An energy storage system made up of ‘second life’ batteries previously used in Renault’s electric vehicle (EV) has been deployed for Umicore, a multinational materials technology company headquartered in Belgium.

Canada-headquartered start-up Li-Cycle has claimed a victory in commercialising its lithium battery recycling processes, with a shipment sent to a customer just before the end of last year.

The 10 most popular blogs on Energy-Storage.news during 2019 offer a fairly strong indication of the overall topics leading industry thinking during the year – so without further ado, here they are:

Flow batteries have so far, failed to live up to the disruptive potential they promise, a new report says, but authors Alex Eller and William Tokash at Navigant Research have identified 12 leading vendors in the nascent field, based on metrics of strategy and execution.

Lead acid batteries are “the most recycled” consumer product used in the US today, according to National Recycling Rate Study, a new biennial report from the Battery Council International (BCI).

While recycling of lithium and other materials such as cobalt from batteries will greatly increase in the coming years, the potential availability of second life batteries should not be underestimated, according to new research and data.

Australia’s strong and ongoing potential for energy storage paired with solar PV has seen international and domestically-headquartered companies race to gain market share.

GE Renewable Energy, an arm of the US engineering giant, will supply 100MWh of battery energy storage systems (BESS) to three projects being developed by Convergent Energy + Power in California.

While lithium-ion enjoys the most media and customer interest at the moment, alternative technologies for storing energy could become competitive – if investors are willing to take them on to the extent that manufacturing efforts can be greatly scaled up.

Idaho-headquartered KORE Power claims it will have 6GWh annual production capacity for its lithium battery energy storage solutions, based on high-power nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) cells, up and running during the first quarter of next year.