Wednesday, 5 August 2026

Emaldo has partnered with Danish energy aggregator Twig to widen market access for its battery storage customers in Denmark, Sweden and Finland, ESS News reported.

The scale behind the deal sits in Emaldo's existing customer base. According to ESS News, Emaldo said in July that customers earn more than EUR 1 million per month through its Grid Rewards program, drawing on over 150 MW of controllable capacity.

Twig runs an automated platform spanning asset aggregation, forecasting, optimization and trading, with coverage of day-ahead, intraday, imbalance and ancillary service markets in Europe, the United States and Japan, per ESS News. The company was founded in Denmark in 2021.

This is Emaldo's second aggregation tie-up in short order. ESS News reported that the Twig agreement follows a deal Emaldo struck in July with Swedish balance responsible party Bixia, aimed at expanding ancillary service market access in Sweden. The Bixia arrangement was confined to one country; the Twig arrangement reaches across three.

For distributed battery owners, the route to revenue runs through a party that can bid aggregated capacity into wholesale and reserve markets. Twig's stated coverage of imbalance and ancillary services alongside day-ahead and intraday trading gives Emaldo's fleet more than one product to sell from the same asset.

A joint research project applying artificial intelligence to lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cell production started in July 2026 under the leadership of EAS Batteries, according to electrive.

The project, named KiBa-Pro, carries EUR 2.4 million in funding from the German Federal Government, electrive reported. That money supports a consortium of research institutions and industry partners working on a data-driven method for manufacturing LFP cells.

Roles are split between the two named partners. EAS Batteries coordinates the work and leads the digitalisation of cell manufacturing, while RWTH Aachen handles cell characterisation and the development of the AI models, according to electrive.

The technical objective is a virtual LFP cell built from production data captured on the line. Per electrive, advanced AI methods will analyse large datasets to identify correlations between production parameters and the resulting cell properties.

LFP chemistry sits at the centre of the consortium's scope, and the funding covers both the characterisation side at RWTH Aachen and the manufacturing digitalisation side at EAS Batteries.

Registered projects for Brazil's first battery energy storage system capacity auctions exceeded 260 GW in the first tender and 280 GW in the second, according to preliminary data from the Energy Research Office (EPE) reported by ESS News.

The capacity reserve auctions, known as LRCAP, are set for Dec. 2 and Dec. 4, ESS News reported. The first of the two tenders is reserved for projects that use domestically manufactured equipment.

Registration closed on July 31. EPE is expected to publish the list of qualified projects on Nov. 17, according to ESS News.

Proposed capacity is heavily concentrated in one part of the country. The Northeast region accounts for 71.1% of registered projects, with the Southeast region next at 18.8%, per the EPE data cited by ESS News.

EPE attributed the volume of submissions to the modular nature of battery storage projects and to the absence of environmental licensing and certification requirements at the registration stage, ESS News reported.

Registered capacity at this stage is a gross measure of developer interest rather than a pipeline that will be contracted. The gap between the registered volumes and the qualified list due in November will show how much of the more than 280 GW submitted for the second tender survives EPE's screening ahead of the December auction dates.

South African energy technology firm Plentify has signed a partnership with Deye to build what CleanTechnica describes as Africa's largest residential virtual power plant.

A virtual power plant aggregates distributed household assets, such as batteries and controllable loads, and dispatches them as a single resource. The partnership targets that segment rather than utility-scale generation.

The backdrop is South African supply scarcity. According to CleanTechnica, Eskom, the country's electric utility, imposed an electricity rationing schedule known as load shedding when generation capacity fell short of demand. Rolling cuts of that kind pushed households toward inverters and battery systems, the hardware base a residential aggregation platform depends on.

CleanTechnica did not attach a capacity figure or a household count to the Plentify and Deye programme.

Italy's energy regulator Arera has proposed a maximum bid of EUR 22,000/MWh/year for the country's second battery storage capacity auction, set for November 24, 2026 with delivery in 2029, according to ESS News.

That ceiling is roughly 40% below the EUR 37,000/MWh/year cap applied to the first auction under the long-term electricity storage procurement mechanism (Macse), which secured capacity for 2028 delivery, ESS News reported. The consultation on the proposal runs until September 7.

The reduction tracks Arera's revised view of what a battery project costs to build. The regulator now estimates total investment costs at EUR 125,000/MWh, against EUR 209,500/MWh used in the first round, per ESS News.

Arera based that revision partly on a BloombergNEF report published in December 2025, which put global stationary battery pack costs at about USD 70,000/MWh excluding power electronics, down 45% from 2024, ESS News reported.

Volumes are rising as the cap falls. The 2029 auction will seek 16 GWh of storage capacity, ESS News reported, against Terna's estimated requirement of 32 GWh by 2030.

The first auction, held in September 2025, awarded 9,968 MWh of storage against a 10 GWh procurement target, according to ESS News. Clearing prices in that round settled well inside the ceiling, ranging from EUR 14,354/MWh/year in southern Italy and Calabria to EUR 18,816/MWh/year in Sicily.

Those outcomes leave the proposed EUR 22,000/MWh/year ceiling above every price cleared in the first round, while cutting the headroom bidders had under the previous cap.

Factorial Energy has agreed a strategic partnership with Tulip Tech to commercialise solid-state and lithium-metal batteries for drones, electrive reported.

Tulip Tech is based in Den Bosch in the Noord-Brabant province in the Netherlands and, according to electrive, develops high-density battery systems for drones and serves more than 250 customers in the defence, security and commercial sectors. The company says it builds more than 100,000 battery packs per month.

Factorial, described by electrive as a US battery specialist, counts Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis and Hyundai-Kia among its backers. All three automotive groups plan to fit Factorial's lightweight solid-state cells in future electric vehicles, which are expected to deliver a range of over 1,200 kilometres, according to electrive.

The drone tie-up moves that cell chemistry into a market with different weight and energy-density priorities from passenger cars. Tulip Tech's existing customer base spans defence, security and commercial buyers, and its monthly pack output gives Factorial a route into serial production volumes for airborne applications.

A USD 489.4 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy has reached financial close, with borrower Amanecer Puerto Rico LLC, a Pattern Energy subsidiary, taking the funds to cut power costs and reinforce the island's electric grid. The lender is DOE's Office of Energy Dominance Financing (EDF).

The money goes into 220 MW of battery energy storage systems at two sites, Arecibo and Santa Isabel. DOE said the batteries at those sites come from American manufacturing lines fed by secure domestic supply chains.

Over a 25-year horizon, the agency put the savings for Puerto Rican households and businesses at roughly USD 312.5 million on their electricity bills.

The department added that the systems can carry backup electricity to more than 100,000 customers when supply falls short. Running the same fleet against 2025 operating data, DOE calculated the batteries would head off close to 13 million customer interruption hours.

EDF Director Gregory A. Beard said the investment "will strengthen Puerto Rico's electric grid, lower electricity costs". He also tied the loan to support for American manufacturing and to dispatchable power for the island.