As a relatively rare and expensive heavy metal, cobalt serves as a vital but costly part of today’s lithium batteries, not just in terms of dollars but also for the environment and well-being of those tasked with mining it. A new battery design from the University of Texas at Austin may help address these issues, with the team demonstrating a new type of battery architecture that performs on par with conventional devices, while being entirely free of cobalt. read the full article on newatlas.com
The energy storage industry is booming. This is not new news -- the up-and-coming sector has been on a swift upward trajectory for quite a while, but now there are some new developments in the works that are set to catapult the industry into new levels of success. Last year, Oilprice reported that the energy storage industry was “exploding” as grid-connected energy storage deployments had increased significantly around the globe with a hefty annual compound annual growth rate of “74% worldwide in the years 2013 to 2018, with a ‘boom’ in deployment figures expected over the next five years,” according to Energy Storage News reporting based on Wood Mackenzie analysis in April. Asia has been a
Solar Flow Battery: Single Device Generates, Stores and Redelivers Renewable Electricity From the Su
Chemists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their collaborators have created a highly efficient and long-lasting solar flow battery, a way to generate, store and redeliver renewable electricity from the sun in one device. The new device is made of silicon solar cells combined with advanced solar materials integrated with optimally designed chemical components. The solar flow battery, made by the Song Jin lab in the UW-Madison chemistry department, achieved a new record efficiency of 20 percent. That bests most commercially available silicon solar cells used today and is 40 percent more efficient than the previous record holder for solar flow batteries, also developed by the Jin lab.
(Bloomberg) -- Tesla Inc. needs to succeed in China if it wants to dominate the world of electric cars—especially in a post-virus world. To do that, Elon Musk is turning to a battery engineer who once helped Apple Inc. extend the life of its MacBook laptops. Zeng Yuqun, 52, built Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. into China’s battery champion in less than a decade, creating the largest global producer of rechargeable cells for the plug-in vehicles considered to be the future of cars. That effort has helped propel Zeng from a modest hillside village and $30-a-month job with a state-run company to an estimated $17 billion fortune. CATL’s products are in the vehicles of almost every majo
FlexGen, an energy storage system integrator that counts GE and Caterpillar among its backers, said this week that a lithium-ion battery storage system it was supplied was used by an Indiana utility to black start a 77MW natural gas plant. Thermal power plants that go offline require black starting and the application is considered an essential service for the grid. While the theory of using batteries to perform this application, akin to “jump starting” a vehicle, was sound, grid-scale battery energy storage systems did not start actively doing so until around 2016, when Energy-Storage.news reported on projects in Germany and later in California that successfully proved the case in real-worl
