Vanadium ore. Image: Australian Vanadium.

Elcora, a Canadian startup aiming to provide materials for the global battery value chain, is developing a vanadium pentoxide plant in Morocco to complement raw materials extraction in the country.

Meanwhile, Indian vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) manufacturer Delectrik has signed a vanadium supply agreement with Technology Metals Australia.

Nova Scotia-headquartered Elcora is targeting the supply of battery materials including graphene, graphite-based anode powder for lithium-ion batteries and vanadium.

It has a graphite mine in Sri Lanka, as well as 17 licenses to look for vanadinite, a mineral which contains lead, vanadium, cobalt, copper, tantalum and other metals, in Morocco. Elcora’s vanadinite research licenses came from the acquisition of Moroccan materials company Ermazon in late 2021.

Founded in 2011, Elcora is pursuing a strategy of vertical integration, and has appointed materials and process-development lab and engineering company Lab 4 to kick off test work and process design for a facility producing vanadium pentoxide for the VRFB industry.

Lab 4 will work in three stages: first confirming vanadinite materials processing can do done from the resources available, then a preliminary economic analysis based on the hydrometallurgical processing of vanadium pentoxide and vanadium from vanadinite that is pure enough to be battery-grade.

Lab 4 will then design and construct a pilot production plant at an Elcora facility in Bedford, Nova Scotia. This will confirm the design and allow for engineers to get data on how to scale up production, as well as producing samples for clients.    

Technology Metals Australia is another startup looking to produce vanadium pentoxide and then electrolyte from its own extraction facility.

The company is developing its Murchison Technology Metals Project in Western Australia, comprising two vanadium projects, Gabanintha and Yarrabubba. Technology Metals Australia claims Gabaninthat holds one of the world’s highest-grade vanadium deposits, while Yarrabubba has higher concentration grades of vanadium and could also yield ilmenite as a by-product.

Earlier this week, the company said it has entered a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Delectrik Systems, a vanadium electrolyte producer and flow battery manufacturer based in Gurgaon, India.

Technology Metals Australia (TMA) would supply Delectrik with raw vanadium, while a TMA subsidiary vLYTE would supply vanadium electrolyte. Delectrik makes VRFBs from 10kWh up to MWh-scale, with founder Vishal Mittal recently claiming it has to date supplied 100 devices.

As well as India, Delectrik is targeting sales of VRFBs in US, Australian, European and Middle Eastern markets, recently signing a distribution deal with Saudi Arabian company Tdafoq Energy for countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Tdafoq has also signed a manufacturing license with flow battery company to establish its own VRFB factory.

Specific volumes for supply will be signed between TMA and Delectrik in a future phase of their agreement, but TMA noted that rolling out and scaling up the VRFBs will require “substantial volumes” of vanadium electrolyte.

Scale-up will require ‘significant volumes’ of vanadium

The two developments speak to the expected takeoff of vanadium flow batteries for renewable energy integration and grid storage applications that is being forecast by the likes of Guidehouse Insights.

While VRFBs have several perceived technical advantages over lithium-ion, particularly for long-duration energy storage (LDES) applications, a long lifetime without degradation of batteries, low cost of ownership (Opex) and lessened fire safety risk, barriers to adoption have included a higher upfront cost (Capex) versus lithium battery storage systems.

Perhaps as important a barrier is that requirement for substantial volumes of vanadium and electrolyte. Most vanadium is produced as a by-product of steel manufacturing, the industry where it is also most in demand presently. Indeed, a TMA analysis showed that as of today, only about 2% of the world’s vanadium goes to the energy storage industry.

While relatively abundant as a raw material, there are presently only three primary vanadium producers in the world. These include Bushveld Minerals, which has a vanadium mine in South Africa and is building its own electrolyte production plant in the country. However, in Australia alone, others besides TMA are looking to execute a similar strategy, such as Australian Vanadium (AVL), developing mines as well as electrolyte production capacity.

Other vanadium deposits are being explored, while a project in Canada to recover vanadium from fly ash produced from the operation of coke-fired boilers is underway by petroleum company Suncor. Suncor’s facility would be Canada’s first commercial vanadium recovery plant and recently received CA$7 million (US$5.2 million) from Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA), administered by the province’s government.  

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Switch Power team members visiting the potential site for a client’s community solar project in 2022. Image: Switch Power via Twitter.

Independent power producer (IPP) and solar, wind and energy storage developer Switch Power has commissioned five battery storage projects in Ontario, Canada.

Switch provides financing, develops and operates assets, including microgeneration, utility-scale and off-grid projects. The five newly-completed projects are sited at commercial premises and total 3,310kW/7,874kWh. They went online between June 2022 and March of this year, the IPP said this week.

They mark only Switch Power’s first year of constructing projects, with four BESS assets it had already operational when acquired. The new sites are part of a wider BESS project portfolio of 25MW/44MWh the IPP bought from commercial and industrial (C&I) energy tech developer Peak Power, from which it also acquired its four existing sites.

At the time of the 25MW portfolio transaction’s closing in November 2021, Switch Power said it secured CA$5.6 million (US$4.15 million) financing, including a CA$4.3 million equipment procurement loan from renewable financing solutions provider RE Royalties, that would enable it to procure the BESS technology for the five projects just completed.

The systems have been deployed for C&I clients based in the Greater Toronto area of Ontario. Heavy industrial users of electricity in Ontario are levied significant demand charges on their bills based on their consumption of power during coincident peaks in demand on the grid. Called the Global Adjustment Charge (GAC), the Ontario scheme has led to the province becoming Canada’s hotbed for energy storage development.

While those projects are often in the multiple megawatt range despite being behind-the-meter, Switch Power said that the five new systems will participate in Ontario’s ancillary services market as well as helping the end-customers to peak shave their electricity use. The majority of revenues will come from Energy Services Agreements with the building owners.

The projects had originally been scheduled to come online last summer. CEO Trevor White said they had been completed safely by Switch Power’s team, “while navigating significant market forces related to inflation and supply chain”.

“These assets will provide electricity cost savings to our clients as well as play a role in Ontario’s energy market and grid transformation by demonstrating the ability of distributed energy resources (DERs) to be an integral part of the energy mix,” White said.

Post-acquisition, Switch Power managed the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) of the five projects, while vendor Peak Power will stay on to provide energy optimisation services and control the dispatch of the assets using its Peak Synergy software platform.

Meanwhile Canadian BESS company Eneon-ES supplied the battery storage solutions. Ownership will be in the hands of a Switch subsidiary that will also provide operations and maintenance (O&M) services.

Financial support from the Canadian government came in the form of CA$2.3 million funding from the national Smart Renewables and Electrification Pathways (SREP) programme.

Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources said the government “is supporting SWITCH Power to deploy energy storage systems across Ontario, while creating jobs and contributing to the development of a reliable net-zero electricity systems by 2035”.

“The modernisation of electricity grids across Canada will ensure that communities have access to clean, reliable and affordable energy,” minister Jonathan Wilkinson said.

Canada set to play catchup with southern neighbour

While energy storage development has been much slower to take hold in Canada than in the US, with the majority of deployments focused on Ontario and the transmission operator IESO’s GAC scheme, there have been moves to accelerate adoption in recent months.

At provincial level, the Ontario government has directed the IESO to hold procurements for up to 2,500MW of energy storage resources, while Nova Scotia has recently sought to make changes to its electricity laws to accommodate storage and Alberta has various projects in development including large-scale solar-plus-storage, several with government assistance.

At national level, the country is set to introduce an investment tax credit (ITC) for energy storage alongside other incentives and investments into clean energy, largely in reaction to the US’ Inflation Reduction Act, which has since the start of this year introduced ITCs for energy storage among its US$369 billion of clean energy support. Canada’s government recently also pledged to refinance the CA$1.56 billion SREP programme, which provides up to CA$25 million support per project.

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Penso Power’s 100MW Minety BESS in England was at one stage Europe’s biggest battery storage project. Image: Penso Power.

UK battery storage developer Penso Power has won planning permission on appeal for a 100MW/250MWh battery storage project in Hampshire, southern England. 

The project, near the small village of Bramley, is part of a pipeline of large-scale battery storage projects in the UK funded by BW Energy Storage Systems (BW ESS) under an agreement with Penso Power signed in October 2021. The initial planning permission for the project was rejected in October 2021, but has now been granted after an appeal to the Planning Inspectorate.  

The agreement between the two companies sees a potential pipeline of 3GWh of battery storage capacity, including the 350MW, 5-hour duration (1,750MWh) Hams Hall project in development through a Penso joint venture (JV) with fellow developer Luminous Energy. BW ESS has also become a significant shareholder in Penso Power Ltd.

Penso has previously developed a 100MW battery storage development which started trading in July 2021. That project, the Minety battery, was financed by China Huaneng Group and CNIC Corporation, with Shell Energy Europe signing an offtake agreement for the Wiltshire site in early 2020. Shell Energy Europe said it was the largest battery storage project in Europe at the time. 

To read the full version of this story visit Solar Power Portal.

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South Africa’s grid operator Eskom is increasingly looking to battery storage to help improve grid resiliency and reduce frequent outages. Image: Eskom.

The 513MW battery storage tender in South Africa has challenging domestic content and location requirements while flow battery projects will not meet the RTE requirement, consultants told Energy-Storage.news.

The tender from the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, which was issued last month with bids due before 5 July, is procuring the four-hour systems for a targeted commercial operation date (COD) of March 2026.

In a note on the technical requirements of the tender provided to Energy-Storage.news, consultancies Clean Horizon and Harmattan Renewables said the tenders have challenging requirements around local economic development and locating the sites. The note was authored by Beatriz Barros and Corentin Baschet of Clean Horizon and Adam Terry of Harmattan Renewables.

“Ten points of the auction are geared towards economic development in the domestic market (job creation, local content, ownership) which will be a challenging component acknowledging there is no manufacturing capability in South Africa,” they said.

The other 90 points of the tender will consider the projects’ rapid voltage change factor, round trip efficiency (RTE) of at least 70% measured at grid connection, the number of cycles and net present value of the nominal payments.

The tender is technology-agnostic but the RTE requirements prevent flow batteries from participating, they added, with lithium-ion battery energy storage set to win out.

The requirement to have the sites in close proximity to the five substations run by grid operator Eskom – Aggeneis, Ferrum, Garona, Mookodi and Nieuwehoop – will also be challenging. Eskom will not be providing any land for the projects.

The projects are primarily aimed at supporting congestions to evacuate additional generation in the Northern Cape province, they said, pointing out that 9GW of capacity has been procured under recent renewable tenders and the capacity of the supply areas is limited to 10GW. Energy-Storage.news’ sister site PV Tech recently covered these renewable procurements in more detail (paywall).

An independent Engineer Agreement needs to be performed within the bid submission timeline, which Clean Horizon and Harmattan said they can provide along with cost optimisation for the projects once launched.

See all previous Energy-Storage.news coverage of the energy storage market in South Africa here.

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Enoh T. Ebong, USTDA director, and Ana Hadjuka, Greenco CEO, signing the agreement. Image: USTDA.

The US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) is funding the assessment of a large-scale battery energy storage project in Zambia, which could grow into a 400MWh nationwide rollout.

The independent agency of the US government announced the undisclosed grant to local firm GreenCo Power Storage Limited (GreenCo) last week (31 March).

GreenCo will use the funding to assess the technical, economic, and financial viability of deploying a utility-scale project in the Sesheke District, with the chosen technology and system design still to be chosen.

A media statement didn’t disclose the planned size of the unit but said it would be ‘one of the largest such battery installations in all of Africa’. It said it would help facilitate the integration of renewable energy resources in Zambia and ensure the stability and reliability of the grid.

The project would also ‘place Zambia at the centre of renewable energy trading across southern Africa’ through the Southern Africa Power Pool (SAAP), the international power grid between a dozen countries in southern Africa.

That pilot project will then inform an expanded 400MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) rollout across the country. The study will also include economic and financial analysis for operating the pilot project and larger portfolio.

GreenCo describes itself as an intermediary offtaker and service provider, purchasing power from renewable independent power producers (IPPs) and selling that to utilities and private sector offtakers in Zambia and the wider SAAP.

“We are excited to receive USTDA’s support in developing Zambia’s first utility scale BESS, which will help increase the solar PV and wind power capacities that can be safely connected to the national grid,” said GreenCo Group CEO Ana Hajduka. “The BESS and the solar PV pilot project will directly enable are expected to create 600 short-term and 20 long-term jobs. We look forward to working with the Zambia Energy Regulatory Board, ZESCO and the Government of Zambia in ensuring the project’s success.”

GreenCO announced plans to procure a 40MWh BESS project in Zambia from IPPs and developers in July last year, inviting them to submit expressions of interest (EOIs). It is not clear if the projects are related.

The USTDA has previously funded feasibility studies into BESS projects elsewhere in Africa, including Mozambique, Senegal, Cameroon and Sierra Leone, reported on by Energy-Storage.news.

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A rendering of the UNFI solar array

United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI), says a solar array at its Howell, N.J., distribution center is complete. 

The 3.2 MW roof mounted solar array is the company’s eighth solar installation and is nearly three times larger than any previous UNFI installation. 

UNFI also plans to complete LED energy lighting upgrades at 33 distribution centers that, once complete, are estimated to save the company approximately $15 million over a 10-year period.

The rooftop array contains 7,171 solar panels and was developed to generate an amount of renewable electricity approximately equivalent to the annualized energy demand at the Howell distribution center. The system is projected to prevent approximately 2,700 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from being released into the atmosphere annually. The system’s environmental benefits are equivalent to the emissions of 524 U.S. homes’ electricity use.

UNFI worked with PowerFlex, a provider of intelligent solar, storage and electric vehicle charging solutions for commercial and industrial customers, to complete the installation of the Howell solar array.

“The completion of our Howell solar array and investments in LED lighting at our distribution centers has already helped reduced our indirect Scope 2 emissions and will continue to help us as we work to reduce energy intensity in our distribution centers by 30 percent by 2030,” says Alisha Real, UNFI’s vice president of ESG and social impact.

Photo credit

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A render of a Convergent Energy + Power solar-plus-storage project in Maryland, US. Image: Convergent Energy + Power.

Some 2.5-3.6GW of energy storage could be cost-effectively deployed by 2033 to cut emissions and lower energy costs in the US state of Maryland, American Clean Power (ACP) said.

The renewable energy trade body’s study said that a rollout of 2.5-3.6GW of new energy storage would lead to net system cost savings to Maryland of approximately $74-100 million in 2033.

That would be under an Increased Energy Storage scenario where no new gas is built and renewables account for 97% of electricity generation by 2033. The projected savings are compared to the Continued Gas Dependence scenario where new coal and gas resources come online and fossil fuel plants are 50% of generation.

CO2 emissions in 2033 under the Increased Energy Storage scenario would be 93% lower than 2023 while they would be just 23% lower under the Gas Dependence scenario. Energy costs to consumers would also be lower, but only by $1 a month.

The ‘Increased Energy Storage’ scenario entails an average annual deployment of 400MW a year of new energy storage, mostly in territories served by utilities Pepco and BGE.

A year ago the state of Maryland increased its economy-wide emissions reduction target from 40% to 61% by 2031, as reported by Energy-Storage.news. The announcement coincided with developer Convergent Energy + Power bringing three solar-plus-storage projects totalling 8MWh online, one of just a few large-scale projects seen in the state to-date.

While California and Texas continue to be by far the largest markets for energy storage in the US, other states are making high-level policy announcements to significantly ramp up their deployments too. Last month, Energy-Storage.news reported on state governments in Michigan and New Mexico proposing and setting (respectively) energy storage deployment targets for 2030 onwards.

Maryland is served by multi-state grid operator PJM.

The Maryland study, for which preliminary findings have been released with a fully report coming later, was commissioned by ACP and conducted by Synapse Energy Economics.

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Energy-Storage.news editor Andy Colthorpe (pictured) and Solar Media conference producer Lucy Jacobson-Durham announced the forthcoming awards at this year’s Energy Storage Summit in London. Image: Solar Media.

Energy-Storage.news publisher Solar Media will host the inaugural Energy Storage Awards this September, recognising excellence, hard work and innovation in the European energy storage industry.

Following on from nearly a decade of industry news and insight from Energy-Storage.news, and a series of highly acclaimed conferences including the Energy Storage Summits in London and Texas running for almost as long, the awards are perhaps the strongest indication yet that energy storage is here, and here to stay.

Energy storage will be one of the most important technologies of the 21st Century – perhaps it already is – giving us all the best means to integrate renewable energy and maintain stability of a cleaner, more secure and more affordable energy system.

These awards will shine a light on the very best of this most important of industries, and give us all a chance to celebrate how far it has come; while never losing sight that this progress really just marks the beginning of something far bigger.

About the awards

Entries will be chosen by a panel of expert judges from industry and academia, including folks from the European Association for Storage of Energy (EASE), BloombergNEF and the Faraday Institution.

Entries can be for any projects, initiatives or developments which have been carried out, completed, or major milestones achieved between 1 June 2022 and 31 July 2023.

We wanted the categories to reflect the broad depth of the industry, from significant projects and scalable innovations, to the people that make it what it is.

Deadline for entries is 21 July 2023. The awards ceremony will take place at Park Plaza London Riverbank, London, on 28 September 2023.

For 2023’s first edition of the annual event, there will be 12 award categories:

Developer of the year

System integrator of the year

Trading and optimisation team of the year

Product of the year

Breakthrough R&D/Innovation of the year

Newcomer/start-up of the year

Challenge of the year

Grid-scale standalone energy storage project of the year

Grid-scale co-located or hybrid energy storage project of the year

Distributed energy storage project of the year

Outstanding contribution to energy storage

Grid operator-led project of the year

For more details, including how to enter, eligibility criteria and more, visit the official website here.

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St Thomas, in the US Virgin Islands, where the Randolph Harley Power Plant is located. Image: wikimedia user Sunil Pereira.

A hybrid power project combining thermal engines with battery storage on the US Virgin Islands is nearing its completion after delays caused delivery deadlines to be extended.

The US Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority (WAPA), the territory’s public-power utility, said yesterday that the project it awarded to technology group Wärtsilä as an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract in 2020 is nearing the finish line.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news at the time the contract was awarded, the hybrid solution combines four 9MW engines running on liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and light fuel oil (LFO), for a total 32MW of generation, together with a 9MW, 2-hour duration (18MWh) battery energy storage system (BESS).

WAPA selected Wärtsilä through a request for proposal (RFP) seeking thermal power resources to expand the Randolph Harley Power Plant (RHPP), the islands’ main power station. The project marked Wärtsilä’s first engine-battery hybrid plant sale.

As well as seeking 36MW to 40MW of internal combustion engine (ICE) thermal generation in blocks of 10MW or less, WAPA also asked bidders to include the 9MW/18MWh BESS, which would deliver spinning reserve and voltage/frequency regulation as part of their proposals.

As noted by WAPA in its announcement yesterday, the BESS will help fortify and add redundancy to the territory’s grid network, storing energy generated at off-peak times for inputting to the grid when it demand peaks.

Integration of the BESS into the project is currently underway and was described as one of the final steps in bringing the hybrid system online. RHPP serves the island of St Thomas, where it is located, as well as two other of the US Virgin Islands via undersea cables.

However, as mentioned above, the project has not all been straightforward. While the notice to proceed issued by WAPA in late 2020 had required it to come online within 23 months, or by October 2022 at the latest, various factors – most significantly the impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic – have caused it to take longer than anticipated.

In November last year, the utility offered an extension until January 2023, and said at that time that the generators had been installed, with the BESS installation still to go. Having received an accelerated timeline from the EPC partner, WAPA said it did expect completion during Q1 2023, but pointed out that a longer timeline for a complex energy project of its type to come online was not unusual.

WAPA said the Virgin Islands Housing Finance Authority, which is overseeing the project “worked closely with the Authority to overcome project-related challenges and ensure timely delivery”. Meanwhile the project was meeting all of its requirements on transparency and disclosure of milestones and timelines that were in place to ensure its status as a US Federal government-funded project, the utility said.

The new generators are much more efficient than the units they will replace, 30% more so in some cases and 70% in others, offering about US$42 million in fuel savings per year, or 25%, while the BESS will act as a “shock absorber” to the grid, insulating it from operational disruptions.

Through the pandemic, various energy storage projects have been delayed, or worse, cancelled, as impacts on everything from worker availability to supply chains for lithium-ion batteries and other key components were disrupted.

On the neighbouring British Virgin Islands, ground-breaking finally took place at the start of this year on a solar-plus-storage project which was also tendered for in 2019 and awarded in 2020. Expected commissioning date had been November 2021, which is now pushed back to November of this year.

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Renderings of Fluence’s 250MW storage-as-transmission project, aka a ‘NetzBooster’ (‘GridBooster’) for TSO TransnetBW. Image: Fluence

Image: Fluence.

Fluence’s launch of a battery storage solution targeted at transmission network projects speaks to the high value of an as-yet underserved market, company representatives have said.

The global energy storage system integrator and energy services provider has just put ‘Ultrastack’ onto the market. Evolved from the company’s current sixth generation battery energy storage system (BESS) product range, it is designed to meet the high technical requirements of transmission system operators (TSOs).

In Europe, the concept of ‘storage-as-transmission’ is “having a material foothold”, Fluence VP of EMEA sales and market development Brian Perusse told Energy-Storage.news in an interview.

This is evidenced by two high-profile projects the company has underway in the continent: a portfolio of four equally-sized 50MW/50MWh BESS installations on the Lithuanian grid which is nearing completion, and a 250MW/250MWh project with TransnetBW, one of Germany’s TSOs, which Fluence got to working on in October last year.

On the occasion of Ultrastack’s unveiling last week, Perusse had said that the type of projects it is designed for require even higher technical standards for things like system uptime and cybersecurity than most other BESS projects. This is because the customers – grid operators – will rely on it as a piece of “critical grid infrastructure” to keep the lights on and prevent blackouts and brownouts.

This value is something that European grid operators do recognise. ENTSO-E, the European Network of Transmission System Operators, offered its take on the European Commission’s Electricity Market Design, which is currently being reformed.  

ENTSO-E represents 39 grid operators in 35 EU and non-EU Member State countries in Europe. It said that the reforms needed to incentivise the acceleration of adoption of energy storage to add flexibility and other key attributes to a secure and decarbonised electricity system for the continent.

Within the EMEA region alone, Fluence is present in 14 countries, and has 77 grid-scale BESS projects under construction or already in operation, totalling about 1,400MW/2,000MWh.

With so many projects already, and presumably a pipeline of opportunities that continues to grow as the adoption of renewable energy does, why take aim at a segment that has so much more exacting needs and high standards to attain?

Transmission: ‘a challenge nobody talks about’

There are two main reasons for this, Perusse said. The first being that as a mission-driven company working to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy, the importance of storage-as-transmission is fundamentally relevant to Fluence’s strategy.

In the first six months of 2022, the cost of redispatching power in Germany was €2.231 billion (US$2.44 billion), close to the €2.3 billion on redispatching costs for the whole of 2021. Meanwhile, investment into power grids is forecast by BloombergNEF to soar into the multiple trillions of dollars globally as this century nears its halfway-point.

Ultrastack’s advanced functionalities enable BESS use cases that address transmission level challenges during that energy transition, like grid requirements that are continually evolving, maintaining system stability, congestion on network infrastructure and the need to aggregate distributed generation and load assets.

From a business point of view, that means its also a big market, Perusse said. To be “relevant on the transmission sector”, storage-as-transmission-assets will generally be in the range of hundreds of megawatts per project.

“So there’s a real value,” Perusse said, but conversely, although they come with high technical requirements to meet, storage-as-transmission-asset (SATA) projects are also often shorter duration projects than front-of-meter BESS as a replacement for gas peaker plants, for example.

The sizing of a project of this type may be large at a megawatt-scale, “but it doesn’t require a tonne of batteries”.

“In a supply-constrained environment too, you’re using slightly less amount of batteries to extract or to deliver a sort of ‘outsized value’ to the markets you’re in.”

The value of energy storage to defer the cost of investment in transmission – and distribution – networks has often been talked about. It may be finally gaining traction now in Europe, as Fluence is finding, and there are other projects in development or proposal stage in Australia and New York, to name two, but it has taken a long time.

Energy-Storage.news has to date reported on just a handful of storage as transmission or distribution investment deferral – often referred to as a ‘non-wires alternative’ (NWA) to infrastructure investment – BESS projects, which tend to come after a lot of work to originate. Most recently, a study commissioned by trade group NY-BEST found that New York’s transmission network planning needs to incorporate energy storage, a seeming blind spot for the state’s lawmakers and regulators that have otherwise been keen to embrace the various roles of storage.

Perusse’s colleague Julian Jansen, director of growth and market development for Fluence in the EMEA region, said that although European Union (EU) targets for renewable energy deployment have been raised significantly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transmission of that energy has been a largely neglected piece in the formation of the bloc’s strategy.

Battery storage was largely being used in Europe to provide frequency regulation until recently. It still is, but the energy crisis sparked, or perhaps made worse, by the war made the business case for energy storage to trade energy on the wholesale market much stronger.

“As you scale up those renewables and you become less reliant on a secure source and secure price source of natural gas, as well as decommissioning your coal-fired power plants, and in countries like Germany and Belgium, nuclear power plants, what you start seeing is that [the] volatility we saw is not just an extraordinary event, given the current geopolitical challenges, but actually, it is a glimpse into the future as we move into a higher renewable [energy] system,” Jansen said.

The RePowerEU strategy formulated by the EU to reduce reliance on Russian fossil fuels calls for 600GW of new solar PV and 510GW of new wind by 2030. As that buildout of renewables accelerates, the value of storage will remain high.

“Then you start having these new applications [for energy storage], advanced pieces around the transmission system. Because the challenge is there, that nobody’s talking about. Everyone’s talking about wholesale markets. Nobody’s thinking: ‘How do we get electricity from A to B?’ And that’s where the transmission system comes in. So to me, this is the wider change that has happened across Europe,” Jansen said.

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