Invinity Energy to build 30MWh UK flow battery

Invinity Energy Systems is to develop a 30MWh vanadium redox flow battery in the UK, the company announced on April 12.

Invinity said it had been awarded £11 million ($14 million) from the UK government for the VRFB longer duration energy asset demonstrator project, which it claimed will be the largest grid-scale battery ever manufactured in the country.

The battery will provide a broad range of grid balancing services.

Invinity said the battery’s storage capacity will be equivalent to the daily energy use of more than 3,500 homes and it will have the ability to deliver full power for a discharge duration of over four hours.

The battery, to be built at Invinity’s factory in Scotland, should start commercial operation in early 2025 and will be around six times larger than the company’s BESS at the Energy Superhub Oxford in southern England.

Invinity said the battery would also be one of the

Avesta plans solid-state R&D center in Portugal

Belgium-based Avesta Battery & Energy Engineering is to develop an R&D center for solid state battery cells in Portugal, the company announced on March 29.

world’s biggest flow batteries — although it should be noted that the China Energy Storage Alliance reported in July 2022 that the 100MW first phase of a planned 200MW/800MWh vanadium redox flow battery energy storage system had been connected to the grid in Dalian, China.

Vingroup, Altinay in Turkey batteries plan

Vietnam’s Vingroup said on April 10 it was joining forces with Turkey’s Altinay Elektromobilite to produce advanced batteries as part of a full-service business for energy storage and mobility systems in the Turkish market.

Altinay general manager Mert Uygun said the partnership with Vingroup’s VinES Energy Solutions subsidiary aimed to attract investment from the domestic energy sector.

VinES will offer the technology, system design, production and verification of the ESS units, while Altinay will head up sales and marketing as well as after-sales services in the Turkish market, Uygun said.

Altinay will also draw on its own experience of designing and building lithium-based energy storage systems and battery packs over the past 12 years, Uygun said.

Last November, Vingroup auto subsidiary VinFast agreed to expand cooperation with China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology to develop battery systems for the EVs market.

Meanwhile, VinES and Canada’s Li-Cycle are assessing proposals to build a lithium ion recycling plant in Vietnam, the companies revealed on April 12.

The plant could be built near battery manufacturing facilities operated by VinES, under an agreement where Li-Cycle would become VinES’ preferred recycling partner for its Vietnamesesourced battery materials from 2024.

The move came five months after the firms agreed to form an international battery recycling partnership.

Avesta has signed a memorandum of understanding with the municipality of Figueira da Foz to develop the 500MWh-1GWh capacity plant at a total cost of more than €1.8 billion ($1.9 billion) on a 17,000m² site owned by the authority.

Avesta CEO Noshin Omar (pictured left) said the plant would be built in two phases and would eventually employ more than 2,000.

Figueira da Foz mayor Pedro Santana Lopes (pictured right) said the project was in line with aspirations to become a center of high-tech development in the region.

In January, Avesta unveiled plans to develop a combined battery packs and recycling complex in Seneffe-Manage, Belgium.

The ‘BE-VOLT’ plant should have an annual manufacturing capacity of 3GWh, which Avesta said would make it Belgium’s first gigafactory.

Tesla to invest and build Shanghai Megapack factory

Tesla is investing an undisclosed sum to manufacture its Megapack energy storage systems at a new plant in Shanghai, the firm said on April 9.

The factory will have an annual production capacity of 40GWh, producing some 10,000 Megapacks each year.

According to Chinese state media, Tesla will break ground for the project in the Lin-gang pilot free trade zone area in the third quarter of this year and start production in the second quarter of 2024.

Zhuang Mudi, deputy secretary-general of the Shanghai municipal government, said the project would help drive the development of the energy storage industry as well as the low-carbon transformation of Shanghai.

In January 2019, Tesla broke ground on a car manufacturing plant in Shanghai, becoming the first company to benefit from a policy allowing foreign carmakers to establish wholly-owned subsidiaries in China.