Latest Battery Energy Storage News Global Apr'21

Latest Battery Energy Storage News from around the World

1. Community Batteries: Community batteries that can be scattered around cities and shared between households in a particular neighbourhood or street. For individual households, a community battery is a good way to lower costs by shifting the cost and the risks from installation, maintenance and replacement onto a private company or council to take care of.
2. Flywheel battery: A flywheel battery stores electric energy by converting it into kinetic energy using a motor to spin a rotor. The motor also works as a generator; the kinetic energy can be converted back to electric energy when needed. Ben Jawdat, the founder and CEO of Revterra, a flywheel startup based in Texas, thinks that his company has overcome the shortcomings, making flywheels capable of long-term energy storage for renewable energy.
3. Vs Gas Plants: Comparing the levelized cost of energy delivered by a new 250 MW gas peaker plant with 250 MW four-hour and two-hour grid-scale batteries, study finds that overall – when various costs are calculated – that the batteries are 17% (two-hour) and 30% (four-hour) cheaper.
4. Thermal battery: Norway-headquartered EnergyNest makes its own branded ThermalBattery product which essentially stores heat in a patented form of concrete, which it has dubbed Heatcrete.
5. Massless Energy Storage: It is called ‘massless’ energy storage because rather than add extra weight to the vehicle, it becomes part of the load-bearing structure – the battery’s weight essentially vanishes.
6. Pumped Hydro Storage: An Australian mining company which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Banpu Public Company Limited, has begun a technical feasibility study to ascertain if underground coal mines can be used to build a 600MW pumped hydro energy storage facility.
7. Growth in Market: In 2021, the United States is forecast to account for 50% of the global market, following a threefold increase from 2020, as energy storage project owners take advantage of the federal solar investment tax credit (ITC). In Europe, a 70% increase in annual installations will be realized in 2021, driven by new frequency response, capacity market, and renewables co-location opportunities.
8. Long duration energy storage (LDES): Store energy using the heat transfer fluids from either trough or power tower CSP plants (Therminol oil or molten salts, respectively) to supply the grid with dispatchable electricity for days.
9. Crucial Metals: Rising demand for existing lithium-ion batteries will be exponential and can be matched by manufacturers only if the materials used to make batteries—primarily lithium, cobalt, and nickel—are also supplied adequately.
10. Compressed air energy storage: Hydrostor, a Canadian long-duration energy storage solution provider, received C$4 million ($3.19 million) from Natural Resources Canada’s Energy Innovation Program and Sustainable Development Technology Canada to pursue its development of a 300-500 MW Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) facility.
11. Li-Recycling: Li-Cycle said that it will build a commercial recycling plant which will be able to process up to 10,000 tonnes of end-of-life batteries and scrap from battery manufacturers in Gilbert, Arizona.
12. Largest Mobile Battery: Power Edison, has been contracted by a major U.S. utility to deliver battery with three megawatts (3MW) and twelve megawatt-hours (12MWh) of capacity, it will be the world’s largest mobile battery energy storage system.
13. Philippines: SMC Global Power Holdings Corp. is spending more than $1 billion to simultaneously build 31 battery energy storage facilities nationwide with a total rated capacity of 1,000 megawatts.
14. Electric Car as BESS: To use your electric vehicle as a power source the car has to have bi-directional charging. That’s only compatible with the Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi Outlander plug-in hybrid vehicles for now.
15. Financing: Corporate funding into the battery storage sector in the first quarter of this year totalled US$4.7 billion across 17 deals, a huge leap from the equivalent period of last year, according to a new report from Mercom Capital.
16. United Kingdom: The UK utility-scale battery storage market kick started during 2017. By now, operational capacity is rapidly approaching 1.3GW, with a pipeline of projects close to 15GW ready for deployment over the next few years.
17. Solid State battery: Massachusetts-based Factorial Energy says it has built a solid-state battery, a new way of making batteries that experts think could take over from the current generation of lithium-ion cells.
18. US vs China vs Japan: The analyst in its H1 Global energy storage market outlook predicts over 370GWh of “mostly US” facilities will be up and running by the end of the decade in the western region, with China having 150GWh online and Japan 25GWh by then.
19. Storing energy in stones: When there is a surplus of electricity from wind or solar, the energy storage is charged. This is done by a system of compressors and turbines pumping heat energy from one or more storage tanks filled with cool stones to a corresponding number of storage tanks filled with hot stones. This makes the stones in the cold tanks very cold, while it gets very hot in the hot tanks, up to 600 degrees. The heat can be stored in the stones for many days. When the power is needed again, the process runs the opposite way, so that the stones in the hot tanks get colder, while they get hotter in the cold tanks.
20. Latin America: Hitachi ABB Power Grids has signed a collaboration agreement on battery energy storage for renewable energy projects in the Americas, with Atlas Renewable Energy to develop and deploy utility-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) for Atlas’ renewable energy projects.
21. Battery Manufacturing: Ultium Cells LLC, a joint venture of LG Energy Solution and General Motors, is planning a more than $2.3 billion investment to build a second battery cell manufacturing plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee.
22. Gravitricity system: The system works by using excess power to raise heavy weights which keep that energy “stored” until it is needed. Electricity is generated when the weights are dropped.