Sunday, 9 August 2026

Antora Energy has closed a USD 550 million Series C round backed by new and existing investors, according to ESS News. G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse co-led the round, ESS News reported.

The US energy storage company will direct the capital toward expanding production capacity, including a second US manufacturing facility, according to ESS News.

Antora's batteries store electricity as heat inside insulated blocks of solid carbon, ESS News reported. The units are manufactured at a plant in San Jose, California.

The company's largest disclosed deployment is a 50 MW/5 GWh thermal battery project in South Dakota, per ESS News. The installation sits at POET's Big Stone City bioprocessing facility. Antora put more than 200 thermal batteries on site and moved the project from initial construction to commissioning in under 12 months, according to ESS News.

Serentica Renewables has commissioned the first phase of a 1 GWh battery energy storage system in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India, according to ESS News.

That opening phase comprises 50 MW/200 MWh of battery capacity, ESS News reported.

The developer said the Bikaner installation supplies one of the world's first time-block round-the-clock renewable power arrangements for industrial consumers.

Serentica Renewables is the renewable energy arm of Vedanta Group, and the project marks the first large-scale battery energy storage system the company has delivered for the commercial and industrial segment, per ESS News.

The independent power producer holds 3.2 GW of renewable energy capacity, ESS News reported, with projects spanning solar, wind, storage and balancing solutions across multiple states.

Serentica Renewables has a planned 7 GWh battery order pipeline for the next two years, according to ESS News.

TerraFlow Energy and Shoals Technologies Group have signed a memorandum of understanding covering a deployment plan of up to 5 GW of vanadium flow battery systems a year, according to ESS News.

The agreement pairs the flow battery developer with Shoals Technologies Group, and sets the 5 GW annual figure as the ceiling of the plan rather than a contracted volume, ESS News reported.

TerraFlow claims its redox battery runs with less than 3.5% degradation over 20 years, per ESS News. The company also puts the cycle life of the system at 20,000 to 40,000 cycles.

Those durability figures are the commercial argument for vanadium flow chemistry, which trades lower energy density for long-duration cycling and slow capacity fade. The claims are TerraFlow's own.

Fluence booked USD 1.44 billion of orders in the three months to June 30, 2026, close to triple the USD 508 million taken in the same quarter of 2025, according to ESS News. The same results cut full-year revenue guidance and disclosed a widening net loss.

The order backlog reached USD 6.4 billion, the highest in the company's history, ESS News reported, alongside an energy storage order pipeline of 45.6 GW/163.7 GWh.

Data center demand supplied a large share of the intake. Fluence secured approximately USD 850 million of data center business through July, ESS News reported, including its first large behind-the-meter order signed during the third quarter and approximately USD 550 million from an unnamed hyperscaler in July 2026.

Quarterly revenue rose to USD 649.8 million for the fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2026, from USD 602.5 million a year earlier, according to ESS News.

The profit line moved the other way. Fluence reported net losses of approximately USD 44.3 million for the three months and USD 136.1 million for the nine months ended June 30, 2026, ESS News reported, against net income of approximately USD 6.9 million and a net loss of approximately USD 92.1 million for the same periods a year earlier.

Manufacturing is the constraint. Fluence now expects USD 400 million in project deliveries to slip into next year because of production issues at a new international contract manufacturing facility and construction-related delays affecting completion and start-up of a new US contract manufacturing facility, according to ESS News.

That pushed guidance down. The company expects revenue of approximately USD 2.9 billion to USD 3.1 billion, with a midpoint of USD 3.0 billion, compared with prior guidance of approximately USD 3.2 billion to USD 3.6 billion and a midpoint of USD 3.4 billion, ESS News reported.

The result is a company converting demand faster than it can convert factory output: order intake up nearly threefold year on year against a backlog that is now the largest it has carried, with roughly USD 400 million of that work rescheduled beyond the current fiscal year.

Hydrostor has secured an offtake agreement covering 60 MW with local power provider Clean Energy Alliance for the Willow Rock Energy Storage Center, the compressed air energy storage plant under construction in southern California, according to ESS News.

The contract gives the project a level of revenue certainty while construction proceeds, ESS News reported. Willow Rock, in Kern County, California, is sized at 500 MW/4,000 MWh, giving it eight hours of duration at full output.

ESS News describes Hydrostor as a Canadian compressed air energy storage developer. Willow Rock is the company's first utility-scale project in the United States.

On-site work started in July 2026. That followed a permit from the California Energy Commission issued in December 2025.

The 60 MW contracted to Clean Energy Alliance represents a fraction of the plant's rated power capacity, leaving the balance of the 500 MW uncontracted under this agreement.

Gas projects account for 99.8 gigawatts of the 201.5 gigawatts admitted to the first study round under PJM Interconnection's overhauled queue rules, Inside Climate News reported.

That round holds 715 projects, the first cohort processed under the grid operator's "first-ready, first-served" framework, according to Inside Climate News.

PJM figures cited by Inside Climate News spread the gas total across 147 projects. Battery storage qualified 60 gigawatts and nuclear 17.3 gigawatts. Among the remaining technologies, solar reached 11.8 gigawatts, hybrid solar-storage 7.5 gigawatts and wind 3.9 gigawatts.

Application counts rank the technologies differently. Storage filed 314 proposals against 147 for gas. Solar entered 117, wind 61 and hybrid solar-storage 37, while nuclear submitted 24.

Three years ago, solar, wind and battery storage made up more than 90 percent of the projects waiting in the queue, Inside Climate News reported.

PJM expects demand to grow by as much as 70 gigawatts by 2038, driven largely by data centers.

Study admission does not guarantee a connection. PJM has studied more than 300 gigawatts of projects since 2020. Only 51 gigawatts of generation hold interconnection agreements today, according to PJM's own figures cited by Inside Climate News.

Vanadium is "a big thing" at the moment, according to Graham Arvidson, quoted by RenewEconomy in a piece on the metal's role in data centre storage.

The metal itself is hard, ductile and lustrous, RenewEconomy reports, and shifts from a silvery grey to blue, yellow, green or purple once exposed to open air.

Power systems are accumulating flexibility plans faster than they are building flexible grids, according to CleanTechnica.

The distinction matters because grid flexibility is easy to mistake for a technology market, CleanTechnica writes. Jurisdictions announce batteries measured in gigawatt-hours, create ancillary-service products, or launch capacity auctions, pumped-hydro programs and demand-response targets. Each announcement lands as a procurement headline rather than as delivered system capability.

CleanTechnica's framing separates the announcement layer from the operating layer: a new ancillary-service product, a capacity auction and a demand-response target are three different instruments, and none of them is the same as a grid that can actually absorb variability. The gap CleanTechnica identifies is between the volume of such plans and the flexibility that power systems have in operation.