Abigail Ross Hopper

The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) says more than 400 companies from across the solar value chain have sent a letter to Congress warning against H.J.Res 39, which would repeal President Joe Biden’s solar tariff moratorium.

President Biden issued an executive action last June to pause new solar tariffs for two years in response to a near-complete shutdown of solar module supply in the U.S. caused by the Auxin Solar tariff investigation. A group of lawmakers are attempting to overturn this action and force American companies to pay more than $1 billion in retroactive duties.

“Congress just passed historic clean energy legislation that is sparking a wave of project deployment and manufacturing investments, but passing this CRA bill will undo much of this progress and have a devastating economic impact in communities across the country,” says Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of SEIA.

“The tariff pause provided business certainty that kept solar projects moving forward while providing a bridge for domestic manufacturing to grow,” she adds. “This deeply flawed use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) rips the rug out from underneath American businesses and will cause thousands of workers to lose their livelihoods.”

Analysis from SEIA shows that passing this CRA legislation will eliminate 30,000 American jobs, including 4,000 manufacturing jobs. It will cause the cancellation of 4 GW of solar project deployment in 2023 worth over $4.2 billion in investment. This lost deployment represents 14% of expected solar installations this year and will increase carbon emissions from the power sector by 24 million metric tons.

The letter emphasizes the need to grow domestic manufacturing and reduce reliance on imports but urges lawmakers to not undermine the very legislation that is positioning America as a solar manufacturing powerhouse.

“This misguided resolution would stall America’s clean energy progress and put thousands of construction jobs at risk,” says George Hershman, CEO of SOLV Energy and chairman of SEIA’s board of directors. “The president’s action to provide business certainty with a pause on tariffs while the supply chain shifts, combined with the historic investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, has enabled solar companies to hire more workers and greenlight projects while the U.S. scales up its manufacturing capacity here at home. Ending the two-year reprieve would effectively halt our momentum and undercut American growth in this industry. We need Congress to stand with solar job creators and reject this dangerous effort.”

“Since the announcement of the two-year pause on solar tariffs and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, we’ve seen a huge uptick in the development of American solar manufacturing facilities,” adds Chad Farrell, co-CEO and founder of Encore Renewable Energy. “The administration’s action provided our company with the certainty needed to continue to build solar projects while providing an important bridge for domestic manufacturing to scale.”

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Jagan Mohan Reddy, chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, India, pours out concrete to mark the start of construction of a Greenko pumped hydro project. Image: CMO Andhra Pradesh via Twitter.

Corporate funding activity into battery storage companies in the first quarter of 2023 fell considerably year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter, according to research from Mercom Capital.  

The group’s latest edition of its quarterly reports into corporate funding, including venture capital (VC) funding and mergers and acquisitions (M&A), found that in Q1 2023, US$2.2 billion was raised across 27 deals.

That’s a drop of 83% from the US$12.9 billion recorded in Q1 2022 from the same number of deals, and a 50% quarter-on-quarter decrease from Q4 2022’s 31 deals, worth US$4.3 billion.

There is however a big caveat to account for. As Mercom pointed out, in Q1 2022, LG Energy Solution floated its US$10.7 billion IPO, which skewed the figures – removing the IPO from the quarterly numbers actually puts the two first quarters on an even footing at US$2.2 billion each.

Nonetheless, looking at previous yearly totals, activity will have to pick up pace quickly this year to catch up to the more than US$26 billion corporate funding recorded for the whole of 2022, which in itself was a massive 50% jump from 2021’s US$17 billion total, and represented more than three times the total of US$8.1 billion reported by Mercom for 2020.

There were decreases in both VC funding and debt and public market funding compared to Q4 2022: there was a 35% drop in VC funding quarter-on-quarter, from US$1.7 billion in 22 deals, to US$1.1 billion in 19 deals. The year-on-year comparison was more favourable, with just an 8% decrease from Q1 2022’s US$1.2 billion VC funding.

While the 83% year-on-year drop sounds dramatic, Q1 2022 was an outlier due to the inclusion of LG Energy Solution’s US$10.7 billion IPO which itself accounted for 83% of that quarter’s total. Image: Solar Media using Mercom Capital data.

It remains to be seen if the sector will go back to attracting funds on the scale it did in 2021, which came after a year of depressed activity during the global pandemic and its related disruptions. Indeed, recent editions of the Mercom report have fairly consistently mentioned record activity, such as Q3 2022, the point at which the previous year’s total corporate funding levels were surpassed.

One area where things appear to have improved in Q1 2023, is the growth in energy storage project funding, as well as the profile of the projects funded. From nine project deals, US$2 billion was raised in Q1 2023, compared to seven deals worth US$749 million in Q4 2022.

Of the top five project deals, Indian developer and independent power producer (IPP) Greenko which offers 24/7 renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs) based on pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) paired with solar and wind got the biggest wedge, at US$700 million, while in second place was Blackstone-owned developer Aypa Power’s US$320 million of corporate credit facilities the Canadian company secured for a 15GW+ pipeline of North American BESS projects.

Rounding out the top three were US developer Leeward Renewable Energy’s US$260 million construction financing raised for its Chaparral Springs solar-plus-storage project in California, UK battery storage and e-mobility infrastructure specialist Zenobe Energy’s £235 million (US$252 million) long-term debt facility for two BESS projects, and US$200 million of project financing and development capital secured by Canadian commercial and industrial (C&I) BESS developer Peak Power.

One other trend Mercom identified last time out was a lean towards debt and public market financing, which grew while VC funding declined, as did private equity financing during 2022.

This time, debt and public market financing levels showed a much greater decline than seen in VC funding. Nine deals worth US$2.6 billion were recorded in Q4 2022, which dropped by 57% in dollar terms to US$1.1 billion debt and public market financing across eight deals in Q1 2023.

Year-on-year, that decline was even more pronounced, with a 91% drop from Q1 2022’s US$11.7 billion raised across just five deals, although again the LG IPO will have skewed this.

Recent M&A activity in the sector has been more difficult to track, with all four M&A deals recorded in the space by energy storage companies in the first quarter of this year on undisclosed financial terms. There were also 12 energy storage project M&A deals, of which three disclosed the transaction amount.

Read Energy-Storage.news’ related coverage of Mercom Capital’s quarterly reports here.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 1st Energy Storage Summit Asia, 11-12 July 2023 in Singapore. The event will help give clarity on this nascent, yet quickly growing market, bringing together a community of credible independent generators, policymakers, banks, funds, off-takers and technology providers. For more information, go to the website.

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A slide from Modo’s presentation at the Summit showing when it expects the ERCOT market for ancillary services to saturate. Image: Modo Energy.

The massive buildout of battery storage in the ERCOT, Texas market and the risk of market saturation was a huge talking point at Energy Storage Summit USA last month.

Taking place over two days in the capital Austin, the ERCOT market and its soaring battery storage market naturally dominated conversations. There is a little over 2GW online today but that is set to nearly quadruple to just under 8GW by the end of 2023, and the implications of this for revenues is clear according to at least one speaker.

“By next summer, we will have saturation because there’ll be more batteries than there are contracts in ancillary services. This means we in the battery world need to think differently and figure out where the rest of the revenue is going to come from,” said Quentin Draper-Scrimshire, CEO of Modo Energy during a presentation. The UK-based battery analytics firm is expanding its platform to cover the US, starting with ERCOT.

Other delegates and speakers interviewed by Energy-Storage.news at the event gave varying views. Speaking in the context of the firm’s strategy to mitigate against this risk, developer Available Power’s VP business development Alex Krass said:

“And we know that there’s a bit of a timeline on the market for standalone battery storage before it gets saturated, so we’ve focused on it in order to get projects in the ground.”

“The idea is that there are a lot of standalone battery storage projects in the queue, the market will saturate, and ancillary service revenues are going to fall off a cliff for some companies in this market in the next couple of years and make the revenue side a little harder.”

Nick Dazzo, head of trading for Spearmint Energy which only launched last year (when its CEO guest blogged here) and recently acquired a 900MW pipeline in ERCOT, disagreed strongly.

“What that forecast doesn’t seem to do is account for an increase in or a constant need for those services as more renewable resources are added to the system. There’s a tonne more solar coming in the next decade, and once there’s more intermittency in the generation stack, then arguably the need for ancillary services continues. So a static comparison of battery deployment against today’s need for ancillary services doesn’t capture the full picture,” he said.

Ravi Manghani, director of strategy and market analytics for BESS firm LS Energy Solutions, agreed that the market would saturate but only temporarily.

“My personal take on that saturation story is that there will be a saturation point, but I think it’s not an indefinite saturation. I think it’s a saturation for now until we can get to a point where we get to increasing renewable penetration and then the market opens up again, because there are again revenue streams that you can tap into,” he said.

“I think batteries have caught up with all the slack because we didn’t see meaningful amounts of storage being deployed in Texas up until a couple of years back.”

Comparing the development of the ERCOT market with the UK, Draper-Scrimshire pointed out that although revenues per kW have fallen compared with 2021 due to growth in battery storage, top-performing assets could maintain closer to the same levels.

Source: Modo Energy.

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A conveyor belt at a facility from US-based Li-Cycle, which recycles lithium-ion battery packs from a range of sectors. Image: Li-Cycle.

Mining giant Glencore, Spain-based utility Iberdrola and commercial waste management firm FCC are partnering to develop lithium-ion battery circularity solutions, including recycling and second life.

The trio intend to provide lithium-ion battery recycling solutions at scale together in Spain and Portugal, Iberdrola’s main markets and where FCC is also based. They will look to establish a purpose-built facility that could also provide second life repurposing as well as recycling.

The facility will focus on the pre-processing of lithium-ion batteries and battery scrap, sometimes called black mass, to be separated into more refined streams for further downstream refining and recovery of the valuable metals like lithium, cobalt, manganese and nickel.

Second life means giving lithium-ion batteries a second use after they can no longer provide the use case they were designed for. Most commonly, this means using electric vehicle (EV) batteries for something other than transportation once they are taken out of a vehicle.

Energy-Storage.news has covered the second life energy storage system (ESS) space extensively.

The trio said they will look to provide lithium-ion battery circularity solutions for both gigafactory scrap and end-of-life batteries. Europe has well over 1TWh of lithium-ion production capacity planned for 2031, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Spain alone has over 100GWh in the pipeline, according to separate figures.

They have already collaborated with the Iberian Energy Storage Research Centre (CIIAE) to assess existing battery recycling capabilities and feed availability in the Iberian region, and are currently assessing potential locations for the facility, which FCC will operate.

The facility will be operated by FCC Ámbito and will focus on the pre-processing of lithium-ion batteries and battery scrap, separating such feed into distinct streams for further downstream refining and recovery of battery metals.

Lithium-ion battery circularity: recycling versus re-use

Companies in the second life ESS space often argue that re-using batteries rather than recycling is a much better way to extract the maximum value from them once they are no longer usable in EVs.

“We believe every piece of battery should be treated at the highest possible level of value, which means looking for any possible way to use it or parts of it as long as possible before it is recycled,” said Gordon Gassmann, CEO of Mercedes-Benz Energy, possibly the largest player in the space, who told Energy-Storage.news in a recent interview.

However, many outside the space say the technology and economics of second life ESS solutions still need to be proven out at scale, while some say the fire safety risk disqualifies them entirely from some use cases like residential.

The US Department of Energy Loan Programs Office (LPO) head Jigar Shah recently told us that most second life firms are in the beta testing phase, for example. The largest player outside China by announced project size is California-based Element Energy with a 50MWh project and 2.5GWh of modules procured.

The recycling space meanwhile has seen companies scale up much more quickly. The LPO committed to loans of US$2 billion and US$375 million to lithium-ion recycling firms Redwood Materials and Li-Cycle, respectively, in February. Glencore is one of Li-Cycle’s investors.

The European Union this week released the first guidance for its upcoming Battery Passport scheme which hopes to increase circularity and sustainability in the lithium-ion battery market.

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Cape Town at night. South Africa suffers from widespread and frequent grid outages as operator Eskom struggles with reliability. Image: Martie Stewart / Flickr.

A solar-plus-storage project is being planned the capital of South Africa, as the city looks to move “away from Eskom reliance and towards a load-shedding-free Cape Town”, its Mayor said.

Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis announced that the city would design, build and operate a solar PV plant with battery storage to the tune of 1.2 billion Rand (US$65 million). The Paardevlei project near Somerset West will “yield up to 60MW of renewable energy” although the official size of the either portion was not revealed.

A media statement did say that the project would protect the city against one full stage of load shedding from grid operator Eskom. It is part of a 500MW renewable energy procurement from independent power producers (200MW of which will conclude in 2023), the third phase of a broader effort to protect the city from load shedding.

“This project is another critical step in our journey away from Eskom reliance and towards a load-shedding-free Cape Town. We are confident that Cape Town will be the first metro to free our economy from power disruptions, and ensure a green and just energy transition,” Hill-Lewis said.

A feasibility study for the project will now be undertaken, to be completed by the end of the year with commissioning of the project planned for August 2026.

It will be supported financially by the C40 Cities Finance Facility (CFF) initiative, which offers cities technical and financial assistance in their energy transition. The CFF is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Government of the UK and the Agence Française de Development (AFD).

The City is also launching a demand management scheme which will be awarded in the next few weeks, the Power Heroes Programme, which will incentivise voluntary turning off of of power-intensive devices.

Eskom struggles to maintain grid reliability and resiliency but is also deploying its own renewable and energy storage projects to shore up its network.

Last month, Energy-Storage.news reported on the latest of these, a 513MW/2GWh RFP for battery storage for which bids are due July 5, 2023. That followed on from other tenders including a 343MW/1440MWh procurement last year, on which the first project broke ground in December.

See all coverage of the South African energy storage market here.

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Australian energy minister Chris Bowen (left) on a recent visit to Wallgrove BESS, a 50MW/75MWh project in Western Sydney. Image: Transgrid.

Nearly double the megawatt-hours of large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) were under construction in Australia by the end of 2022 compared to the previous year.

According to national trade association Clean Energy Council’s latest annual report into the country’s clean energy sector, the combined capacity of 19 BESS projects being built last year totalled 1380MW output and 2,004MWh energy capacity.

At the end of 2021, the figures had been 921MW and 1,169MWh respectively. Meanwhile, investment in large-scale wind, solar and storage was at AU$6.2 billion (US$4.17 billion) for 2022, a 17% increase on 2021 figures.

In a foreword to the Clean Energy Australia Report 2023, Clean Energy Council (CEC) chief executive Kane Thornton noted however that overall, clean energy development actually slowed down a little last year over a “stellar” 2021.

That was in part due to supply chain and workforce constraints causing a slowdown in rooftop solar uptake, from 3.3GW added in 2021 to 2.7GW in 2022. The growth did mean however that for the first time ever, rooftop PV comprised more than a quarter of all renewable energy generation in Australia.

The number of new wind projects was down too, from 1.7GW in 2021 to 1.4GW in 2022, but project sizes grew.

The number of new megawatts of large-scale solar also decreased, by quite a significant amount, dropping from 1,683MW in 2021 to 860MW last year. That said, as of the end of last year, 48 large-scale PV projects were in construction across the country versus 42 at the end of 2021, and again, with average project sizes growing larger, CEC said it was confident total generation from utility-scale solar PV will rise in the coming years.

It was a similar dynamic for utility-scale batteries: while at the end of 2021, 30 projects were under construction versus the 19 recorded at the end of last year, the more recently announced projects dwarf the scale of what has gone before.

CEC’s report estimated that around 50,000 residential battery systems were installed during the year, again, a considerable increase on an estimated 34,731 installations in 2021 and broadly in line with a recent market size estimate of 47,100 new systems as reported by solar consultancy Sunwiz a few weeks ago.

Good outlook, but pace of large-scale deployment needs to increase

Thornton said that the figures showed that despite a slowdown in some areas, the energy transition economy in Australia remains strong, particularly as coal power plant retirements accelerate.

Australia’s political direction gives good cause for optimism, the CEC executive said, with the Labor government voted in last year setting a 43% by 2030 emissions reduction target and announcing initiatives like the Rewiring the Nation AU$20 billion grid upgrade scheme and forthcoming tenders for large-scale BESS.

Renewable energy in 2022 accounted for 35.9% of all generation, up from 32.5% in 2021, more than double the 16.9% share it had in 2017 when Australia’s clean energy “boom” began, CEC said. A total 2,257MW of new large-scale renewables were added to the grid during last year, and 500MW of large-scale wind and solar was in construction as of the end of 2022, another record.

Thornton said however that the sustained growth of renewable energy cannot be taken for granted. Even with the “greater policy clarity” the sector now enjoys, reaching the federal government’s targeted 82% renewables in the generation mix will require the pace of large-scale project deployment “to at least double”.

Australia’s national science group, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), recently published a roadmap for renewable energy storage which found that a 10-14x increase in energy storage capacity will be needed in the National Electricity Market (NEM) between 2025 and 2030.

View the full Clean Energy Council’s ‘Clean Energy Australia Report 2023’ PDF in full here.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 1st Energy Storage Summit Asia, 11-12 July 2023 in Singapore. The event will help give clarity on this nascent, yet quickly growing market, bringing together a community of credible independent generators, policymakers, banks, funds, off-takers and technology providers. For more information, go to the website.

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Commercial rooftop solar installation in Vietnam, which has plenty of solar PV, but very little energy storage. Image: Sungrow

Vietnam’s energy storage sector will be a beneficiary of US$35 million funding from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and non-profit Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP).

The two organisations have partnered to make the funding available to improve energy access and accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels in the South and Southeast Asian regions.

As ADB managing director general Woochong Um said as the agreement was announced, two of the bank’s most important priorities are “expanding clean energy for the 350 million people in our region who have either limited or no access to electricity,” as well as catalysing the transition “from coal and other fossil fuels toward clean, affordable, and reliable energy sources”.

Meanwhile GEAPP CEO Simon Harford said that while there is a big opportunity to address those major challenges and decarbonise the region’s energy sector, low and middle-income countries only accounted for 8% of the world’s total energy transition investments in 2021.

That was the lowest share seen in 10 years, and while 2022 was slightly better, with 15% of investments made worldwide seen in low and middle-income nations, it still isn’t enough.

“We need to do better and act bolder, knowing we will only meet critical climate goals through collaboration and meaningful capital commitments,” Harford said.

A formal signing ceremony was held last week in Washington DC, US, to cement the partnership, with the funding to be managed by a new fund set up by GEAPP, an organisation that describes itself as “an alliance of philanthropy, local entrepreneurs, governments, and technology, policy, and financing partners”.

The GEAPP Energy Access and Transition Trust Fund (GEATTF) will assist with energy access and energy transition efforts in five countries: Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.

However, two priority programmes mentioned by GEAPP in a release were for supporting battery energy storage system (BESS) development in Vietnam, and supporting the phaseout of coal in Indonesia.

While neither party went into specifics on what those programmes might entail, the partnership will provide technical assistance, grants to partially fund projects and blended concessional finance instruments to mobilise and attract private investment.

Southeast Asia’s energy storage sector is seeing an uptick in investments over the past couple of years, with the Philippines in particular seeing a rapid buildout of battery storage resources. High upfront cost of investment in advanced energy technologies and other barriers such as regulation and bankability issues have at the same time been seen to be holding the region back from faster adoption, which the new partnership seeks to address.

Vietnam has seen a major growth in its installed solar PV capacity the past few years, but successful grid integration of that renewable energy is an unanswered question that energy storage could help answer.

Li-Cycle in Vietnam recycling partnership

In related news, North American lithium battery recycling company Li-Cycle has been signed up as a strategic and preferred recycling partner to Vietnam-based battery and energy storage system manufacturer VinES Energy Solutions (VinES).

VinES is currently building Vietnam’s first lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cell ‘gigafactory’ in a joint venture (JV) with Chinese manufacturer Gotion, as reported by Energy-Storage.news last November as construction began at the 14-hectare site. VinES’ devices will be sold into both electric vehicle (EV) and stationary battery storage markets.

The agreement with Li-Cycle takes effect from 2024. Li-Cycle, which has pursued a strategy of building its recycling facilities close to end-demand centres, locating them on both West and East Coast regions of the US, for example, could also build a facility in Vietnam, the company said.

Until an investment decision is made on that, expected in 2025, VinES materials will be recycled at Li-Cycle’s North American sites. In February the recycling specialist got a loan commitment worth US$375 million from the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 1st Energy Storage Summit Asia, 11-12 July 2023 in Singapore. The event will help give clarity on this nascent, yet quickly growing market, bringing together a community of credible independent generators, policymakers, banks, funds, off-takers and technology providers. For more information, go to the website.

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Ed Baine

The Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) has approved nearly two dozen new solar and energy storage projects to help meet the growing needs of Dominion Energy Virginia customers.

Once in operation, the projects will generate more than 800 MW of electricity, enough to power about 200,000 Virginia homes at peak output.

“This is another big step forward in delivering reliable, affordable and cleaner energy to our customers,” says Ed Baine, president of Dominion Energy Virginia. “These projects will bring jobs and economic opportunity to our communities, and they will deliver fuel savings for our customers. That’s a win-win for Virginia.

The SCC approval includes nine solar projects and one energy storage project – totaling nearly 500 MW – that will be owned and operated by Dominion Energy Virginia. Two of the projects – Kings Creek Solar and Ivy Landfill Solar – will be built on previously developed land. Ivy Landfill Solar will be the company’s first solar project developed on a former landfill.

The SCC also approved power purchase agreements with 13 solar and energy storage projects – totaling more than 300 MW – that are owned by independent developers.

Construction of the projects is projected to support thousands of jobs and more than $920 million in economic benefits across Virginia.

Additional details about the utility-owned projects:

Bridleton Solar, 20 MW, Henrico County

Cerulean Solar, 62 MW, Richmond County

Courthouse Solar, 167 MW, Charlotte County

Ivy Landfill Solar, 3 MW, Albemarle County

King’s Creek Solar, 20 MW, York County

Moon Corner Solar, 60 MW, Richmond County

North Ridge Solar, 20 MW, Powhatan County

Racefield Solar, 3 MW, James City County

Shands Storage, 15.7 MW, Sussex County

Southern Virginia Solar, 125 MW, Pittsylvania County

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Testing of battery cells at the lab of analytics company TWAICE, one of the consortium partners. Image: TWAICE.

The first publicly available guidance on the European Union’s Battery Passport has been released by the consortium tasked with supporting the flagship sustainability and transparency effort.

Part of the European Union (EU) directive on batteries which the bloc is introducing in phases in the coming years, the passport would make all components and materials used in batteries tracked and traceable in a central ledger.

The ledger will include information about the devices’ carbon footprint, safety certification and supply chain due diligence, among other metrics.

While the wider directive includes requirements for batteries to include an increasing proportion of recycled content and stringent carbon emissions reporting, the passport is perhaps the most radical of the directive’s proposed regulations. It would be Europe’s first-ever digital product passport (DPP) of any kind.

The Battery Pass Consortium, convened to support the implementation of the Battery Passport, officially handed over its new guidance to German parliamentary state secretary Michael Kellner of the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) at the Hannover Messe industry fair.

Led by technology and information systems design company SystemIQ with 11 German industry partners including Audi, BMW Group and BASF, the consortium was formed in 2022 with a three-year remit that encompassed creating a demonstrator passport and creating content and technical standards.

Kellner said the guidance “will help companies developing battery passports to shape these efficiently and in accordance with EU law”.

“It may also be a sound foundation for the evolution of digital product passports in general which will be rolled out in other sectors in the future.”

What is the Battery Passport?

It applies to batteries used in light transport applications, industrial batteries of over 2kWh capacity (including stationary battery energy storage systems (BESS) as a sub-category), and electric vehicle (EV) batteries, with the passport to be required from 42 months after the EU’s battery regulation comes into force.

Responsibility for having one will be put in the hands of the “economic operator” who placed the battery on the market. This is an interesting point because previous EU language around the passport implied manufacturers would be responsible.

In turn, battery trade group RECHARGE had argued in favour of the “economic operator” rule. RECHARGE said it would be difficult for the manufacturer to effectively trace and take back all end-of-life materials, as reported by Energy-Storage.news in December last year.

It’s also worth noting that the regulation will also cover flow batteries, with fellow trade group Flow Batteries Europe (FBE) celebrating their inclusion earlier this year. They had been omitted from early draft proposals, as the rules covered lithium-ion and other types of electrochemical batteries but the EU had limited its definition to batteries with internal storage.  

In short, batteries will need to be tracked in terms of:

general product and manufacturer information

carbon footprint

supply chain due diligence

materials and composition

circularity and resource efficiency

performance and durability  

Guidance issued today also includes a long list of attributes that data should be provided for, most of which is mandatory but some also voluntary. For instance, stationary BESS batteries must provide data on the number of deep discharge events, but for most other types of battery, that would be voluntary data.

Download the Battery Pass consortium’s guidance here.

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Transmission lines in Illinois, one of 15 states where MISO operates the high-voltage network. Image: Corey Coyle.

A senior executive from the US’ second-largest grid operator MISO sat down with Energy-Storage.news to discuss the challenges that come with a soaring energy storage market.

Doing the interview whilst at the Energy Storage Summit USA last month, MISO’s VP system planning and competitive transmission Aubrey Johnson provided a perspective on the issue of grid interconnection delays, a huge talking point at the two-day event and its Europe equivalent in London a month earlier.

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) is responsible for the transmission system and electricity markets in 15 states in the Midwest and the South, with its 45 million people covered making it the second-largest after PJM.

It has 32GW of standalone storage and 34GW of projects combining storage and another renewable, Johnson said, more than three times higher than end-2021 (around 10GW each). This is due to a combination of the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act as well as the approval of the MISO Long Range Transmission Plan Tranche 1 portfolio.

Cost, modelling and flooded interconnection queues

Conducting the interview shortly after a Keynote discussion on the same topic, Johnson said: “The main barrier to further penetration of storage will be the overall cost. As I said in the presentation, there are other more cost-effective mechanisms and resources available today.

“But, our modelling indicates that to achieve decarbonisation and resource mix goals then storage is going to have a key place in that process.”

The two other challenges he highlighted are accurately modelling energy storage’s role on the grid and the increased workload to do this after interconnection queues were flooded after the Act was passed.

The roughly 600MW of storage online on MISO’s grid today is mostly an energy play, helping to meet load and smooth existing wind and solar plants. Going forward, storage will do more, especially as its price comes down, but getting there requires modelling which it itself a challenge.

“The short-term thinking for us for storage deployments is ‘how does it show up as a transmission asset and get transmission revenues’. Cost is significant. In a perfect world the battery owner and the battery developer wants to get every revenue stream possible, but our systems don’t work that way,” Johnson said.

“We look at this and say if you are transmission-only we can model that and understand those benefits and revenues. If you are a generating asset, then we know what that is and we can again understand those benefits and revenues, and also work out how to make sure the asset is charged. Today we focus on those two areas. As our systems continue to develop and we learn more about batteries, we can think about how you can monetise other services.”

A 2.5MW/5MWh, two-hour transmission-only storage project from one of MISO’s member organisations, ATC is coming online this summer, which will exclusively do things like frequency, voltage and short-circuit support, Johnson said. Another challenge will present itself as durations for energy storage projects grow, he added.

“The predominant product today is a four-hour battery and some of our modelling looks at longer ones, 6, 8 and 12 hour ones, and we’re really thinking about how you fill capacity and energy needs. Like, how do you deal with recharging when the renewables that you need to recharge the battery aren’t there as expected?”

He then went on to describe the soaring quantities of energy storage in the interconnection queue as a ‘chicken-and-egg’ issue.

” Our challenge is having a glut of projects that we need to work through and model. We need more projects to materialise, but those projects can cause congestion in the queue which delays the time to get studies done and determine their viability. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg scenario.”

The significance of MISO adding storage to its market portfolio

In September last year, Energy-Storage.news reported on MISO adding electricity storage to its market portfolio, allowing it to participate in MISO Energy and Operating Reserves Market as supply and demand resources.

Asked for more details on the significance of this and what it meant in practice, a spokesperson for MISO said:

“The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) defines ESRs (electricity storage resource) as ‘a resource capable of receiving electric energy from the grid and storing it for later injection of electricity back to the grid regardless of where the resource is located on the electrical system’.

“ESRs are flexible resources that can help reduce peak demands, manage congestion and provide backup power for major disruptions because they can respond quickly and switch between injection (discharge) and withdrawal (charge) modes.

“The near-term benefits of the new ESR model are modest due to the small volume of storage resources. However, the new model positions MISO ahead of the increased storage participation anticipated with higher penetration of renewables and Distributed Energy Resources over the next five to 10 years.”

Read more recent news about the energy storage market in MISO territory here, including Michigan Democrats proposing a 2.5GW deployment mandate, a large acquisition by a Blackstone-owned developer and Vistra winning an interconnection exemption for a coal-to-battery project.

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