March 18, 2021: California’s public utilities will be directed to prepare for power outages caused by extreme summer weather conditions in plans outlined by the Public Utilities Commission on March 5. The PUC will consider exactly what directions to make at its next meeting on March 25, and they could include encouraging electric vehicle participation…

March 18, 2021: New York’s National Grid on March 11 said it had struck a partnership with Standard Hydrogen Corporation to demonstrate a hydrogen-based energy storage system in New York’s Capital Region. The system will produce hydrogen at the site using electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then use the hydrogen as…

March 18, 2021: The US Department of Energy is building a $75 million grid storage facility to speed up the development and deployment of long-duration, low-cost grid energy storage, it announced on March 10. The Grid Storage Launchpad will be installed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richmond, Washington, and comprises 30 research labs that…

March 18, 2021: Canadian vanadium flow battery firm VRB Energy on March 15 said it had agreed to install a 100MW/500MWh flow battery at a solar plant in China, which will be the country’s biggest solar battery, the announcement said. The agreement also includes a commitment to build a gigafactory for the manufacture of vanadium…

March 18, 2021: Nanotechnology firm OCSiAl on March 17 revealed it had opened a new plant in Russia to produce graphene nanotubes for lithium battery anodes, solving a degradation problem that has bothered researchers for years. While silicon is an abundant element — the second most abundant after oxygen — and has a large capacity…

March 18, 2021: Finnish energy company Wärtsilä said on March 15 it had been hired to supply energy storage technology for two projects in southern Texas, where power blackouts killed at least 30 people and left up to five million people in the dark this winter. The two systems, named Madero and Ignacio, will have…