This edition of the round-up is an eclectic mix of stories from the US and Europe.

US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said yesterday that flow batteries are “good for grid storage” as her Department of Energy (DoE) announced funding to support domestic manufacturing for the energy storage technology.

Large-scale Vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) technology looks set to be deployed at a 100MW solar energy power plant in China, two years after a smaller-scale demonstration project was commissioned in the region.

A large-scale vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) demonstration project in California which has been providing grid services on a commercial basis will now also trial the use of the technology for microgrid applications.

Vertically-integrated vanadium mining, production and supply company Largo Resources wants to launch its own vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) onto the market within a year-and-a-half, predicting that the technology will play a “critical role” in addressing significant demand for energy storage.

A AU$20.3 million (US$15.36 million) project to demonstrate the capabilities of utility-scale vanadium flow battery storage in combination with solar PV has been announced in South Australia, with the Federal government helping to fund the project.

In a world first project, tidal power is set to be combined with vanadium flow batteries to produce continuous green hydrogen.

A solar-plus-storage microgrid being deployed at an alloys mine in South Africa will feature a vanadium flow battery energy storage system, using locally sourced vanadium electrolyte.

We caught up with Bo Normark in his capacity as EIT InnoEnergy executive to discuss the past, present and future of energy storage, with his organisation taking the lead in the European Battery Alliance.

While redesigning California’s energy system will take some time, in the past couple of weeks alone, Energy-Storage.news has become aware of numerous initiatives and projects, both publicly and privately-driven, that are seeking to modernise, add resilience to and lower the emissions of the California grid.