While lithium-ion is rapidly racing ahead to become the “de facto grid storage solution” and is the most popular technology choice by far, vendors of other types of batteries are also targeting the market, with varying degrees of success.

Europe’s ‘first commercial battery park’, a 5MWh lithium-ion battery system that was recently tripled in size to 15MWh, has been used to successfully restart a disconnected power grid in Germany.

Energy Renaissance is constructing a 1GWh per annum lithium-ion battery storage manufacturing plant at Darwin, in the Northern Territory of Australia, while CEFC has financed a 2Mtpa lithium concentrate mining project in Western Australia.

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

The Renault-Nissan Alliance will build a 100MW battery storage project using its second-life EV batteries, according to media reports.

Tesla has announced the first programme to aggregate the capabilities of hundreds of its residential and commercial stationary storage systems in a partnership with Vermont utility Green Mountain Power.

Queensland-based developer SolarQ is planning to build a 350MW(ac) solar plant combined with a ground-breaking 4,000MWh of lithium-ion battery storage in the Gympie Region of Queensland, Australia.

Brisbane-based renewable energy investor Lyon Group will soon start building a AU$1 billion (US$767 million) solar-plus-storage farm in South Australia – the world’s largest.

The complexities of combining batteries and solar microgrids are explained by Sam Duby, who is co-founder and director of research and development at mini-grid technologies company SteamaCo Ltd and consults for TFE Consulting. TFE Consulting is a strategy consulting firm focusing on accelerating the energy transition in emerging markets and is active in Africa, India, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

News in Brief: Tesla’s Powerpack 2 is installed in a utility-scale project for SCE, Texan utility CPS opens EPC bids for a large-scale solar-plus storage project and Eguana and LG Chem expand their storage partnership.