Two subsidiaries of Wisconsin-based electric and gas company WEC Energy Group have put forward plans for their second large-scale solar-plus-storage project in as many months.

Almost 70% of home solar PV in Germany comes with battery energy storage attached and the country’s residential storage market represented around 2.3GWh of installed capacity by the end of 2020.

An order worth US$14 billion placed by carmaker Volkswagen with lithium-ion battery manufacturer Northvolt will have a “significant” impact on the stationary energy storage market, a spokesman for Northvolt has said.

Europe is on course to become the world’s second-largest lithium-ion battery cell producing region by 2025, although some key challenges need to be addressed, a European Commission vice-president has said.

With the US having rejoined the Paris Accord on the climate crisis last week, President Joe Biden has now signed an Executive Order which identifies the importance of mitigating risks in the supply chain for “large capacity batteries”.

SimpliPhi Power has made some bold choices in the decade that the company has been active, leveraging key technologies to “satisfy different pain points around energy”. Andy Colthorpe hears from CEO Catherine Von Burg about why chemistry matters in the push for clean energy.

A lithium-ion battery recycling plant is under construction in Norway, focusing initially on electric vehicle (EV) batteries, but the CEO of the company behind it has said that it will also be capable of processing batteries from stationary energy storage systems (ESS).

The European Union (EU) looks set to introduce the “most extensive product legislation in the world for batteries,” but its potential shortcomings include the risk that battery prices could go up and that established manufacturers from Asia might be better positioned to benefit from the rules than the new European value chain.

A €105 million (US$127.6 million) push to develop low-cost, environmentally-friendly lithium-ion battery technology by Sunlight, a designer and manufacturer of batteries headquartered in Greece, will receive €49.9 million in grant funding.

Proposed updates to EU legislation on batteries that aim to address some of the issues associated with Europe’s supply chain have been welcomed by trade industry association RECHARGE, albeit with the suggestion that they may be too complex in their current form.