News in brief: Indian PM Modi visits Tesla and talks solar-plus-storage with Musk; Scottish renewable energy group forms energy storage division; Harvard team developing flow batteries reports findings.

The latest claimant to the crown of ‘largest flow battery installation in North America and Europe’ has emerged, with the award of a 2MW project in Canada to US manufacturer Vizn Energy.

24M, a battery company that claims it can achieve 50% cost-savings over existing Li-ion technology and hit US$100 per kWh by 2020, is positioning itself as a ‘disruptor’ of the energy storage space, an industry analyst has said.

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin has acquired energy storage company Sun Catalyx, which was founded by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor and has recently been developing flow batteries for grid storage.

A team at Harvard is pursuing a metal-free battery chemistry based on organic molecules called Quinones. The technology potentially offers an abundant and safe material to use for scaling up flow batteries, but according to the energy storage team at Lux Research in Boston, there are significant limitations based on project cost.

Earlier this year New York governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled plans for an “energy modernisation initiative that will fundamentally transform the way electricity is distributed and used in New York State”. This will include the creation of a leading energy storage marketplace, argues Bill Radvak, chief executive officer of American Vanadium, whose company recently installed a vanadium flow battery storage system for New York’s Metropolitan Transport Authority in Manhattan.

PV Tech Storage interviewed Bill Radvak of American Vanadium, whose company has a plan to scale up flow batteries for renewable energy integration, using its own vanadium deposits.