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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Graphite Solar in Carbon County, Utah, supplies power to Facebook owner Meta via a Pacificorp power purchase agreement. Image: Greenbacker.

Western US electricity utility Pacificorp has released its 2023 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) outlining significant solar, wind and storage capacity expansions as well as investment into new transmission lines.

By 2032, Pacificorp is planning to have an installed solar and wind capacity of over 20GW across the six states in which it operates – Utah, California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming. This is almost a fourfold increase on its current capacity. It is also planning 7.4GW of energy storage systems by 2029.

The IRP also continues Pacificorp’s plans to add 2,500 miles of transmission lines, spanning the range of its territory between the Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountains, to support the deployment of the renewables. 

The utility said its plans will result in a 70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared with 2005 levels, with an 87% reduction by 2035 and 100% by 2050.

A further plan, to be realised through 2042, outlines:

7,855MW of new solar resources (most paired with battery storage)

8,095MW of storage resources

9,111MW of new wind resources

4,953MW of capacity saved through energy efficiency programs

929MW of capacity saved through direct load control programs

To read the full version of this story, visit PV Tech.

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A 19.3MW floating solar PV plant under construction in Israel. Image: BELECTRIC.

The Electricity Authority of Israel (PUA) has introduced a supplementary tariff for distributed solar PV facilities that use energy storage to manage demand on the grid.

The country is targeting reaching 30% renewable energy on the network by 2030, but has struggled to hit its earlier 10% by 2020 target. The regulatory Electricity Authority recognised that a major obstacle to this progress has been “the ability to plan and develop the electricity network at a sufficient pace and in the required scope”.

The new tariff should mean existing network resources can be used more efficiently, by encouraging the use of energy storage so that solar-generated power can be shifted to night-time hours when demand is low.

It applies to distributed solar generation facilities used for onsite self-consumption and feeding surplus power into the grid. Solar PV and energy storage facilities that share a single metered connection point to the grid will be eligible.

Local news outlet Times of Israel reported that the reform is aimed at encouraging the production of renewable energy without putting further strain on an already congested grid. The newspaper noted that the Israel Electric Corporation has been forced to reject “large numbers” of grid connection requests from new solar PV plants.

The supplementary tariff will increase the amount of renewable energy used on the grid without the need for new grid connections at additional points on the network.

An official announcement on the new regulation has so far only been published in Hebrew. Energy-Storage.news has asked PUA for more details and will add them to this story as appropriate, but it appears the new tariff will take the form of a top-up payment for generators, paid on an annual basis.   

According to prior modelling from PUA, Israel will need about 2GW/8GWh of energy storage to support the integration of 30% renewable energy to the grid, equivalent to roughly 12GW of solar PV. The authority has hosted a couple of solar-plus-storage tenders in the past, including a 2020 round that awarded contracts to 777MW of PV with 3,072MWh of battery storage.

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Giga Buffalo, the largest planned BESS project in the Netherlands. Image: Giga Storage.

Developer Giga Storage has acquired a closed distribution grid in Groningen, the Netherlands, with the aim of deploying large-scale battery storage projects at the site.

The deal sees Giga Storage buy the distribution grid in the Delfzijl region which has a connection to the high-voltage network of the Netherlands. Groningen Seaports, which manages industrial areas in the region, has signed a new lease agreement with the developer for a period of 50 years.

Giga acquired the grid from the assets of DAMCO Aluminum Delfzijl Coöperatie UA out of bankruptcy, after the aluminium producer went under late last year due to high energy prices. Energy prices spiked in Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine severely compounded existing imbalances in the supply and demand of natural gas.

Giga said that a large amount of renewable energy is generated in Delfzijl and that the energy storage projects it builds there will solve local congestion and provide grid balancing services to grid operator TenneT.

“As unfortunate as it is that this industrial beacon of Delfzijl had to stop, we are very pleased that wehave the opportunity to replace a large industrial energy consumer and thus give a sustainable interpretation to the location”, said Ruud Nijs, CEO of Giga who wrote a guest blog for Energy-Storage.news in January 2022.

Cas König, CEO of Groningen Seaports, added: “For Groningen Seaports, this is an additional and logical step in the energy transition. Originally, several fossil power plants were housed at our locations. By facilitating large-scale energy storage in addition to wind turbines and solar parks, we show that we consider sustainable energy important.”

The Netherlands suffers from significant grid congestion and developers are looking at novel ways to get around this. Some have opted to deploy co-located projects which share capacity while others have looked to formulate time-limited interconnection deals where battery storage can only discharge or charge from the grid at certain times.

Giga Storage is one of the most active battery storage developers in the Netherlands with the country’s largest project, the 48MWh Giga Buffalo, commissioned in October 2022.

Another developer, Lion Storage, recently told Energy-Storage.news in an interview at Energy Storage Summit in February that the ‘double-charging’ of energy storage as both a consumer and generator needs to change for the market to kick on.

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Battery energy storage system (BESS) equipment at the factory of Turkish system integrator Inovat. Image: Inovat.

The national regulator in Turkey has begun awarding pre-licensing for energy storage facilities paired with wind and solar, with around 20GW expected to be issued over a period of about three years.

Pre-licenses were issued for a total of 12 applications, totaling 744MW, by the Energy Market Authority earlier this month, representing an investment value of around US$1.5 billion.

According to remarks by Energy Market Regulation Authority (EMRA) head Mustafa Yilmaz, these are the first selected from 4,369 applications, adding up to about 221,000MW, state-owned news outlet Andolu Agency reported.

The pre-licensing comes after key regulatory changes including an EMRA ruling in 2021 that energy companies should be allowed to invest in energy storage. Last year, energy laws were adapted to allow power producers to develop new renewables projects on the congested Turkish grid, if paired with energy storage.

The latest announcement is a big step towards establishing a market for large-scale energy storage in the country, Energy-Storage.news heard from Korkut Öztürkmen, board member at Aksa Energy, one of Turkey’s largest independent power producers (IPPs).

Öztürkmen is also on the board of Turkey’s electricity generators’ association, which he said has been working on business development activities for energy storage for about four or five years.

Investors are eligible to put renewable energy projects combined with approved storage capacity on a one-to-one ratio, 1MW/1MWh wind or solar per 1MW/1MWh of energy storage. Aksa Energy had applied for pre-licensing and would begin developing wind and solar projects with storage as soon as granted.

“The target of the Minister of Energy is in the first phase to provide at least 20,000MW licensing. So in the coming two to three years Turkey will be a very promising market for storage projects,” Korkut Öztürkmen said, adding that provisions for rewarding domestic industry participation are also “on the agenda”.

According to the Aksa Energy board member, the storage initiative has been opened to support the development of renewable energy first and foremost.

Renewable energy capacity has been tendered for in auctions to receive feed-in tariffs (FiTs) but in recent rounds the prices have been too low to enable projects to be realised.

“With this new regulation, if [renewable energy power plants are] then accompanied with storage, there won’t be any auctions, no feed-in tariff. This is a good development, but on the other side, these will be fully merchant power plants which are selling into the spot market or to commercial PPAs.”

It will take time for EMRA to process the entire backlog of more than 200GW of applications, although there may be some overlapping of projects in that pipeline, but Öztürkmen anticipates that within the next two years, “we will be hearing [about the] kickoff of at least 20,000MW installations”.

“After that, of course, the rest will follow,” Öztürkmen said.

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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Daniel Emmett

NEXT Energy Technologies Inc. says it has received $3 million in funding under the California Energy Commission’s Realizing Accelerated Manufacturing and Production for Clean Energy Technologies (RAMP) program, to be applied toward NEXT’s development of a proprietary transparent photovoltaic coating for commercial windows.

The specific purpose of NEXT’s agreement is to fund the scale-up of a low-rate initial production line for the assembly of solution-processed organic photovoltaics on architectural window glass into window-PV modules that are ready for integration into commercial insulated glass units.

“We’re honored to receive the RAMP grant award,” says Daniel Emmett, CEO and co-founder of NEXT. “The funding provided is vital to startups like ours that are focusing on manufacturing at the next level. Our goal is to help commercial buildings achieve net-zero energy and reduce their carbon footprint, and we are working with innovative partners to demonstrate how this technology can grow in the future.”

NEXT says the grant will enable the company to accelerate its development and commercialization.

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Trina Solar’s tracker solution provider, TrinaTracker, has launched the second generation of its Vanguard 2P tracker, equipped with a new multi-motor control system.

The 2P configuration and the fewer-pile design features help reduce BOS costs, especially for harsh soiling and scenarios with higher pile requirements. Vanguard 2P (single-axis two-in-portrait tracker) has been the main product of TrinaTracker since its first release in 2021. Its patented spherical bearing prevents misalignment and minimizes friction, as well as reduces installation time and cost, the company says.

The second generation of Vanguard 2P uses a multi-motor control system to replace the original mechanical method. In the new drive system, the main controller sends commands and the secondary controller receives commands to drive the motors. The self-developed intelligent mechanism enables the synchronization of multiple motors to avoid potential structure failures. The updated Vanguard 2P also improves the structure’s compatibility with larger-sized modules up to 695 W.

“For the past few years, we’ve seen more projects in sites with slope terrains, deserts and near coastal regions. This requires solar components to meet more severe quality standards and include more innovative developments to operate under those harsh scenarios,” explains Trina Solar’s Andrew Gilhooly. “The second generation of Vanguard 2P aims to successfully solve such challenges.”

TrinaTracker has 19 years of experience in solar tracker development and manufacture.

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Mazen Turk

Greenwood Sustainable Infrastructure (GSI), the North American renewable energy subsidiary of Libra Group, is acquiring the solar and battery development portfolios of Saturn Power, including its team of developers and a 1.4 GW pipeline of early- to late-stage solar and energy storage projects in five U.S. states and two Canadian provinces.

GSI says the acquisition enables the company to bolster its development capabilities and expand its footprint from seven to 12 U.S. states, which will now include New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Florida, Minnesota, Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, as well as Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada.

“We are delighted to welcome members of Saturn Power’s expert team to help us develop a stronger renewable energy business capable of transforming communities at pace and at scale,” says GSI CEO Mazen Turk. “With this acquisition, the integration of both management teams will dramatically increase our capabilities in developing efficient, effective and essential renewable energy projects nationwide. This also represents the next step in our strategic goal to grow our pipeline to the 5 GW mark of clean power by 2029.”

The acquired pipeline includes 72 solar projects (90% community solar) and six battery storage projects. The deal also adds skilled energy developers, engineers and senior leaders, bringing GSI’s total headcount to more than 50 employees.

GSI plans to direct $200 million of capital investment to support its North American operations, including building the acquired pipeline in the coming years.

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