Russia Aims to End Reliance on Imported Scarce Metals, Accelerates Lithium Mining Development by 2030

On March 25, the Sichuan Qimingxing 100 MW/200 MWh user-side ESS project, invested in and developed by the Municipal Industrial Investment Company, officially broke ground at the plant of Sichuan Qimingxing Aluminum Co., Ltd. The project was a key undertaking jointly developed by Meishan Industrial Investment Company and Sichuan Qimingxing, with a total investment of approximately 180 million yuan and a site area of about 30 mu, and adopted a technologically mature and performance-stable LFP battery BESS. Upon completion, the project is expected to deliver annual discharge of about 100 million kWh, effectively optimizing the enterprise's power consumption structure and improving the reliability of power supply.

Recently, Daqo Tailai Electric’s official account announced that the core No. 4 site of the 85 MW PV power station energy storage supporting project in Cuba, built by the company under Chinese government aid, was successfully connected to the grid and began power generation. The 85 MW PV+ESS project connected to the grid this time is planned as an overall layout of 15 distributed PV energy storage sites, covering multiple core power consumption areas in Cuba. It adopts a technical solution combining China’s currently mature and efficient PV modules with advanced ESS to achieve integrated operation of “PV power generation + energy storage peak shaving + off-grid backup.” Compared with traditional standalone PV power stations, the ESS supporting this project can effectively address the intermittency and fluctuations of PV power generation, improve the stability of power supply from the power grid, and ensure continuous regional power supply even under extreme weather or power grid failure conditions, thereby significantly improving energy utilization efficiency.

Recently, the 2025 Electrochemical Energy Storage Black Start and Frequency Regulation Key Technology Research and Application Project of Huadian Group Wuchang Branch was officially and successfully accepted for grid connection. The project was jointly advanced by Huadian Group, Shanghai Electric Power Transmission & Distribution Group, and REPT Battero. As a key pilot project under the national 14th Five-Year Plan, the project took the lead in achieving engineering application, marking that REPT Battero's 324Ah battery cell has 1P C-rate performance and has passed testing under relevant national standards, enabling it to participate in future grid-side frequency regulation projects. The project accepted for grid connection this time is located in Wuhan, Hubei, with a total capacity of 9MW/9.554MWh, consisting of two 4.5MW/4.5MWh energy storage units. It is intended to build electrochemical energy storage black start capability for two sets of 9E-class combined-cycle generating units and, when the ESS is idle, to participate in secondary frequency regulation ancillary services for the power grid through the combined thermal power and energy storage frequency regulation mode.