Canada-headquartered start-up Li-Cycle has claimed a victory in commercialising its lithium battery recycling processes, with a shipment sent to a customer just before the end of last year.
Lead acid batteries are “the most recycled” consumer product used in the US today, according to National Recycling Rate Study, a new biennial report from the Battery Council International (BCI).
Lithium-ion waste from a solar lantern scheme run by oil & gas major Total in Kenya will be recycled into new batteries for solar home systems by start-up Aceleron.
While recycling of lithium and other materials such as cobalt from batteries will greatly increase in the coming years, the potential availability of second life batteries should not be underestimated, according to new research and data.
Vanadium producer Bushveld Minerals has offered its backing to the merger of UK energy storage provider redT with US vanadium redox flow battery maker Avalon Battery, providing a loan to help the deal get over the line – and to help its own vertical integration ambitions.
By the middle of the 2020s, using hybrid ‘portfolios’ of batteries and renewable energy sources will economically outperform existing gas power plants, while the combination of technologies is already cost-competitive with building new gas plants, a new report from the US-based Rocky Mountain Institute has said.
The huge upsurge in lithium-ion battery deployment expected over the next two decades poses a particular problem: what to do with cells that have reached the end of their useful life. Stefan Hogg investigates how lithium recycling will come into its own to handle spent batteries
While lithium-ion enjoys the most media and customer interest at the moment, alternative technologies for storing energy could become competitive – if investors are willing to take them on to the extent that manufacturing efforts can be greatly scaled up.
The race to build Europe’s first lithium-ion energy storage system ‘Gigafactory’ could be won by Tesvolt, as the German manufacturer announced a “multimillion-euro investment” in production lines this week.
