Thursday, 6 August 2026

Swedish developer OX2 has acquired two standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) projects in Italy's Puglia region from Hanwha Energy Europe, each rated at 100 MW/400 MWh, according to ESS News.

Both sites sit in Lecce province in southern Puglia, ESS News reported. Construction is scheduled to start in the second quarter of 2027, with commercial operations expected by the end of 2028.

The purchase adds to a portfolio OX2 has assembled since it entered the Italian market in 2021. ESS News put the developer's Italian pipeline at 1.5 GW, split between roughly 750 MW of solar, 650 MW of standalone battery storage and 100 MW of onshore wind.

Storage therefore accounts for the second-largest slice of that pipeline behind solar, on the figures reported by ESS News. The two Lecce assets carry a four-hour duration at full rated power.

Ørsted's Old 300 Storage project, a 250 MW/500 MWh battery built with Tesla Megapacks, is now supporting the Texas grid, according to Electrek.

The site sits in Needville, southwest of Houston, and is fully connected to the ERCOT grid, Electrek reported. At full output the battery energy storage system can discharge 250 MW for two hours.

Old 300 Storage shares a location with Ørsted's 430 MW Old 300 Solar, but Electrek reported the battery and the solar farm operate independently of each other.

For Ørsted, the addition lifts the company's operating US onshore portfolio to around 6 GW, according to Electrek. The same 500 MWh counts toward Tesla's stationary storage deployments.

Tesla says it has more than 58 GWh of industrial storage systems running in over 65 countries. Its current two-hour Megapack configuration delivers about 1.9 MW of power and 3.85 MWh of storage per unit, per Electrek.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright issued an emergency order to mitigate the risk of blackouts for families and businesses in Guam, according to US DOE Energy.gov.

The order permits the Guam Power Authority (GPA) to operate specified generation units to meet anticipated electricity demand and maintain reliability, US DOE Energy.gov said.

GPA has limited generation options to meet demand because of constraints that include, but are not limited to, the Ukudu steam turbine going offline for emergency repairs, per the same announcement.

The order takes effect at 10:00 AM Guam Standard Time on August 6, 2026, and runs through 11:59 PM Guam Standard Time on November 4, 2026, according to US DOE Energy.gov.

Researchers at State Grid Henan Electric Power Company in China have proposed a method for sizing and siting distributed energy storage systems that uses a Stackelberg game framework, according to ESS News.

Tested on a 33-node distribution network, the approach cut the load fluctuation rate from 25.98% to 14.25%, a reduction of 11.73 percentage points, ESS News reported.

The optimized storage configuration carried an average total cost of CNY 1.8187 million across a five-year planning period, per the same account. The constraint satisfaction rate reached 99.8%.

A Stackelberg game models a sequential decision structure in which a leader commits first and followers respond, a framing used in power-system planning where a network operator and storage owners hold different objectives.

The work appeared in the journal Results in Engineering under the title "Optimal allocation of distributed energy storage systems based on the Stackelberg game," ESS News said.

Tonly has put sodium-ion battery electric haul trucks to work at the Tangshan Sanyou limestone mines in China, a deployment Electrek described as a world's first.

The machines are Tonly K120E haul trucks, fitted with a "Haixing" series pack rated at 676 kWh, according to Electrek. That capacity puts the truck battery well above passenger-vehicle scale and into the range typical of heavy mining duty cycles.

Electrek reported the Haixing cells carry an energy density of 165 Wh/kg. Sodium-ion chemistry has historically lagged lithium-ion on that metric, which is why the figure matters for a vehicle class where payload competes directly with pack mass.

Cycle life is the second specification Tonly is leaning on. Electrek put the usable lifespan of the Haixing battery at 8,000 cycles. For a mine truck running repeated short hauls, cycle count rather than range determines how long a pack stays in service before replacement.

The cold-weather case is the operational reason for the chemistry choice. According to Electrek, the trucks are earmarked to work in the coldest regions of northern China, where nighttime temperatures frequently drop to -20°C in areas such as Harbin and Shenyang. Battery performance at sub-zero temperatures is a persistent constraint on electrified heavy equipment in those conditions.

Sodium-ion cells use no lithium and no cobalt, which removes the two inputs that expose battery supply chains to concentrated mining and refining. A commercial deployment in mining duty rather than a pilot fleet is the test that matters for the chemistry, and Tangshan Sanyou is where it is now running.

Syntropic Power and UNIGRID Inc. have formed a strategic partnership to commercialize UNIGRID's sodium chromium oxide (NaCrO2, or NCO) battery technology in North America and to establish a pathway to U.S. production, the companies said in a statement distributed by GlobeNewswire.

The two firms plan to deploy 1 GWh of NCO-based energy storage in 2027, according to the announcement.

Syntropic will lead system development, certification, U.S. module assembly and integration, with a stated priority on establishing a non-FEOC-aligned supply pathway by the end of 2027. The term refers to sourcing that avoids foreign entities of concern, a qualification that governs eligibility under U.S. clean energy tax credit rules.

On cell performance, the companies cited independent testing at RIT of UNIGRID's 210Ah NCO cells. That testing measured 216-218Ah of discharge capacity against the 210Ah nameplate rating, cell-level round-trip energy efficiency of at least 97.9%, and 2.3% capacity loss between the C/10 and 1C discharge rates.

UNIGRID's own cycle life testing at full depth of discharge has passed 1,000 cycles with more than 99% of capacity retained, the release said.

Sodium-ion chemistry competes with lithium iron phosphate on the basis of raw material availability rather than energy density, and the supply-chain framing in the announcement is explicit: the partnership pairs a domestic assembly and certification role with a deployment target and a dated sourcing milestone. The 1 GWh figure is a plan rather than a contracted order book.

Round-trip efficiency and rate performance are the two metrics that determine how a cell behaves in daily-cycling grid applications, where losses compound across thousands of charge and discharge events. The RIT numbers cover cell-level behavior, not full system performance after integration into modules and enclosures.

Delhi had installed roughly 446MW of rooftop solar as of June 2026, short of the 750MW target set under the Delhi Solar Energy Policy 2023, according to a study by IEEFA and Ember.

The two organisations concluded that Delhi's power sector is transition-ready but requires rooftop solar, storage and market enablers to cover rising demand peaks.

On the demand side, IEEFA put Delhi's total energy requirement at 38,482 million units in financial year 2026, around 2.2% of India's total energy requirement.

Peak demand climbed from 7.7GW in FY2023 to 8.7GW in FY2027 by June 2026, a trajectory IEEFA described as effectively managed so far.

Allocated generation capacity stood at about 7,544MW as of June 2026, per the IEEFA-Ember work.

Households dominate the load. Domestic consumers made up more than half of total electricity consumption, which the study said underscores the weight of residential demand in shaping the city's electricity system.

The UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero opened a consultation on 6 August 2026 on a permitted development right covering ground investigations for electricity network projects, applying to England.

Submissions close at 11:59pm on 4 September 2026, according to the department.

Under the proposal, some low-impact, temporary ground investigations and surveys tied to electricity network projects would proceed without a planning application, subject to a set of conditions and limitations.

The department states the right is intended to cut delays and administrative burden for electricity network developers and for local planning authorities, while keeping environmental safeguards in place.

Saft, a subsidiary of TotalEnergies, has signed a joint agreement with startup Mana Battery to develop anode-free sodium-ion battery technology, ESS News reported.

The deal follows a technical evaluation of Mana Battery that Saft began in 2025, according to ESS News. Mana Battery is pursuing commercialization of a proprietary electrolyte platform alongside its anode-free sodium cell design.

The two companies are targeting defense, aerospace, rail, data center and industrial uninterruptible power supply (UPS) customers with sodium-ion batteries, ESS News reported. That customer list places the partnership in segments where cell safety and cycle performance carry more weight than the lowest cost per kilowatt-hour, rather than in mass-market vehicle or utility-scale storage supply.

Anode-free construction removes the separately manufactured anode from the cell, and sodium-based chemistry substitutes a more widely available raw material for lithium. Both companies describe the batteries they intend to bring to market as safe and high-performance.