It's Tuesday. A grid battery chemistry with two decades of commercial service and roughly 5 gigawatt-hours in the field has just reached a new country, about eleven months after the only company that builds it stopped taking orders. Debut and discontinuation rarely share a paragraph.
In today's edition:
🔋 Big Story: Australia connects a sodium-sulfur battery its maker no longer sells
⚡ Quick Hits: a 15% Sungrow price hike, 1 GWh bound for Japan, fusion finds the Pentagon
💰 Capital: New Mexico's DOJ circles the Blackstone-TXNM deal
📋 Policy Watch: Brussels puts non-wires fixes first
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The Big Story
Australia's first grid sodium-sulfur battery starts up as its maker exits
Advanced materials company Lava Blue has commissioned a 250 kilowatt, 1.45 megawatt-hour sodium-sulfur battery at its PRiSM research facility in south-east Brisbane, the first time the chemistry has been connected to an Australian grid. The system, built by Japan's NGK, sits behind 200 kilowatts of existing rooftop solar and ties into Energex's distribution network and the National Electricity Market. Lava Blue said the combined system can carry up to 100% of the site's peak operating load, including the energy-intensive equipment it uses to refine high-purity alumina from low-grade feedstock. The project was delivered through the Queensland Energy Storage Technology Hub, a QUT and state-backed commercialisation program, with Melbourne's Allset Energy handling electrical engineering and integration.
NAS cells are built to discharge for six hours or more at rated capacity, with roughly 5 GWh deployed worldwide across more than two decades of commercial operation.
NGK said in October 2025 that it would discontinue NAS manufacturing and sales and stop accepting new orders after BASF withdrew financial backing, though it will keep servicing existing sites including this one.
Allset Energy also delivered Australia's first NAS system, at a remote Western Australian mine in 2023, under an ARENA-backed trial that cited the chemistry's tolerance for extreme heat in regional networks.
The power management interface linking battery, solar and grid carries more than 80% Australian content, with DC converters from Queensland manufacturer Advanced Converter Solutions.
Source: Energy-Storage.news
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five stories from across the stack, from inverter price lists to a fusion supply chain finding a defense customer.
Sungrow is raising prices on inverters and battery systems by up to 15%, pv magazine reported, and the largest global supplier of both moving up sets a floor other vendors now get to price against. pv magazine
Trina Storage signed a 1 GWh supply MoU aimed at Japan, written around the seismic and grid-code requirements that have kept most overseas battery suppliers at the edge of that market. Energy-Storage.news
Pacific Fusion and Xcimer are signing defense-related agreements, TechCrunch reported, opening a validation and funding channel for fusion developers that runs outside the power sector entirely. TechCrunch
GE Vernova and SPIC Brasil completed the modernisation of a third generating unit at the São Simão hydro plant in Brazil, the halfway mark of a six-unit program the partners say raises output from the same water. GE Vernova
The STREAM project published findings from local flexibility market pilots in Slovenia, Finland, Italy and Spain, and reported that regulation, more than technology, is what holds these markets at demonstration scale. Enlit World
The Capital Stack
New Mexico's DOJ presses for answers on Blackstone's TXNM takeover
The New Mexico Department of Justice is seeking more information on indirect ratepayer costs in Blackstone's acquisition of TXNM Energy, Utility Dive reported, after TXNM unwound a stock sale that had been ruled illegal. That makes this the clearest live test of how far infrastructure funds can buy into regulated utilities, and what state regulators will extract on the way through. Nothing has been decided.
Source: Utility Dive
Also in the capital stack:
Masdar and Luxcara signed an MoU to put more than €5 billion into German battery storage and offshore wind, announced during the UAE state visit to Germany, with no equity split disclosed. ESS News
Policy Watch
European MEPs backed prioritising non-wires solutions in the revision of the trans-European energy infrastructure rules, Enlit World reported, which would put grid-enhancing technologies ahead of new line build in the EU's own planning hierarchy. Enlit World
The EPA is expected to finalise repeal of federal power-sector carbon limits this week, Utility Dive reported, removing the last federal cap on generation emissions and the regulatory floor a number of state and city clean-energy plans were drawn against. Utility Dive
Bannock County, Idaho is reconsidering the renewables moratorium it adopted in 2024, with the Republican commissioner who drove the ban now leading the repeal effort, a reminder that local siting rules move in both directions. Canary Media
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