Energy Storage

German software company Autarc launched a platform for residential heat pump projects, covering design, planning and customer project management functionality. It uses LiDAR imaging to enable heat load and hydraulic balancing calculations, as well as visualizations.

The novel propane heat pump has a coefficient of performance of up to 4.9 and can reportedly achieve a flow temperature of up to 55 C.

By coating the iron sulfide cathodes in polymers, a research team was able to create transition-metal sulfide-based lithium batteries with stable cycling and high safety. After 300 cycles, a lithium carbide iron disulfide pouch cell retained 72.0% capacity with no capacity degradation after 100 cycles.

The novel heat pump can reportedly heat air to up to 49 C. Its full-load heating capacity is of up to 63,000 Btu/hour.

It took eight years of field measurements for researchers at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany to estimate the usable capacity of home battery energy storage systems and develop a dataset covering 106 system years and 14 billion datapoints. Their key finding was that home battery systems lose about two to three percentage points of usable capacity per year on average, meaning good news for the industry as most warranties in the market can be met with the implementation of capacity reserves.

China’s Huawei has built a 400 MW/1.3 GWh solar-plus-storage off-grid facility in Red Sea New City, Saudi Arabia.

A group of researchers in Thailand outlined a new methodology to identify the optimal temperature in two-stage cascade heat pumps using non-azeotropic refrigerants. Through their analysis, the scientists found that the coefficient of performance for simultaneous heating and cooling is affected by the pinch point temperature at the cascade heat exchanger, with lower temperature levels being responsible for a higher COP.

Renewable Energy Expo India (REI) returns to Greater Noida at the start of October, for what will be its 17th edition. For the second year running, The Battery Show India will run concurrently with REI. pv magazine had the chance to catch up with Julian Thomas, Senior Project Director at show organizer Informa Markets, to discuss why electric vehicles and energy storage are now the key to India’s energy transition.

This year’s edition of the China International Energy Storage Expo (EESA EXPO) has underlined the latest energy density achievements in the battery energy storage space on both cell and system levels. Meanwhile, the sheer number of commercial and industrial (C&I) systems on display spoke of growing demand in this market segment. Alternative lithium-ion battery chemistries were not easy to find.

Ballard Power Systems says it has started restructuring its global operations to cut costs due to slower hydrogen infrastructure development and delayed fuel cell adoption.