The US Department of Energy (DOE) has earmarked up to US$3.5 billion of new capital for battery manufacturing, a week after European gigafactory company Freyr announced it would only be scaling in the US for now.
Metal-hydrogen battery company EnerVenue will open a manufacturing factory with a 1GWh annual capacity in Kentucky expected to begin production by the end of the year.
ASX-listed Altech Chemicals and research institute Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have progressed plans for a 100MWh plant in Germany to produce the latter’s energy storage-focused sodium solid state battery technology.
The business case for a range of long-duration storage technologies needs to be addressed to help the US reach its decarbonisation targets, according to the Department of Energy’s director of energy storage research Dr Imre Gyuk.
Siemens has partnered with the company behind what is to be the UK’s first lithium-ion battery gigafactory, providing it with its Digital Enterprise Technology, which can simulate gigaplant production processes and flows ahead of construction.
North America is currently leading the world for utility-scale energy storage deployments, but could be overtaken by the second-largest market, the Asia-Pacific region, as early as 2023, according to forecasting and analysis by Guidehouse Insights.
Northvolt has now raised in excess of US$3.5 billion of financing towards its aim of establishing 150GWh of advanced battery manufacturing facilities in Europe by 2030.
In addition to Silicon Valley, California could also be host to its own “Lithium Valley” as the US state’s Energy Commission met last week to discuss extracting the vital battery ingredient from geothermal brine.
Northvolt, the startup which recently netted a US$1 billion equity raise for its initial lithium battery ‘gigafactory’ in Sweden, has said that its ambitions extend deep into the energy storage solutions space, in addition to its involvement with major carmakers.
