Providers of solar-plus-storage into the continent of Africa have said that it is a misconception that lead acid batteries used in off-grid systems are recycled efficiently back into the supply chain.
Kokam has deployed high power battery storage at an off-grid site in Australia, which the company claims increases efficiency of onsite gas turbines at lower cost than rival grid-scale lithium projects.
South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries will install a 70MWh standalone energy storage system at its own facilities in Changwon, as well as a smaller battery installation co-located with solar PV.
A new consortium, V2GB (Vehicle to Grid Britain), will develop driver-centred business models to support the rapid roll out of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technologies, enabling millions of electric car batteries to become a vital part of the UK energy system. National Grid, carmaker Nissan’s European Technical Centre, Moixa and energy consultancy Element Energy have come together to help work out how to reward drivers who use electric vehicle (EV) batteries to support the power network. Chris Wright, the Chief Technology Officer of UK home battery company Moixa, talks us through the mission behind V2GB and the potential impact of the study.
The UK’s power system could become greener and more efficient if excess generation, typically from renewable sources, was used to create hydrogen, a national association of engineers has said.
Axiom Exergy, a US manufacturer of energy storage units that use stored energy for cooling buildings and produce, has netted close to US$8 million from investors including Shell’s venture capital unit and Tesla battery guru JB Straubel.
Convergent Energy + Power, a US-Canadian project developer which has attracted investment from the venture capital arm of Statoil, has acquired 40MW of flywheel energy storage already in operation in grid-balancing markets in New York State and Pennsylvania.
The US government Department of Energy is funding research into storing energy for periods of between 10 and 100 hours, announcing last week that “up to US$30 million” will be available through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).
Israel-headquartered SolarEdge launched a software platform for aggregating household energy storage units – and other distributed energy equipment – into virtual power plants, last week. The company’s solution has already been chosen for a VPP project in Australia by AGL, one of the country’s biggest utilities. The commercial launch of the VPP platform direct to customers is now underway. Andy Colthorpe spoke with Lior Handelsman, one of SolarEdge’s founders and vice president of marketing and product strategy.
Virtual power plants (VPPs) can greatly increase the value of home energy storage systems for a range of stakeholders including grid operators, utilities and their customers, according to SolarEdge, which has just launched a VPP software platform.
