Fluence opens technology centre in Bangalore
Fluence has opened a technology centre in Bangalore, India, which will support the system integrator and energy services company’s global customers.
It’s the company’s first tech centre in Asia and complements similar operations in North America and Europe. Fluence has around 4.8GW of battery storage projects in operation, development or construction and a growing number of contracts to optimise storage and renewable energy assets through its digital software platform.
A team of experts at Fluence India Technology Centre will work on areas including engineering of enclosures, batteries and inverters, software quality assurance and product management.
The announcement made earlier this week follows the news from January that Fluence is forming a joint venture (JV) with independent power producer (IPP) ReNew Power, to target opportunities within the India market.
Fluence was the first company to deploy a 10MW grid-scale battery storage project in the country, developed jointly by AES and Mitsubishi. It was commissioned in 2019, in a market which has just been described as now being on the verge of an “energy storage revolution”.
Redflow launches new zinc-bromine flow battery product
Production has begun of the latest range of flow batteries using zinc-bromine electrolyte from Redflow’s factory in Thailand.
The ASX-listed Australian company made the announcement yesterday that the Gen3 battery is commercially available and deliveries to customers will begin next month. The product comes in 10kWh modules stackable up to multi-megawatt configurations.
As the name implies, Gen3 is Redflow’s third-generation product, although there was a Gen 2.5 product between the last two major iterations.
Key features include a new stack design, updated electronics and increased functionality along with new tank design and cooling system. CEO Richard Aird said “significant manufacturing cost reductions” as well as performance improvements have been achieved from applying learnings from its earlier products’ field usage delivering more than 2GWh of energy and over 10 million hours uptime since 2018.
The company recently completed a 2MWh flow battery project at a bioenergy project in California, its first North America project and its biggest to date. In its half-year financial results to 31 December 2021, the company registered a 172.3% increase in revenues from the same period the previous year.
Ground breaking for Wyoming data centre with zinc battery backup power
A new data centre under construction in Wyoming, US will rely on zinc-based battery energy storage system (BESS) for backup power.
As reported by Energy-Storage.news in January this year, nickel-zinc batteries from tech company ZincFive will be used to support 30MW of critical IT loads at the first phase of the 120MW centre being built in Aspen, Wyoming.
Data centre company Wyoming Hyperscale is planning to build a number of sustainable data centre facilities for a market projected to double in size between now and 2026. Engineering firm Burns & McDonnell, which is working on the project, announced the start of construction in mid-June.
The Aspen Mountain Hyperscale Data Center campus has been designed to eliminate industrial water consumption and refrigerant use as well as being powered by renewable energy and utilise liquid-cooled IT equipment.
As noted in a February guest blog for this site by Dr. Josef Daniel-Ivad, manager of the Zinc Battery Initiative trade and technology group, the data centre company specified that it was seeking a zinc-based backup solution in developing the project. Daniel-Ivad said this was another example that zinc battery technologies are ready for “commercial prime time”.