Tesla has signed a three-year pricing deal with Japan’s Panasonic Corp relating to the manufacture and supply of 2170 lithium-ion battery cells manufactured at its gigafactory in Nevada, US.
The electric vehicle and energy storage system maker made the announcement on 10 June.
Mineral extraction and battery recycling company American Battery Metals Corporation— which is changing its name to American Battery Technology Company— has chosen northern Nevada, US, for its lithium-ion battery recycling facility.
The company chose the location because of the proximity of Tesla's Gigafactory, established road and rail infrastructure, and access to a qualified labour pool.
A funding windfall will allow mining company American Battery Metals Corporation to continue its plans to build a lithium-ion battery recycling plant in Nevada, US.
The company will use $8 million of a $10 million investment to develop an initial commercial pilot plant capable of recycling 20,000 tons of batteries a year that will return lithium, cobalt, and nickel back into the materials supply chain.
Materials extraction, mining, and battery recycling firm American Battery Metals Corporation (ABMC) has announced plans for a lithium-ion battery recycling plant in its home state of Nevada, US.
The company said on 7 January it would build a scalable, commercial lithium-ion battery recycling facility that would be fully operational in the second half of this year.
Lead-acid battery recycler Aqua Metals is counting the cost of a fire this week that caused ‘significant’ damage to its Aquarefinery area of its Nevada, US, plant.
The company’s equipment, including all 16 AquaRefining modules, control wiring and other supporting infrastructure, were damaged by the heat and smoke from the fire on 29 November
After initial damage assessments, the company believes it will incur a cost and delay in operating any processes within the plant, although it was not able to say how long, and at what cost.
Nevada power utility NV Energy and its subsidiary Sierra Pacific Power Company have an anxious two-month wait to hear if they will be fined for not setting aside $10 million in incentives for energy storage systems in the US state.
Members of industry regulator the California Public Utilities Commission found that NV Energy had “failed to comply with the Commission’s orders” to set aside funding for energy storage during a prehearing on 27 June.
Nevada utility NV Energy has unveiled proposals to build an additional 590MW of lithium-ion battery energy storage systems in the state along with 1,200MW of new solar photovoltaic capacity.
NV is asking regulators to approve a total of three projects in the south of the state towards the utility’s target of doubling its renewable energy generating capacity by 2023.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has blamed “lower-than-expected” battery manufacture from Panasonic for disrupting production of Tesla’s Model 3 electric vehicles (EVs).
Musk said in a post on Twitter that Panasonic’s battery cell lines at the ‘Gigafactory 1’ facility in Nevada amounted to about 24GWh per year— lower than the expected 35GWh— and had “been a constraint on Model 3 output since July (2018)”.
Musk added “Tesla won’t spend money on more capacity until existing lines get closer to 35GWh theoretical”.
The Public Utilities Commission of Nevada (PUCN) has given approval for six NV Energy projects in the state— collectively the “largest clean energy investment in Nevada History”— as the utility moves towards its long-term commitment to providing 100% of its energy through renewables.
Three of the projects will be located in northern Nevada, three in the south. The projects represent a direct investment to Nevada of more than US$2 billion, and will bring an aggregate 1,001 megawatts of solar photovoltaic generation to the state.
LithiumOre is to form a new division to develop a method of extracting battery-grade lithium from brine.
The division will extract battery metals from LithiumOre’s 26,000-acre Nevada land holdings, as well as marketing its extraction technology to other mining companies.
The Nevada-based exploration and development company said current extraction technology— involving a series of evaporation ponds— can take up to two years to complete and requires a huge amount of water, meaning the process is no longer permissible within the US.
LithiumOre CEO Doug Cole said the new division “simultaneously creates a technology side to our business with an entirely new revenue stream independent of our mining operations and realises our goal of becoming a fully integrated lithium mining and production company”.
