South Africa’s Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy is conducting a fairly unique procurement programme for 2GW of energy capacity, to come from a “range of energy source technologies”. Clean Horizon head of market analysis, Corentin Baschet, spoke to Andy Colthorpe about what the “almost technology agnostic” tender aims to do and the type of companies and projects likely to be successful in it.

An agreement to support the manufacture and sale of vanadium flow batteries has been struck between Australian Vanadium and Enerox, which makes and markets systems under its CellCube brand.

There’s a race to develop new technologies – and adapt existing ones – that can either be complementary to lithium batteries, or even compete with them. Representatives from three technology providers offer up some case studies, data, insights and opinions on where they think the market could go.

Long duration energy storage is “essential” to help accelerate renewable deployment, according to the US Department of Energy’s Dr Imre Gyuk, who moderates this panel discussion with Matt Harper from flow battery provider Invinity Energy Systems and Russ Weed from gravity energy storage company ARES.

Energy generation has never been a single technology market and energy storage is no different, says Ed Porter from Invinity Energy Systems.

Long duration energy storage is an “essential” technology to help accelerate renewable deployment, according to the US Department of Energy’s Dr Imre Gyuk, but will require “appropriate regulatory frameworks”.

Vanadium redox flow batteries are almost as reliable as diesel generators in providing resiliency, but won’t be competitive against lithium-ion unless cost reductions can be achieved with the scaling up of manufacturing and deployment.

There exist opportunities for flow batteries to target areas of the market lithium-ion “can’t provide in an economically justifiable way,” the chief commercial officer of Invinity Energy Systems has said.

A roundup of news in brief from the energy storage industry, this time with a special focus on the UK market.