The war in Ukraine has acted as a brutal wake-up call for governments to act and reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels. Many have pledged to hasten project timelines for renewables, but there are mixed reports about impacts on investor confidence and projects under development in Ukraine’s neighboring countries. Marija Maisch reports.

In other news, GM and Honda are jointly developing affordable EVs, the Biden administration holds an EV industry meeting, and Mercedes-Benz Energy agrees to supply EV batteries to BatteryLoop for its scalable, circular energy storage products.

Australian deployment of battery storage remained steady in 2021, according to market research firm SunWiz, bringing cumulative installations to 1,089MWh.

Sodium-ion batteries are emerging as a viable alternative to lithium-ion technology. Industrial heavyweights CATL and Reliance Industries, following the acquisition of UK-based sodium-ion specialist Faradion, are bent on bringing the technology out of the lab and into mass production. Against a backdrop of soaring prices and predicted shortfalls of lithium-ion battery materials, sodium-ion chemistry has never been more tantalising.

Underwriters Laboratories, a US non-profit standards development organisation, will carry out research into the operating and safety profile of Queensland company Redflow’s redox flow batteries under nominal and off-nominal conditions.

China’s largest state-owned grid operator and power utility plans to deploy the world’s biggest battery fleet and almost quadruple its pumped hydro storage by 2030, thus supporting the nation’s switch to renewable energy sources.

In battery storage, there is no silver bullet chemistry type and as we move towards more ambitious decarbonization goals, room is being made for diverse systems. As an old technology with new vitality, zinc-based batteries are edging closer to commercialization, leveraging their unique ability to be configured for short and long duration operation. They are safer, longer lasting and, in some cases, reportedly up to 50% cheaper than lithium-ion batteries and, following recent game-changing advances, the prospects for zinc look much more exciting. pv magazine sat down with the manager of the newly established, global Zinc Battery Initiative, Josef Daniel-Ivad, to discuss the technology’s market position and developments.

A pair of researchers from the University of California San Diego have proposed to precompute certain data when the grid is flooded with solar or wind power, and then store it on servers for later use.

The uptake of EVs in the years ahead will add up to staggering battery capacity, mostly sitting idle on driveways. The two-way flow of electricity from EV batteries, known as vehicle to grid, could not only enable power systems to rely on intermittent renewables, but could also be the trump card for network operators to respond to grid disturbances. However, there are still a few catches to be worked out, as Marija Maisch explains.

Scientists in Korea have developed an efficient synthesis route to produce a novel co-doped anode material for rechargeable seawater batteries. They developed a one-step plasma-in-liquid process to synthesise nitrogen and sulfur co-doped carbon-based anode material, which displayed great potential for seawater batteries.