Recharge Industries and Accenture gets set to build 30GWh gigafactory in Australia

Recharge Industries announced on January 16 that Accenture, the Dublin-based information technology services firm, will be its engineering and design provider to build its gigafactory in Australia.

The large-scale lithium-ion battery cell production plant, to be located in Geelong, Victoria, at full capacity will generate up to 30GWh of energy storage per year. Recharge Industries says it will make it one of the world’s largest. Building will start in the second half of 2023, with the goal of producing batteries equal to 2GWh annually in the second half of 2024 and 6GWh by 2026.

At full capacity, the factory will employ up to 2,000 workers.

Recharge Industries has secured the production equipment for the first 2GWh production line, which is scheduled to arrive in Australia in May.

The two companies will

Asahi Kasei wins China patents legal battle

Asahi Kasei revealed on January 10 that it had won a series of court challenges in China to protect its patent for lithium ion battery separators.

The Japanese tech firm said a final ruling by China’s supreme people’s court, handed down on November 2, has ended four years of legal wrangling concerning Li battery separator patents in Asia.

The final ruling brought to an end a protracted legal battle launched in August 2018, when Asahi filed a patent infringement lawsuit with the Shenzhen intermediate people’s court against Shenzhen Xu Ran Electronic Co Ltd and others.

The move sought to prohibit the companies from selling their ‘single-layer Wscope’ battery separators in China and to receive damages for patent infringement amounting to a total of Rmb1 million ($148,000).

Asahi said its claim was initially accepted in full by the supreme people’s court in December 2020.

However, Xu Ran then tried to have Asahi’s patent invalidated — a bid that was rejected by the China also collaborate with Charge CCCV (C4V) a technology partner of Recharge Industries, to support the project’s timing. C4V will provide IP, supply chain blueprints and technology concepts for battery manufacturing, which will accelerate the project.

National Intellectual Property Administration and also by the Beijing Intellectual Property Court, which handed down its decision in September 2021.

Xu Ran made a final appeal to the supreme people’s court, whose November ruling ends the matter.

Asahi said it is paying close attention to protect its intellectual property rights, warning that it stands ready to deal with infringements.

Rob Fitzpatrick,

CEO of

A new initiative using residential solar and battery storage systems to create a virtual power plant has been launched in California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and not-for-profit electricity supply firm Swell Energy announced on December 22.

The VPP aims to boost energy supply reliability and initially should give the district 10MW/20MWh of renewable capacity by recruiting, installing and aggregating capacity from customers’ battery storage systems in the utility’s service area.

However, the project

Recharge Industries, said: “Establishing a sovereign manufacturing capability to produce state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery cells is critical to Australia’s renewable energy economy — meeting national demand, generating export income and securing supply chains.” could eventually be scaled up to 27MW/54MWh.

The initiative should start operating in April, with contract capability based on a two-hour deliverable capacity.

Around 600 SMUD customers already have domestic energy storage systems, with an additional 400 finalizing interconnections and “thousands more” projected over the next several years, according to the district.

SMUD chief zero carbon officer Lora Anguay said: “As more customers add solar panel systems paired with battery storage solutions, they’ll be better able to manage their carbon footprint.”

Italvolt enters strategic collaboration with StoreDot for XFC lithium-ion batteries

Italvolt, the Italian gigafactory developer, announced it had entered into ‘a strategic collaboration’ with Storedot, a lithium-ion battery developer, on January 16.

Italvolt will license StoreDot’s extreme fast charging technology (XFC) and IPR to manufacture XFC lithium-ion batteries at its plant, which is to start production in 2024 in Turin, Italy.

The agreement between the two companies will allow Italvolt to scale and upgrade its battery cell production.

It also enables StoreDot to buy Italvolt’s batteries for its own business, once production is complete.

StoreDot’s ‘100inX’ product roadmap has an ambition to develop advanced battery cells capable of 100 miles of drive range in five minutes’ charge by 2024, reducing to three minutes by 2028 and two minutes by 2032.

Lars Carlstrom, founder and CEO of Italvolt, said, “Our collaboration with StoreDot is an inflection point in our journey to deliver high-quality, lithiumion battery cells, at scale.”

Doron Myersdorf, CEO of StoreDot, said, “This agreement lets us obtain captive capacity so we can guarantee supply of cells to our future OEM customers. It is extremely important that StoreDot creates these strong relationships as we rapidly move towards mass production.”