The 10 most popular blogs on Energy-Storage.news during 2019 offer a fairly strong indication of the overall topics leading industry thinking during the year – so without further ado, here they are:
Of course, throughout 2020 – and beyond – we’ll be tackling all of these as well as other crucial, controversial and / or intriguing topics. We’re expecting to see more of a focus on the supply chain and manufacturing in 2020, both for lithium and non-lithium technologies. Safety and regulation topics including grid integration with electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure, as well as the related areas of finance and business model innovation are likely to also feature heavily.
Meanwhile here at Solar Media, we’re running with #SmartSolarStorage2020, a hashtag that can be used on social media to create and curate conversations throughout the year.
The Top Three
‘Leapfrogging’ the grid: Hybrid lithium-flow in action at a remote Thai village microgrid
We talk a lot about the existing prominence of lithium-ion. There’s also been an increasing amount of discussion of flow batteries as a long duration counterpart to lithium, evidenced by the popularity of our November news story on Lockheed Martin’s forthcoming flow energy storage battery launch (see our Top five news stories for the year here).
I was both surprised and enthused to see a guest blog on a project combining both technologies, lithium-ion batteries with zinc bromine flow batteries, at a remote Thai village, take the number one spot for this year.
Ben Shepherd, chief commercial officer at Australian company Redflow, talked about the advantages, challenges and execution of a project that promises to prove “an excellent demonstration of the benefits of energy storage systems in developing nations”.
(Cover image to this article shows an aerial view of the village, Ban Pha Dan. Credit: Redflow).
A flow battery ‘competitive with the LG Chems and Samsungs of this world’
Ditto the second entry in our list: the proposed merger between flow energy storage providers Avalon Battery and redT was discussed in detail with Avalon and redT leadership, alongside NEXTracker’s CTO, Alex Au.
NEXTracker has deployed Avalon’s batteries in the field already in its innovative solar-plus-storage power plants. Some deep insights as well as attention-grabbing soundbites from the bullish trio propelled this one into the upper echelons of our Top 10 blogs of the year.
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