Energy company Total and solar-plus-storage developer 174 Global, a division of Hanwha Group, have formed a joint venture to develop utility-scale solar and storage projects with a total capacity of 1.6GW in the US.
The lion’s share of new funding announced this week to help scale-up potentially disruptive technologies by the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) of the US government Department of Energy (DOE) will go to battery and smart grid technologies.
A project which will combine and then assess four different types of non-lithium technologies for long-durations of energy storage has been awarded a grant by the California Energy Commission (CEC).
Long-duration energy storage startup Form Energy has confirmed details of its recently reported Series C investment round, with Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures among continuing investors.
UK energy storage solutions provider Zenobe Energy is targeting an additional 500MWh of storage and 1,000 electric buses following a £150 million (US$198.94 million) investment the infrastructure equity investment arm of investment manager M&G.
While lithium-ion continues to dominate big project announcements worldwide, three providers of long-duration non-lithium battery technologies have claimed various milestones in commercialisation.
Germany company Voltstorage, claiming to be the only developer and maker of home solar energy storage systems using vanadium flow batteries, raised €6 million (US$7.1 million) in July.
Lithium battery cells will be rolling off a production line at a 16GWh-capacity factory in France in 2023, with manufacturing startup Verkor then planning to scale up to 50GWh “in line with market dynamics”.
Funding into battery storage companies fell dramatically in the first half of 2020 compared to last year’s equivalent period, according to the latest reporting from Mercom Capital.
While the renewable energy industry has suffered significant blows such as loss of employment during the COVID-19 crisis, venture capital (VC) funding into the battery energy storage sector in the first quarter of this year nonetheless saw a significant increase over the previous year’s equivalent period.
