Lithium-ion waste from a solar lantern scheme run by oil & gas major Total in Kenya will be recycled into new batteries for solar home systems by start-up Aceleron.

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.

Vanadium producer Bushveld Minerals has offered its backing to the merger of UK energy storage provider redT with US vanadium redox flow battery maker Avalon Battery, providing a loan to help the deal get over the line – and to help its own vertical integration ambitions.

By the middle of the 2020s, using hybrid ‘portfolios’ of batteries and renewable energy sources will economically outperform existing gas power plants, while the combination of technologies is already cost-competitive with building new gas plants, a new report from the US-based Rocky Mountain Institute has said.

The huge upsurge in lithium-ion battery deployment expected over the next two decades poses a particular problem: what to do with cells that have reached the end of their useful life. Stefan Hogg investigates how lithium recycling will come into its own to handle spent batteries

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.

Energy-Storage.news spoke with Li-Cycle, which claims it can achieve a recycling rate of 80% to 100% of materials in lithium-ion batteries.

The race to build Europe’s first lithium-ion energy storage system ‘Gigafactory’ could be won by Tesvolt, as the German manufacturer announced a “multimillion-euro investment” in production lines this week.

Ben Hill is widely known in the solar and energy storage industries as the former Trina Solar executive who drove the Chinese company towards a leading position in the European market in the days of the large-scale boom before leaving to become Tesla’s VP for Europe, Africa and the Middle East. UK start-up Solo Energy is among a number of companies he is now working with closely as an advisor.

CATL, a major Chinese manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries, has just opened its first sales and service centre in North America.