Commercial operations have begun at the Hydrovolt battery recycling plant in Norway, a joint venture (JV) between Norwegian materials processing company Hydro and Sweden-headquartered lithium battery manufacturing startup Northvolt.

thium-ion battery gigafactory group FREYR reported a US$35 million loss in the first quarter of 2022 and has recently announced three conditional offtake agreements (COA) totalling 53.5GWh.

It’s been a positive week for thermal energy storage technology, with utility Edison International validating a cold storage solution, a collaboration between two groups to achieve 100% round trip efficiency, and an acquisition involving several intellectual property rights patents.

Norwegian lithium-ion gigafactory startup FREYR Battery could easily dedicate half of its 2030 production capacity target of 100 GWh to energy storage and is also launching a system integrator play, CEO Tom Jensen tells Energy-Storage.news in an interview.

Saft has won a turnkey contract for a 7MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) in a Norwegian archipelago which it claims is the largest in the Arctic.

FREYR Battery, a European startup developing advanced lithium-ion battery cells for mass production, has signed a 31GWh off-take agreement with an energy storage system manufacturer. 

Equinor has acquired a 45% stake in UK utility-scale energy storage and stability services developer Noriker Power.

A new joint venture (JV) is evaluating building battery cell gigafactories in the US, based on advanced lithium-ion technologies, formed by investor Koch Strategic Platforms and manufacturer FREYR Battery. 

A lithium-ion battery recycling plant is under construction in Norway, focusing initially on electric vehicle (EV) batteries, but the CEO of the company behind it has said that it will also be capable of processing batteries from stationary energy storage systems (ESS).

The company behind what looks set to be Norway’s first gigawatt-scale manufacturing facility for lithium-ion battery cells has secured pre-construction financing of NOK130 million (US$13.85 million) which it said will “enable rapid development” of the plant.