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
Energy Storage Special Report 2019, from the editorial teams behind Energy-Storage.news and PV Tech, brings you no less than seven feature articles and technical papers looking at everything from the policy and regulatory initiatives that still need to happen, to bankability and profitability of ESS, system technologies and architecture, all the way to recycling and end-of-life care for batteries.
A new white paper from Wärtsilä Energy shows that being able to integrate and then optimise all of these different assets is the key to ensuring that your project – and your investment – is going to provide the maximum benefit, longest possible lifetime in the field – and the best business case. Risto Paldanius, Director of Business Development, Energy Storage and Integration at Wärtsilä told us a bit more about what optimization really means in today’s energy market.
While lithium-ion enjoys the most media and customer interest at the moment, alternative technologies for storing energy could become competitive – if investors are willing to take them on to the extent that manufacturing efforts can be greatly scaled up.
Australia-headquartered flow battery maker Redflow is continuing with a strategy of selling devices into the telecoms sector, agreeing on a second deal to repower mobile phone towers for a South African provider.
Despite the huge strides energy storage has made, significant hurdles remain before the technology in its many guises can be claimed to have fulfilled its massive potential. E-S.n editor Andy Colthorpe assesses the key successes and ongoing challenges for this indispensable part of the future power system.
The latest project to be switched on in Nigeria’s solar electrification programme for universities is also thought to be the largest ‘hybrid’ plant of its kind on the African continent so far, inaugurated this week at Bayero University Kano (BUK).
Japanese developer Eurus Energy and Australian-headquartered wind developer Windlab have signed an MoU with Kenyan authorities to develop an 80MW solar-plus-wind-plus-storage facility.
PV Tech Power, the downstream solar industry journal from our publisher Solar Media, has reached its fifth ‘birthday’ and Volume 20 of the quarterly magazine, out now, includes a special report on energy storage.
