The Nobel Foundation recognised not only the role of lightweight, portable battery technology for mobile phones, laptops and latterly electric vehicles, but also that it “can also store significant amounts of energy from solar and wind power, making possible a fossil fuel-free society”.
Batteries are increasingly widely used in grid balancing, but there are many more applications where a battery can play an important role. With electric grids requiring periodic maintenance, batteries can stand in for the grid during downtime in order to reduce the impact on industry and households, writes Dieter Castelein.
Updated: Germany-headquartered renewables developer Baywa r.e. will deploy a solar-plus-storage solution for a goldmine in Mali that will include 13.5MWh of battery storage and reduce the mine’s dependence on heavy fuel oil during the daytime.
Distributed renewables and energy storage are now the cheapest form of baseload power and if Western Australia’s remote areas can benefit from that, we can all benefit, argues David Martin, founder of energy trading platform provider Power Ledger.
New technologies and designs aimed at driving down the cost of energy storage facilities are currently the focus of intense industry R&D. Sara Verbruggen reports on DC coupling, an emerging system architecture that many believe will soon become the industry standard.
Engie has been hired by Guam’s state electricity utility to build two solar-plus-storage plants with a combined capacity of 50MWp/300MWh on the Micronesian island.
Energy-Storage.news editor Andy Colthorpe shares his top takeaways from last week’s Solar Power International convention, incorporating Energy Storage International and hosted this year at the North American Smart Energy Week in Utah.
Energy-Storage.news editor Andy Colthorpe reports back from Solar Power International 2019 in Salt Lake City on trends including bifacial PV modules, corporate PPAs, utilities and energy storage as a grid infrastructure asset and lots more.
The huge upsurge in lithium-ion battery deployment expected over the next two decades poses a particular problem: what to do with cells that have reached the end of their useful life. Stefan Hogg investigates how lithium recycling will come into its own to handle spent batteries
