Orders for distributed energy storage and the rise of an electric mobility market have kick-started a battery assembly push in India.

French car maker Renault has brokered a partnership to provide second-life battery units to UK home storage supplier Powervault.

Leaning on an existing track-record and manufacturing scale of electric vehicles (EVs) and their batteries remains an essential component to delivering cost-effective energy storage, BYD global sales director Julia Chen has said.

Swedish start-up Northvolt, which is run by two former Tesla Motors executives, plans to build a huge lithium-ion battery factory in the Nordic region, giving Tesla and Panasonic’s Nevada Gigafactory a close rival within Europe in terms of size.

A new project is set to test the feasibility of turning a UK car park into a MW-scale battery to provide power on demand to the electricity grid from electric vehicles.

India’s first grid-scale solar-plus-storage tender from Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) has received very strong interest with a total of 13 developers submitting bids.

The Advanced Lead Acid Battery Consortium (ALABC) has set out a three-year research programme to improve the performance of lead batteries in energy storage and electric vehicles. It has called for investment of up to US$2 million per year from governments and research agencies to fund its studies, which will run through 2018.

Used electric vehicle (EV) batteries could soon be on the market at a significantly reduced cost that competes with brand new energy storage systems, according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) report.

Despite its thirteenth quarterly reverse on the spin, Tesla chairman and chief executive Elon Musk predicts Tesla and SolarCity will create an automotive-energy giant worth US$1 trillion.

It’s no surprise that Elon Musk’s announcement that he was working on Tesla’s second master plan was met with great anticipation. Lux Research’s Chris Robinson looks in depth at the new strategy, which included autonomy, solar power, some vehicles we expected, and some vehicles we didn’t.