Distributed Storage

A conference about the UK’s electricity market showed organizations are considering the future of the country’s energy sector and how to achieve a net zero economy.

Austrian tech company ecop has developed a rotation heat pump with a reported coefficient of performance (COP) of 4.0 – 7.0. The 700 kW machine operates under temperatures of 150 degrees Celsius and is based on an anticlockwise running Joule process, during which there is no phase transition of the working medium that always remains gaseous.

The Chinese manufacturer has presented new products based on its lithium-iron phosphate battery technology. Their capacity ranges from 10.6 to 639.6kWh.

A look at the interconnection queue of California’s grid operator shows that the US state’s market has already shifted to batteries – sometimes with solar, and sometimes without.

Scientists in Spain have designed a BIPV forced ventilated facade that can be used as support for heating and a domestic hot water (DHW) building system based on air source heat pumps (ASHPs). In the proposed system configuration, the heat pump is expected to cover building heating demand at all times, regardless of the performance of the solar array.

The German battery manufacturer said this week its residential storage systems were automatically switched to a regulated stand-by mode in Germany. The background to the remote shutdown is three reports of explosions in houses in which Senec products were installed.

Panasonic has unveiled a new product in Japan with a PV-based charging function that uses a heat pump and hot water storage unit to save energy by maintaining bathwater temperatures at constant levels.

Industry body Recharge says it would be absurd if the makers of small batteries were required by law to collect and recycle products the size of shipping containers, and claim a requirement individual battery cells be replaceable will pose a safety risk.

A Swedish research group has developed a device combining CIGS thin-film solar modules and an alkaline electrolyzer based on a trimetallic cathodic catalyst made of nickel, molybdenum, and vanadium (NiMoV) and an anode made of nickel oxide (NiO). The electrolyzer achieved an average solar-to-hydrogen (STH) efficiency of 8.5% for stable operations during 100 hours.

Called GC PowerNest, the battery has a storage capacity of 5kWh and a voltage of 51.2V. It is scalable in an eight-stack configuration, thus reaching a capacity of up to 40kWh.