two most common methods for the reuse of lithium-ion battery material are pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy.
2. Australia: Lumea, a commercial arm of TransGrid, has issued an expression of interest (EoI) to develop a 300 MW grid-scale battery storage system in Victoria, Australia. The company plans to develop the project without using government funding.
3. Zinc battery: Zinc-based electrochemical battery storage provider Eos Energy Enterprises has said that a subsidiary of Koch Industries has committed to investing US$100 million into the company.
4. Energy Storage Grand Challenge:Through investments and ongoing initiatives like DOE’s Energy Storage Grand Challenge—which draws on the extensive research capabilities of the DOE National Laboratories, universities, and industry—we have made energy-storage technologies cheaper and more commercial-ready. Thanks in part to our efforts, the cost of a lithium ion battery pack dropped from $900/kWh in 2011 to less than $140/kWh in 2020.
5. Battery Farm Fires:With the potential for huge explosions, fires and clouds of toxic gas, they could devastate towns and villages nearby, says Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University and co-author of the report.The threat of fire is not merely theoretical. South Korea saw 23 battery farm fires in just two years. A recent battery fire in Illinois burned for three days and thousands of residents were evacuated.
6. Virtual Power Plant: According to project partner sonnen Inc., a unit of the German energy company, the Jasper project’s solar-powered homes will be able to communicate with one another, acting as a “hive,” as the company puts it. Another name for this is virtual power plant (VPP). The Jasper community will work as a unit to flatten the load curve, minimize stress on the grid and keep the carbon footprint down. All this while a self-contained, resilient microgrid is created — capable of powering itself without drawing on the wider area’s electric grid.
7. Amazon: Amazon has invested in India-headquartered battery management software and electronics specialist ION Energy through its US$2 billion fund to support companies with promising sustainability technologies.
8. Chile: Engie is to build two hybrid renewable energy complexes, combining wind, solar and batteries, with a combined installed capacity of 1.5GW after winning a tender to use government land reserved for renewable projects.
9. CO2 Batteries: Italian start-up Energy Dome says that its new long-duration “CO2 battery” system will achieve a levelised cost of storage (LCOS) of $50-60/MWh in the next few years as compared to LCOS of lithium-ion batteries — $132-245/MWh, and Highview Power’s CRYObattery ($100/MWh)
10. Vanadium Flow Batteries: China’s National Photovoltaic and Energy Demonstration Experimental Center has begun testing vanadium redox flow batteries at its Daqing facility in northeastern China. VRB Energy will provide a 125 kW/500 kWh storage unit for testing.
11. Iron Air battery:The basic principle is based around reversible oxidation (rusting) of iron. As the battery discharges, oxygen from the air turns metallic iron into rust. Then as it is charged, the rust is converted back into iron through the application of electrical current. The only thing emitted by this process is oxygen.
12. Iron Air Battery – Hype ?Form Energy founders include Mateo Jaramillo, former head of battery development for Tesla, and MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang, among the world’s foremost battery scientists. Investors include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon founder and Post owner Jeff Bezos, the iron and steel colossus ArcelorMittal, and MIT’s The Engine, a strategic fund aimed at long-term solutions to big problems.Form Energy has the process working well under lab conditions. The next step is a one-megawatt pilot project with an electric utility in Minnesota, set to begin after the project battery’s expected completion in late 2023. If successful, the collaboration could lead to a larger project to power part of the utility’s system.
13. Germany:RWE is building one of the largest and most innovative battery storage systems in Germany. A battery system with a total capacity of 117 megawatts is being installed at the company’s power plants in Lingen and Werne. What is special about this project is that the batteries will be virtually coupled with RWE’s run-of-river power stations along the river Mosel.