Distributed Storage

The partners behind a JV aiming to develop a lithium conversion factory in Portugal say Iberia could supply enough geological feedstock spodumene to produce 700,000 EV batteries per year, starting in 2026.

A U.S.-Israeli consortium is developing synchroinverters – inverters that mimic a synchronous generator and are able to actively respond to the grid’s frequency changes while stabilizing the voltage. The new devices are expected to do this simultaneously and provide grid stability services in less than 16.67 milliseconds.

The lack of proper business models, high upfront costs, and long payback periods are the key barriers to enabling the wider adoption of solar-powered heat pumps, according to recent research. Other factors reducing market acceptance are a lack of information on the technology and sociodemographic factors like public perception and peer effects.

A lack of end-of-life batteries this decade is likely to play into the hands of Chinese recyclers located near most of the world’s production facilities, according to analyst WoodMac, but might at least help rebalance the current situation in which new products are cheaper than recycled ones.

Sodium batteries, an increasingly competitive area of research, have emerged as a low-cost, lithium-free energy storage alternative based on abundant, more environmentally friendly materials. A pair of new research papers addresses some of the remaining hurdles to widespread adoption, such as the formation of dendrites on the anode.

Germany’s Home Power Solutions has developed a hydrogen storage solution with a capacity of up to 15,000 kWh. The Picea system stores excess electricity from rooftop PV systems in the form of green hydrogen.

Scientists in the United States placed fast charging for lithium-ion batteries under the microscope, finding that charging at higher rates can quickly damage the structure of a graphite anode, causing capacity loss even after a small number of cycles. By identifying the mechanisms causing this performance loss, the group can help point future research in the right direction.

A U.S.-Swedish research group has investigated the complex economic relationship between PV and heat pumps in cold climates under four different levels of electrification. It found that, compared to propane, solar heat pumps can reduce reduce costs by up to 20% and carbon emissions by 30%.

The elevator is powered not only by the solar array and the batteries but also by the energy produced by the elevator itself while it is moving, through gravitational storage.

Scientists in the United States turned to artificial intelligence to speed up their search for new materials for use in a flow battery. The group developed a machine learning algorithm that could search a dataset of potential materials and identify those with the ideal balance of different characteristics that make it suitable for use in a flow batteries. The group says its algorithm could be applied to other battery technologies, and even in other fields.