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.

Germany company Voltstorage, claiming to be the only developer and maker of home solar energy storage systems using vanadium flow batteries, raised €6 million (US$7.1 million) in July.

Lithium battery cells will be rolling off a production line at a 16GWh-capacity factory in France in 2023, with manufacturing startup Verkor then planning to scale up to 50GWh “in line with market dynamics”.

California investor-owned utility (IOU) Pacific Gas & Electric has begun work constructing a 182.5MW / 730MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) project at a substation in California.

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.

Northvolt has now raised over US$3 billion to support its plans to become a major player in the European battery manufacturing space, including US$1.6 billion in debt financing which it announced today.

While we do acknowledge the challenges faced as a result of COVID-19, we cannot afford to lose sight of the opportunity renewable energy and energy storage solutions, such as the Vanadium Redox Flow Battery (VRFB) present, argues Paul Vollant, Director of Sales and Trading at vanadium supplier Largo Resources.

Based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Dr Imran Syed is head of industrial power for Enerwhere, designing and implementing hybrid systems that use energy storage. Dr Syed spoke to Andy Colthorpe about some recent project case studies.

Australian startup Vast Solar said it has picked a site in Queensland where it could develop a AU$600 million (US$427 million) power plant combining different low emissions technologies to provide baseload power cost-effectively over a 30-year lifetime.

Bringing a proven, flexible, virtual power plant (VPP) platform into North America is a step towards “unleashing the potential” of distributed energy, the chief commercial officer of UK-headquartered solutions provider Kiwi Power says.