January 7, 2021: Nick Hennen joined Inbatec, the German battery formation manufacturer known for its acid recirculation, in December as global vice president for sales and business development. Hennen previously worked for Digatron Power Electronics for six years as a vice president of sales and latterly as vice president for the Americas and global business development.…

January 7, 2021: The US Department of Energy set out its goals for energy storage with a strategy outlined in its ‘Energy Storage Grand Challenge Roadmap’ (ESGCR), released on December 21, alongside a storage Act that pledges $1 billion for the sector. The ESGCR is a follow-up to the Grand Challenge announced in January 2020,…

January 7, 2021: Texas-based energy firm Vistra on January 6 said it had switched on the largest lithium-ion battery storage facility in the world, the Moss Landing facility in Monterey County, California. The 300MW/1,200MWh system is not even up to capacity yet, with a further 100MW/400MWh due to be added by August 2021 in Phase…

January 7, 2021: Chinese lithium battery giant CATL has been chosen to provide the batteries for two 110MWh standalone storage systems in Texas, US, the company behind the installation, FlexGen, said on January 5. The batteries are operated and controlled by FlexGen’s HybridOS management platform, which already has more than 260MW/171MWh of projects in commercial…

January 7, 2021: Reinhardt Peper, former CEO of Bosch Battery Systems, has joined IQ International’s advisory board after retiring from Bosch in November, IQ announced on January 1. Based in Detroit, US, Peper had headed up Bosch battery since 2013, having joined the company in 1984. Apart from a three-year stint as CEO of Cobasys…

January 7, 2021: Israel-headquartered smart energy firm SolarEdge has hired She-Woong Jeong as CEO of its battery subsidiary Kokam, as well as appointing Yogev Barak as chief marketing officer of SolarEdge, the company said on December 23. Described by SolarEdge as an ‘industry veteran’, Jeong has joined the firm from Samsung Electronics, where he was…

January 7, 2021: The price of lithium batteries dropped to its lowest ever in 2020, a report by BloombergNEF claimed on December 16, citing a 13% drop on 2019 figures. For the first time, BNEF said, battery packs were selling for less than $100/kWh for e-buses in China, although the volume-weighted average price for e-buses…

December 10, 2020: The US utility Evergy has appointed David Campbell as CEO and president effective January 4, the firm said on December 8. Outgoing Terry Bassham, who announced his retirement in August, will remain in post until Campbell takes over. Evergy is a fairly new company, having been formed in 2018 when local energy…

December 10, 2020: Canada’s largest utility, Hydro-Québec, on December 9 launched a subsidiary called EVLO Energy Storage to design, sell and operate lithium iron phosphate battery energy storage systems for power producers, transmission providers and distributors, and commercial and industrial markets. The modular systems are the result of extensive work on battery materials by Hydro-Québec,…

December 10, 2020: Southern California Edison, the second largest utility in the US, has added another 590MW of battery energy storage capacity to its portfolio ‘to further enhance the region’s electric system reliability needs’, the utility said on December 7. All of the batteries are lithium-ion and include three utility-scale projects plus one 5MW behind-the-meter…