Wednesday, 26 August 2026

Energy storage is strengthening grid reliability in the United States, and five states lead that deployment, according to CleanTechnica.

The publication ties the buildout to rising consumption. Electricity demand is surging from data centers, advanced manufacturing, and extreme summer heat, CleanTechnica said.

Storage sits at the intersection of those three drivers. Data center load runs around the clock, manufacturing sites add firm industrial demand, and summer heat concentrates stress on the system during peak hours. CleanTechnica frames the reliability gains as an outcome of storage deployment rather than of any single state policy.

Solmech has finished a hybrid retrofit at the 4.1 MW Warnertown Solar Farm in South Australia, bolting DC-coupled battery storage onto an operating PV plant, according to ESS News.

The contractor swapped out six of the site's Sungrow PV inverters for hybrid units, pairing each with a 200 kWh Powerkeeper battery. ESS News reported the work added 1.2 MWh of storage capacity in total.

Warnertown sits roughly 215 kilometers north of Adelaide and dates back further than most operating solar assets in the state. Per ESS News, the plant was built in 2001 with a 2.5 MW ground-mounted PV system, and a second stage of 1.6 MW followed in 2023.

The DC-side approach is what Sungrow points to as the commercial case. Coupling the batteries directly on the DC side avoided transformer modifications, cut project complexity and significantly lowered investment costs, Sungrow said.

Retrofits of this shape matter for older PV sites whose grid connection agreements and balance-of-plant equipment were specified for solar alone. Sungrow said the configuration enabled faster deployment and stronger commercial returns. At Warnertown, the six inverter replacements carried the entire storage addition without touching the transformer stage.

GE Vernova Inc. announced the launch of the GL316c, a 420 kV, 63 kA sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)-free Live Tank Circuit Breaker, at CIGRE Paris 2026.

The breaker replaces SF6 with a carbon dioxide and oxygen (CO2/O2) gas mixture. According to GE Vernova, the mixture delivers the performance and reliability required by modern transmission networks.

The design did not start at the launched rating. GE Vernova said the GL316c was originally developed for 420 kV, 50 kA applications under its "LIFE SF6-free HV Breaker" project, co-funded by the European Union's LIFE Programme.

Production is earmarked for Europe. The company said the new 420 kV, 63 kA circuit breaker is planned to be manufactured at its facility in Villeurbanne, France.

Live tank circuit breakers sit at the interruption points of high-voltage transmission substations, where SF6 has long been the standard insulating and arc-quenching medium. Moving a 63 kA short-circuit breaking duty onto a CO2/O2 mixture puts the alternative gas at the upper end of transmission-class switching requirements rather than in lower-rated niches.

The EU co-funding link ties the product to a public decarbonisation instrument, and the step from the 50 kA project rating to the 63 kA commercial rating is the change GE Vernova is taking to market.

GE Vernova has signed an agreement with LS Electric to set up a joint venture in voltage-sourced converter high-voltage direct current (VSC-HVDC), according to a GE Vernova press release.

The company said the venture is intended to strengthen its competitiveness in the VSC-HVDC business.

GE Vernova described VSC-HVDC as a core component of Korea's next-generation power grid. The converter technology sits at the heart of long-distance direct-current transmission links, converting between AC and DC at each end of a line.

GE Vernova did not disclose further terms of the agreement in the announcement.

A research team led by scientists at South Korea's Chonnam National University has built a tri-layer composite solid electrolyte for next-generation rechargeable lithium metal batteries, ESS News reported.

The best-performing version, designated CSE-30, reached an ionic conductivity of 5.60 × 10−3 S.cm−1 at 60 C, according to ESS News. The same sample recorded a lithium transference number of 0.81, with the publication describing mechanical strength and elongation as exceptional.

In full-cell testing, LiFePO4|Li cells built with the electrolyte held a stable discharge capacity of 133.6 mAh g−1 at 0.5C, ESS News said.

The work was published in Advanced Materials under the title "Surface-Functionalized LLZO-Incorporated Multilayer Composite Solid Electrolytes for Dendrite Suppression and Efficient Ionic Conduction in Lithium-Metal Batteries". Researchers from Chonnam National University and the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology contributed to the study, according to ESS News.

Standalone battery revenues from continuous intraday trading in Germany dropped to EUR 14,300 per MW/month in July from EUR 17,700 per MW/month in June, a decline of about 19%, according to ESS News, which modelled a representative 10 MW/20 MWh system.

The fall came in a month when renewables covered 71.5% of German electricity generation, the highest monthly share recorded so far in the year, ESS News reported.

Continuous intraday remained the strongest single-market strategy for standalone assets even after the drop. Batteries combining markets did better: forecast-based cross-market optimization brought in EUR 23,100 per MW/month, around 8% below June but roughly 33% above the combined wholesale strategy, per ESS News.

Capacity payments held flat. Frequency containment reserve revenues stayed unchanged at EUR 14,900 per MW/month, according to the same report.

The wider price picture explains part of the squeeze on trading margins. ESS News put the average German day-ahead spot price at around EUR 104/MWh in July, roughly EUR 6/MWh below June. Negative day-ahead prices, which reward batteries for charging, became more frequent: 79 hours were recorded in July against 52 in June.

That combination - more hours below zero but a lower average price level - left arbitrage spreads thinner than the headline count of negative-price hours suggests, with intraday and cross-market revenues both moving down month on month.

FCR was the only revenue stream in the ESS News breakdown that did not move, leaving capacity-market income as the stable floor beneath a weaker trading month.

Public Service Electric and Gas Co. (PSE&G) has opened its GridSmart Battery Program as a pilot for residential electric customers in New Jersey, pairing a USD 5,000 incentive with interest-free on-bill financing for home battery installations, according to Solar Builder.

The incentive covers purchase and installation of a residential battery energy storage system (BESS), Solar Builder reported. Customers can also take up to USD 25,000 in interest-free repayments spread across their utility bill, removing the upfront capital barrier that keeps most households out of the storage market.

PSE&G says the pilot will test how residential batteries can support virtual power plant (VPP) programs in the state, according to Solar Builder. That framing puts the utility's device-level incentive alongside a regulatory track already underway: the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU) opened a stakeholder process earlier in 2026 to develop a statewide VPP network.

The sequencing matters for how aggregated residential storage gets valued in New Jersey. A VPP requires enrolled devices before it can dispatch anything, and household batteries are the slowest asset class to build out because the cost lands on the customer, not the utility balance sheet. Splitting the subsidy into a fixed grant plus zero-interest amortization addresses both halves of that problem, and it gives PSE&G an installed base to study while the NJBPU rulemaking is still open.

What PSE&G learns from the pilot on enrollment rates, install economics, and dispatch behavior will land in a policy environment where the statewide framework has not yet been settled.

Asahi Kasei has started up a coating line for its Hipore wet-process battery separators in Charlotte, North Carolina, according to electrive.

The line sits on the grounds of the existing Celgard plant, electrive reported, with commercial output scheduled for the second half of fiscal 2026.

The Japanese chemical company is pairing the Charlotte investment with a separator factory under development in Canada, a combination it says will substantially widen its local supply chain across North America, per electrive.

Ryu Taniguchi, President of Asahi Kasei Battery Separator Corporation, described the Charlotte opening as a key milestone in building the company's North American supply platform for battery separators.

Separators are the thin porous membranes that keep the anode and cathode of a lithium-ion cell apart while allowing ions to pass, and wet-process grades are used in higher energy-density cells. Coating capacity placed alongside an operating separator plant shortens the step between base film and finished product for customers on the continent.