Despite the growing interest and deployment figures for lithium-ion batteries for stationary energy storage, its ‘predecessor’ lead acid still has a strong role to play in enabling more and more people to go solar, a representative of Trojan Battery has argued.

A veteran of Kenya’s renewable energy industry has argued strongly in favour of lead acid batteries over lithium-ion, in response to a recent Energy-Storage.news article on off-grid solar PV in Africa.

Providers of solar-plus-storage into the continent of Africa have said that it is a misconception that lead acid batteries used in off-grid systems are recycled efficiently back into the supply chain.

The huge increase in demand for safe and reliable batteries to store energy from renewable sources such as solar and wind heralds a new lease of life for advanced lead batteries, argues Dr Andy Bush of the International Lead Association.

Already this year we’ve been able to learn directly about the energy storage market in Europe from the Energy Storage Summit in London at the end of February and Energy Storage Europe in Dusseldorf, which just took place last week. Andy Colthorpe summarises what he’s seen and heard.

Four projects have been awarded £42 million (US$59.6 million) of UK government money between them to conduct research aimed at overcoming battery challenges, mainly focused on electric vehicles.

Since the launch of the site almost four years ago, Energy-Storage.News (and PV Tech Storage as it was previously known), has consistently brought you high-quality blogs from both guest contributors and our team of journalists and experts here at Solar Media. Here’s just a selection of some of the best guest blogs we ran from January to June, 2017:

Narada Power, which makes batteries and complete energy storage systems as well as acting as a project system integrator, is establishing a subsidiary for the recycling of lithium-ion batteries.

Increasing Li-ion demand will help to continue to lower energy storage costs, but also brings up an important issue: what should be done with the batteries after they are used in vehicles? Chris Robinson of Lux Research weighs up the pros and cons of recycling versus repurposing for second-life use.