European Commission greenlights €3.2bn research plan by seven major states to turn continent into global battery hub even as it signals it is ready to block imports on environmental grounds.
Northvolt, the start-up aiming to manufacture lithium-ion batteries on a massive scale in Europe sustainably, has signed a contract to deliver its own first commercial energy storage system (ESS) project and revealed news on a second planned ‘gigafactory’ in Germany.
Tesla will “build batteries, powertrains and vehicles” at its European gigafactory, which company CEO Elon Musk has tweeted will be in the Berlin area of Germany.
Officially inaugurated a few weeks ago in Slovenia, the first Tesla Powerpack installation in the Balkans took just a few months from April to August to construct, the company behind the project has said.
NGEN, a developer based in Slovenia, has celebrated the installation of a 22MWh grid-scale battery energy storage system (ESS) supplied by Tesla in what is thought to be the product’s first deployment in the Balkans.
The business models and technologies underpinning the development of stationary energy storage markets are evolving rapidly. Dr. Kai-Philipp Kairies, Jan Figgener and David Haberschusz of RWTH Aachen University look at some of the key trends driving the sector forwards, in a paper which first appeared in PV Tech Power’s Energy Storage Special Report 2019.
The dramatic fall in cost, occuring alongside the mass roll-out of home storage systems in Germany since 2013, has highlighted the potential of decentralised batteries in virtual power plants to utility companies and grid operators.
