September 2, 2021: Systems Sunlight, the Greek battery manufacturing firm, will spend €50 million ($59.2 million) to expand its lead and lithium manufacturing unit in Xanthi, north-eastern Greece, it announced on September 2. The company said it would plough €30 million ($35.5 million) into increasing its Xanthi unit’s annual lead-acid motive battery production from 4GWh…

September 2, 2021: CATL has joined European battery alliance EUROBAT, the association revealed on September 2. Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited is based in Ningde, about 330 miles south of Shanghai, but has a number of operations in China as well as other countries. It makes lithium batteries for electric vehicles and stationary…

September 2, 2021: Lithium experts John Mitchell and Govind Arora have joined Li-Cycle’s board of advisers, the lithium battery recycling company announced on August 24. Both men co-founded Blue Horizon Advisors and Blue Horizon Capital, and before that they overlapped at the Albemarle Corporation, Mitchell as president of lithium, Arora as chief commercial officer for…

September 2, 2021: Massachusetts-based lithium battery maker 24M Technologies has joined up with Indian electrical components manufacturer Lucas TVS to build a battery gigafactory in India, the firms announced on September 1. The factory will be built in Thervoy Kandigai, Gummudipundi, near Chennai, and Lucas TVS said it expected it would build other plants throughout…

September 2, 2021: A long line of investors led by Prime Movers Lab and including Saudi Aramco have drummed up $100 million in Series C funding for Energy Vault’s proprietary brick energy storage technology. The technology works with electric motors lifting bricks up and stacking them into an ‘EVx gravitational energy storage tower’. When electricity…

September 2, 2021: UK-registered explorer and developer Bacanora Lithium has been taken over by the Chinese lithium giant Ganfeng in an improved $391 million offer finalized on August 25. The original offer, made in May 2021, was for 67.5 pence ($0.93) in cash per share, and this was increased to 73.6 pence ($1.10) in the…

September 2, 2021: The Washington State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on August 18 said they had hired Noel Schulz to co-lead the Advanced Grid Institute with PNNL chief electrical engineer Jeff Dagle. The institute is a research collaboration set up in May 2018 ‘to promote the evolution of advanced grid modelling to support…

August 19, 2021: Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, Inc, the US affiliate of Japanese giant Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, on August 8 said it would buy the UK-based firm Smarter Grid Solutions. The deal is expected to be finalized within a few weeks. SGS develops distributed energy resources management software for power utilities and operators and could…

August 19, 2021: Scotland-based energy company SSE has made its first venture into battery storage with the purchase of a 50MW installation in southern England, the firm announced on August 18. SSE has bought the project development rights from Harmony Energy, which has been developing the site in Salisbury, Wiltshire for four years. It won…

August 19, 2021: The Indian government is putting up billions of dollars of cash, offering tenders and incentives to battery firms to put in place more than 50GWh of storage over the next few years. Policies in line with the country’s aims to Aatma Nirbar Bharat — Make in India — include a $2.5 billion ‘Production Linked…