Distributed Storage

A new report from energy consultancy Reputex has thrown cold water on the Federal Government’s plan to replace AGL’s ageing Liddell coal-fired power station with a gas option.

Lithgow City Council is smack-bang in the thick of NSW coal country, its surrounds are littered by coal-fired power stations (most of them closed). However, the immunity of solar and energy storage to the power outages brought on by emergencies like bushfires, as well as the Council’s own community goals, means times are a changing.

Origin Energy has unveiled plans to build up to five big batteries as the Australian energy utility accelerates its transition to clean energy.

Spanish energy storage company E22 has set to work on its first project in Australia, a 5MW/7.5 MW Li-ion battery in Longwarry, VIC that is set to provide AusNet with much needed network services during the heights of summer congestion.

While long hyped, uptake of residential battery storage is continuing to underwhelm, according to BayWa r.e. Solar Systems managing director Durmus Yildiz. In the wake of the Insight on Quality session of the All-Energy Australia virtual conference, Yildiz says he has reservations about battery safety and quality, and that education is needed to drive the application’s growth.

The choice of battery storage technologies in support of solar energy supply is broadening to suit a variety of emerging applications. VSUN has just made its first power play for vanadium-redox-flow batteries in the off-grid residential market.

Mobile electricity storage systems (MESS) – batteries that are charged and then transported – could offer one of the best scenarios for electrification across the vast Indonesian archipelago, which spans more than 17,000 islands. A team at the University of Indonesia is working with multiple government agencies to bring the idea to scale and provide affordable electricity to rural Indonesians.

Following on from Social Energy’s launch in Australia late last year, the UK company has teamed up with SolaX to offer a rather appetising feed-in-tariff deal to go with a combined solar and energy storage system.

AGL, one of Australia’s biggest polluters, is working towards net-zero emissions by 2050 and new relevance in a renewable-energy-powered world. Think big batteries to replace the spinning reserve of some coal and gas generators, and digital management of its customers’ distributed rooftop resources.

Scientists in the U.S. examined the use of different conductive filler materials in a lithium-ion battery electrode, finding that adding single walled carbon nanotubes to a nickel-cobalt-manganese cathode resulted in better electrical conductivity and higher rate capability for the overall battery. The results, according to the group, could provide new insights into design of high power, high energy battery electrodes.