Tuesday, 7 July 2026

Energy Dome and the Salt River Project (SRP) have signed a deal to bring a 19 MW, 10-hour CO2-based battery system onto the Arizona grid, according to Solar Builder.

The system will sit alongside SRP's Coronado Generating Station in St. Johns. SRP will take its output under a tolling contract running 20 years.

SRP picked the project through a 2024 RFP process, with Google set to cover part of the cost under a shared-funding arrangement, Solar Builder reported. The battery is due to start operating in 2029.

SRP says it aims to at least double the number of generation resources in its power system portfolio by 2035.

Peak Energy has entered a partnership with General Motors to manufacture sodium-ion batteries for energy storage systems, according to Inside Climate News, which reported the deal was announced last week.

Under the arrangement, GM will develop sodium-ion batteries at its Michigan battery lab, and Peak will be able to use them in its energy storage systems, per Inside Climate News.

Kurt Kelty, GM's vice president for battery and sustainability, said in a news release that the company believes "sodium-ion will be a defining chemistry for grid-scale energy storage systems".

Peak is based in Burlingame, California, and has about 125 employees, with a cell engineering center in Broomfield, Colorado, according to Inside Climate News. The company demonstrated its technology by completing a 3.1-megawatt-hour sodium-ion battery in the Denver area last year.

Sodium-ion remains a small share of the battery market. In China, sodium-ion's market share is 1 percent and is on track to rise to 3.4 percent by 2030, Inside Climate News reported.

The sector has seen setbacks. Natron Energy, a Peak peer, abruptly closed last year when its funding dried up, according to Inside Climate News. It had about 100 employees and operations in California and Michigan.

Argentina's Energy Secretariat moved 232 of the 235 bids in its AlmaSADI battery storage tender into the economic evaluation stage, with three proposals rejected for failing to meet tender requirements, according to pv magazine.

Interest in the round ran far ahead of what regulators sought. The 235 submissions came from 37 domestic and international companies and totaled 8,335 MW, against a reference target of 700 MW, pv magazine reported.

Under Resolution SE 50/2026, the rule that opened the tender, participating projects must deliver at least four consecutive hours of energy from new battery energy storage systems.

The next step falls to CAMMESA, which is set to open economic bids on June 24 and hand out awards in early July under the published timetable.

Holding the 700 MW target would put total investment near USD 700 million, pv magazine reported.

Before AlmaSADI, Argentina ran its first large-scale storage procurement, AlmaGBA, awarding 713 MW of battery capacity for critical nodes across the Buenos Aires metropolitan area.

A new US industry group, the American Battery Leadership Coalition (ABLC), has formed to promote sodium-ion batteries in domestic energy storage, according to ESS News.

Graeme Grant, chief operating officer of Alsym Energy, chairs the coalition. Edward McGlone of Peak Energy holds the vice chair role.

Developers, utilities and data center operators have signaled plans to buy more than 15 GWh of sodium-ion storage capacity, Grant said.

The push targets a market where power demand is climbing. IEA estimates put US data center electricity use at 183 TWh in 2024.

Tesvolt has secured building approval for a battery storage project in Wittenberg made up of 36 individual systems with a combined capacity of 60 MW and 190 MWh, according to ESS News.

The project will sit on a 20,000 square metre industrial site in Wittenberg and is designed as a merchant asset for energy trading markets, including arbitrage, ESS News reported.

According to ESS News, construction is scheduled to begin shortly, with commissioning targeted for March 2028.

The total investment volume is estimated at around EUR 35 million, according to ESS News.

Tesvolt will handle project development and construction up to the ready-to-build stage, while financing and long-term operation will be carried out by an external investor, ESS News reported.

Belenus Solar, a subsidiary of Ansasol, is building a hybrid plant in Spain's Zamora province that ties together 33 MW of solar generation, 111.8 MWh of battery storage and a 25 MW electrolyzer, ESS News reported. That electrolyzer is designed to yield as much as 445 kilograms of green hydrogen each hour.

For the storage side, the developer has specced lithium iron phosphate cells rated at 111.8 MWh of capacity, paired with 26.625 MVA of discharge power, according to ESS News.

At the Pobladura del Valle site, produced hydrogen would sit in 30 pressurized vessels holding a combined 19.5 tonnes of compressed gas.

Ansasol runs its hydrogen work under a brand called Hydron, which now counts more than 20 projects at different stages of development, ESS News reported.

Lithium ions crossed boron nitride nanotube membranes at up to 31 times the speed that standard diffusion would predict, ESS News reported.

The finding came from a collaboration spanning Rutgers University, the University of Illinois Chicago, and Argonne National Laboratory, according to ESS News.

ESS News reported that the results were published in Nature Nanotechnology under the title "Anomalous ultrafast lithium-ion transport through boron nitride nanotube membranes".

Measured at pH 5.5, the membranes reached per-pore power densities of up to 15,300 W per square meter, with energy-conversion efficiency nearing the theoretical ceiling of 50%, ESS News reported.

In bench demonstrations, salt-solution gradients alone drove enough current to run a watch, a calculator, and LEDs, according to ESS News.

ESS News reported that the team cited two possible uses tied to the membrane result: recovering lithium from spent batteries, and blue energy generation, which draws power where salt water and fresh water meet.

A 602 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) built by Solarpro Technology and CATL has begun feeding Bulgaria's grid at Burgas, according to ESS News.

The project lifts Bulgaria's total energy storage capacity by 10%, Solarpro Technology said in reporting by ESS News.

Solarpro describes the installation as the largest operational storage facility in Eastern Europe.

The system runs on CATL's TENER storage platform, with Solarpro handling engineering, procurement and construction and the full integration, ESS News reported.

Before Burgas, Solarpro managed a 260 MWh battery project in Tenevo that entered service in October 2025 using Hithium and Kehua batteries, according to ESS News.

Aretis Group has sold a battery storage portfolio rated 45 MW/120 MWh near Riga to Hungarian developer Futureal Energy Partners, ESS News reported.

The two-site package pairs a 15 MW/40 MWh installation at Bolderaja with a larger 30 MW/80 MWh unit at Bisuciems, according to ESS News. Both hold grid connection agreements and building permits.

Work is due to start at each location in July 2026, and Futureal is aiming for commercial operations by November 2026, per ESS News.

The purchase gives Futureal its first directly owned battery assets in the Baltic states, the company said, according to ESS News.

Earlier in 2026, Futureal offloaded Tuovila, a 125 MW battery project in Finland, to Prime Capital AG, ESS News reported.