Australia could be getting its first lithium-ion battery ‘Gigafactory’, with some progress made in the past few days for a facility proposed to be built in Queensland.
1414 Degrees, an Australian startup manufacturing thermal energy storage systems using a proprietary silicon storage medium is preparing to launch an Initial Public Offering (IPO) and build a 200MWh ‘module’ at a renewable energy facility.
It’s been predicted for some time that the redox flow energy storage space will, after some turmoil and rapid consolidation, find success in providing energy storage at durations of more than four hours. This past couple of weeks have been a tale of both turmoil and success.
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.
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.
Over the past couple of weeks, various flow battery makers have touted new sales and supply chain agreements as the fledgling sector fights for a share of the stationary energy storage market.
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.
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.