lithium ion batteries

A monastic community on the Mt Athos peninsula this year installed a solar-storage-diesel mini-grid which is set to be augmented by a biomass combined heat and power system in March.

With demand for lithium-ion battery cells picking up, largely driven by EVs but also from the fast-growing stationary storage segment, production capacities in China are ramping up quickly. But safety and quality must remain centrally important in the face of the need to scale, even more so after the numerous battery fires that shocked buyers globally and brought the South Korean market to a standstill. Clean Energy Associates (CEA) has launched the 2019 BESS Supplier Market Intelligence Program report, covering 40 suppliers, in an effort to support buyers navigating this novel supplier landscape. George Touloupas, CEA’s director of technology and quality for solar and storage, shares the company’s key findings on the supply chain and tells us what can have an impact on Li-ion safety and reliability.

The European Commission has approved use of funds given by seven member states to back Europe-wide R&D projects across the lithium-ion battery value chain, with the aim of potentially unlocking an additional €5 billion in private sector investment.

Scientists at the University of Maryland have developed an organic polymer electrode which they claim demonstrates stable function for a sodium-ion battery over 50,000 cycles and also offers encouraging performance in magnesium-ion and aluminum-ion storage devices.

American John B. Goodenough, Brit Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, from Japan, will receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing the lithium-ion battery. A statement from the Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden said the invention “laid the foundations of a society without wires and fossil fuels, and [they] are of great benefit to humanity”.

The Munich-based chemical company has taken a substantial minority share in the British materials specialist to expand its silicon-based high-performance battery activity. The value of the transaction was not disclosed.

A new coating developed by scientists at Stanford promises to bring lithium metal batteries ‘closer to reality’, by significantly extending their operational lifetime and limiting the occurrence of dendrites at the anode, which can cause short circuiting and fires.

The energy storage market is set to be the latest affected by Trump’s trade war as lithium-ion batteries were excluded from the group of Chinese imports for which the U.S. president announced tariffs would be delayed until December 15.

The analyst has published its latest Energy Storage Outlook report and says large scale deployment will provide the majority of the 1,095 GW/2,850 GWh of battery storage worldwide in 2040, with prices driven down further by grid services demand and EVs.