ESS Inc, US manufacturer of a novel iron flow battery for stationary energy storage applications, has entered the German market via an agreement with investor, chemical company BASF.

Nuclear generation company Exelon and chemical company Albemarle, which has lithium mining facilities, are investigating opportunities in the energy storage space, having partnered with battery energy storage investor Volta Energy Technologies to do so.

While energy storage can be considered “critical” to Australia’s transformation to a distributed, low carbon energy mix, a lack of investment and planning for the technology could have negative consequences for the network.

A project demonstrating the integration of energy storage onto grid networks in Hubei, China, will see the first phase of a 10MW / 40MWh project built by Pu Neng, a vanadium flow battery manufacturer.

Energy storage investors in Britain will need to have their projects in the ground by June next year at the latest if they are to take advantage of the lucrative new ancillary services market set to be implemented by National Grid, according to Sungrow’s European managing director.

Battery vendors are being hit by a combination of rising prices for raw materials and continuing currency uncertainty, resulting in rapidly changing costs for businesses according to Easystart.

TerraE Holding, a collaborative initiative to establish large-scale production line manufacturing of lithium-ion cells at a European ‘Gigafactory’, has signed a raw materials deal for anode materials with Australia’s Magnis Resources.

Northvolt, the Swedish battery start-up founded by former Tesla executives, has closed in on two possible sites for its planned multi-gigawatt production facility.

Lithium mining and extraction companies have made several recent high profile moves to increase their production of the metal, which is used to make the batteries in many stationary energy storage systems and EVs.

Property and infrastructure group Lendlease has signed a joint venture agreement (JVA) to deliver solar, battery storage and microgrid projects across Australia with Carnegie Clean Energy.