First Solar Inc. says its manufacturing facility in India has been awarded financial incentives under the Indian government’s Production Linked Incentive (PLI) program. First Solar was one of only three manufacturers selected to receive the full range of incentives, which are reserved for fully vertically integrated manufacturing. 

The incentives are subject to the facility meeting product efficiency and domestic value creation thresholds, which will be evaluated on a quarterly basis beginning in the second quarter of 2026 through 2031.

The PLI program is intended to promote the manufacturing of high efficiency solar modules in India and to reduce India’s dependency on foreign imports of solar modules. Under the program, manufacturers are selected through a competitive bid process and receive certain cash incentives over a five-year period following the commissioning of their manufacturing facilities. 

Among other things, such incentives are based on the efficiency and temperature coefficient of the modules produced, the proportion of raw materials sourced from the domestic market, the extent to which the manufacturer’s operations are fully integrated within India, and the quantity of modules sold from such manufacturing operations.

First Solar’s new facility, expected to be commissioned in the second half of this year, is located in the state of Tamil Nadu and will have an annual nameplate capacity of 3.4 GW DC. Designed using the advanced manufacturing template established by First Solar’s newest factory in Ohio, the facility will produce the company’s Series 7 modules.

First Solar produces its thin film PV modules using a fully integrated, continuous process under one roof and does not rely on Chinese c-Si supply chains. The company’s eco-efficient module technology, which uses its proprietary Cadmium Telluride semiconductor, has low carbon and water footprints.

First Solar is also expanding its U.S. manufacturing footprint, which currently stands at over 5 GW of annual nameplate capacity with three operating factories in Ohio, to over 10 GW by 2025 when it completes its new $1.1 billion factory in Alabama and a $185 million expansion of its existing capacity in Ohio. The company is expected to have over 20 GW of annual global nameplate manufacturing capacity by 2025.

Photo by Priamo Mendez on Unsplash

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Dan Shugar

Nextracker Inc., a provider of solar tracking and software solutions, has signed a multi-year volume commitment agreement with Strata Clean Energy to supply 810 MW of trackers for large-scale solar power projects in Texas, Arizona and Virginia. 

Consistent with Nextracker’s years-long campaign to grow its partnerships with U.S. suppliers, much of the equipment will be sourced from U.S. factories.

“Strata’s integrated model of solar and storage development, EPC and operations generates value for utilities and landowners,” says Dan Shugar, founder and CEO of Nextracker. “Our expanded U.S. supply chain is well-positioned for their needs to reliably deliver high performing solar power plants, while creating more jobs in communities across the country. We’re excited to enter into this agreement with Strata to deliver low-cost high-performing solar power plants.”

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Scott Canada

Swift Current Energy is ramping up construction this spring for its Double Black Diamond solar project in central Illinois. The company has contracted St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Companies as the engineering, procurement and construction contractor. 

Swift Current has also selected First Solar to provide the 800 MW DC solar modules for the project and Nextracker to provide the smart solar tracker solutions for the project. The majority of the project’s 1.6 million solar panels will be manufactured in the United States.

In coordination with local unions, the project is hiring approximately 435 craft workers to construct the Double Black Diamond solar project, with crews having already begun sitework. Peak workforce is expected to be onsite for approximately 14 months, beginning in late spring 2023. The project is expected to reach commercial operation by fall 2024, with Swift Current continuing to own and operate the facility.

“As the developer and long-term owner of Double Black Diamond, we are thrilled to prepare for full mobilization of the more than 400 skilled workers who will construct this project,” said Eric Lammers, CEO of Swift Current Energy. “The Double Black Diamond solar project brings together American-based businesses McCarthy, First Solar and Nextracker to construct a market-leading project that we hope will serve as an example for other projects to come.”

The project has set apprenticeship, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion hiring goals, which are being facilitated by local unions for carpenters, laborers, operators, electricians and crew leads. In partnership with the unions, McCarthy will train workers who are inexperienced in utility-scale solar construction to assist with future workforce needs and accommodate the exponential regional and national growth of the solar industry.

McCarthy is responsible for the design, procurement, construction and commissioning of the solar facility, which represents the largest solar energy project in Illinois and will significantly enhance the region’s sustainable energy infrastructure.

“With the expansive growth of utility-scale solar construction throughout the country, we are thrilled to be able to facilitate the development of a more diverse workforce while also supporting the state’s sustainability goals – Double Black Diamond truly represents a community impact project for the region,” says Scott Canada, executive vice president of McCarthy’s renewable energy and storage team.”  

Once operational, the project will provide reliable, renewable energy and offset the equivalent emissions of more than 85,000 Illinois households per year. In collaboration with Constellation, it was announced in August that the City of Chicago would be a key end-user for the Double Black Diamond solar project. 

Starting in 2025, the City of Chicago will partially source its large energy uses such as Chicago O’Hare International Airport and Midway International Airport as well as certain other large facilities with renewable energy from the Double Black Diamond solar project. Additionally, the project is expected to bring $100 million in tax revenue to Sangamon and Morgan counties in central Illinois, where the project is located.  

Additionally, State Farm and PPG will purchase zero-emission, renewable energy from the Double Black Diamond solar project. Illinois-based State Farm will procure approximately 103,000 MWh of energy per year from Constellation, as part of the insurance company’s continued efforts at reducing its overall impact on the environment. The energy purchased by State Farm is the equivalent to what is currently used to power eight of State Farm’s corporate facilities in Bloomington, including its corporate headquarters and operations center.

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An Agilitas solar-plus-storage project in Massachusetts. Image: Agilitas Energy.

Agilitas Energy, a developer of distributed and smaller utility-scale solar PV and battery storage projects in the US, has entered the Texas ERCOT market.

The company said yesterday that it has agreed to acquire a portfolio of standalone energy storage projects in development for around US$75 million, from Gulf States Renewable Energy, a Texas-based subsidiary of California solar and battery storage development company GSR Energy.

Comprising six assets totalling 60MW output in the Greater Houston area of Texas, they will serve utility CenterPoint Energy, which serves residential customers in the region, charging with surplus energy at off-peak times, for inputting to the grid when demand peaks and it is most needed.

They are identically designed and sized at 9.96MW/20.721MWh each, with BYD Energy as battery supplier. Two will begin commercial operation this year and the remaining four will come online in 2024. Agilitas will buy each project when fully permitted and ready to enter the construction stage.

It marks a geographical departure for Agilitas, which has to date focused on the Northeastern US, with projects that include Rhode Island’s first-ever utility-scale BESS, a 3MW/9MWh asset that came online last year. Other projects include community solar-plus-storage in Massachusetts that qualified for that state’s SMART incentive programme.

It also marks something of a departure in a sense that its projects to date have focused on renewable energy markets in US states or grid operator regions that are policy driven e.g, feed-in tariff or net metering, with additional wholesale market participation and behind-the-meter benefits like peak shaving, whereas Texas’ ERCOT wholesale market is much more of a merchant play.

At the end of last year, Agilitas president and board member Barrett Bilotta said the company was looking to build on the momentum it had built up in the Northeast and expand into additional markets, but at the time did not mention which ones that might include nor drop hints that Texas was in the frame.

In one of our Year-in-Review 2022 Q&A blogs, Bilotta did say however that Agilitas Energy expected to be able “to leverage the benefits afforded by the IRA,” noting that as part of the energy storage industry in a country freshly committed to supporting clean energy that “we have lots of momentum propelling us forward”.

Agilitas raised US$350 million in equity investment last year from global alternative asset management group CarVal Investors to help fuel its expansion, while Bilotta also noted that the developer doubled its employee headcount in 2022.

“Texas has always represented the holy grail of energy and is one of our key expansion markets because it’s a leader in energy production, energy consumption and renewables,” Bilotta said of the deal yesterday.

ERCOT was a topic of focus in our recent webinar with energy trading and storage asset optimisation firm GridBeyond, which is building on its experience in the UK and Ireland energy storage markets to take on Texas. GridBeyond’s heads of energy trading and forecasting discussed the available revenue opportunities for batteries in ERCOT and how best to capture them.

Bilotta noted that in addition to expanding into Texas, Agilitas is also “planning to bolster our renewable portfolio to include sources beyond solar, partnering with other leading renewable developers to achieve these goals as necessary”.

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Dan Siegel

Birch Creek Energy LLC, a St. Louis-based renewable energy company, has acquired Foundation Solar Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based solar developer focused on greenfield solar projects primarily in the MISO and PJM markets. 

Together, Birch Creek and Foundation Solar have developed over 1.7 GW of solar and storage projects since 2019 and have a combined development pipeline of 13.5 GW in varying stages of development.

“We are excited to add the expertise of Foundation Solar to the Birch team,” says Dan Siegel, CEO of Birch Creek. “They not only bring immediate value by materially increasing our portfolio in key markets such as PJM and MISO, but the acquisition of the team brings a proven greenfield engine which will increase our velocity and scale.”

Lazard Frères and Co. LLC acted as exclusive financial advisor to the seller, Hull Street Energy. Foley and Lardner LLP acted as legal counsel to Hull Street Energy, and Nelson Mullins Riley and Scarborough LLP acted as legal counsel to Birch Creek.

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Matt Lynn

Lendlease, a real estate and investment group that manages almost 8,000 homes for the U.S. Army on Oahu, and Holu Hou Energy (HHE), a provider of design-to-service solar plus energy storage systems, have signed a contract to install HHE’s HoluPower energy storage and solar PV systems on homes at Lendlease’s Island Palm Communities.

The installations will come in the form of HHE’s EnergyCluster, where multiple residential units have their systems connected in an energy network. Excess solar generation from any unit’s system in the network that would normally be lost is directly shared in real time with other connected units that have load above solar generation. The benefit is that the optimized PV and energy storage systems can meet 75% to 80% or more of the overall residents’ energy needs while not exporting power to the utility grid.

“Lendlease Communities is proud to partner with Holu Hou Energy on this innovative renewable energy project, which will not only improve the quality of life for military families at Island Palm Communities, but also contribute to a more resilient and stable electric grid in Oahu,” says Matt Lynn, SVP, energy and utilities at Lendlease. 

Lendlease and HHE began planning in 2021, which culminated in constructing a pilot project in May 2022. Since then, the pilot has been operating across six residential units. In a typical month, approximately a third of the total generated electricity is shared with other units in the cluster, thereby solving issues related to vacancy and resident load variability while proving the value created through a clustered approach versus stand-alone systems.

The savings realized by Island Palm Communities through deployment of HHE’s systems is being reinvested to enhance the housing and amenities Lendlease offers to military families on the installation. Additionally, residents now have back-up power that can be utilized during grid outage events. 

Each residential unit will have approximately 10 kW of PV and 25 kWh of energy storage, with six residences typically being connected in an HHE EnergyShare network. Construction is set to begin summer of 2023, with initial installations at the Aliamanu Military Reservation near Honolulu.

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A render of the 100MW Kwinana BESS NHOA is nearing completion for Synergy in Western Australia. Image: Synergy/NHOA.

NHOA’s energy storage business accounted for the vast majority of the company’s €165.7 million (US$180 million) reported revenues in 2022, a year-on-year growth of 448%.

Reporting its financial results for last year, the Italy-headquartered company said yesterday that €153.6 million revenue was recognised by its energy storage global business line (GBL), which focuses on utility-scale standalone energy storage and solar-plus-storage projects as well as microgrids.

The revenue figures exceed the upper end of the company’s 2022 guidance, which had been in the range of €140 million to €160 million.

Referring to energy storage as NHOA’s “growth engine” as it has done in previous results announcements, the company reported EBITDA for energy storage at over €2 million, alongside an order intake of €240 million and a backlog of €301 million. The company currently has 1.4GWh of energy storage projects in construction and claimed a €1,043 million pipeline of opportunities.  

NHOA, formerly known as Engie EPS before its acquisition and rebranding by Taiwan Cement Corporation (TCC), is also active in the e-mobility and electric vehicle (EV) fast-charge infrastructure spaces.

With the company seeking to expand its presence and capabilities in all its divisions, costs of doing business were high in 2022, including the hiring of new workers and a 285% rise in operating costs.

Overall, the group’s 2022 EBITDA amounted to a €32.9 million loss in 2022, compared to €13.2 million the previous year. Net result was -€52.2 million by the end of last year, compared to -€28.4 million at the end of 2021. Against its €165.7 million total revenue, cost of sales was €150.6 million.

The company also said its net financial position as of the end of the year when it held €4.2 million versus the €74.3 million it held at the end of 2022 was a reflection of investments into the EV fast charge segment as well as “working capital consumed by the Energy Storage GBL”.   

That money helped NHOA progress to get more than 300MWh of battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity commissioned or close to commissioning by the end of 2022, while its BESS assembly plant in Cosio Valtellino, Italy assembled 230MWh of BESS during the year and has since October been producing 45MWh per month (equivalent to 540MWh annual production capacity).

NHOA also touted BESS project wins that happened during the winter, most notably its award of the 200MW/400MWh supply contract to Blyth Battery in South Australia by developer Neoen, as well as projects for parent company TCC in Taiwan and projects in the US.

Projects it currently has under construction include the Kwinana 100MW/200MWh BESS in Western Australia for integrated utility Synergy nearing its commissioning phase and a 107MWh project in Yingde, China, four US projects totalling 78.8MWh. One of its several large-scale Taiwan projects for TCC went into commercial operation recently, and another 311MWh is in installation and approaching commissioning, NHOA 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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Jeffrey Peck

iSun Inc., a solar energy and clean mobility infrastructure company, says it has closed five contracts covering 6.5 MW to provide expanded solar energy capabilities at five industrial sites.

The Vermont projects are valued at $5.1 million. They are scheduled to begin this spring and are expected to be completed this and next year.

“In 2023, we are focused on execution and efficiency, and we appreciate the trust and confidence of our customers in our ability to help them achieve their goals in alternative energy initiatives,” says Jeffrey Peck, chairman and CEO of iSun. “This award demonstrates yet again our strong commitment to accelerating the transition to solar energy for customers in New England.”

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Brian Li

SparkCognition, a provider of artificial intelligence software solutions for business, says it has added generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) capabilities to its Renewable Suite. This new feature will help accelerate time to value by delivering actionable insights for their renewable asset performance management solution.

SparkCognition’s GPT, part of the Generative AI Platform for Industrials, leverages large language models to interpret user inputs and return relevant information in a seamlessly intuitive experience. This capability analyzes the performance of wind, solar and storage assets and provides real-time insights to support key operational decisions.

Renewable Suite users can access SparkCognition GPT anywhere in the suite with simple conversational prompts to look for summaries, specific information or interact with various modules. 

“It will improve our efficiency by being able to perform analysis across multiple modules in a single conversational thread, allow the user to focus more on drawing conclusions and making decisions, and ease troubleshooting by incorporating relevant information from OEM manuals and unstructured maintenance data into the context of a specific event,” says Brian Li, staff engineer at AEP Renewables.

SparkCognition GPT allows operators to perform custom data analysis tasks quickly and efficiently and automate the workflow, enabling insight into their renewable energy assets’ performance. 

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Redflow zinc-bromine flow batteries at an off-grid installation in Australia. Image: Redflow.

US energy efficiency and renewables company Ameresco has entered into a “strategic relationship” with Australian flow battery provider Redflow.

Redflow makes flow batteries based on a zinc-bromine electrolyte, following up deployments in markets including Australia, New Zealand and South Africa with its entry into the US, completing a 2MWh project in 2021 at a California bioenergy power plant and signing a master service agreement (MSA) with EPC services firm Black & Veatch to put Redflow on Black & Veatch’s list of approved suppliers.

Ameresco said yesterday (28 March) that through the non-exclusive deal, it plans to use the technology at project and asset installations for customers in the North American and European markets.

It will target medium to long-duration energy storage (LDES) and daily cycling applications, offering Redflow’s flow batteries as part of an integrated solar-plus-storage offering. Ameresco’s projects in the US are for federal agencies such as the military.

While Ameresco’s energy storage projects to date have been done using lithium-ion battery energy storage systems (BESS), including a 2.1GWh three-project portfolio underway for California utility Southern California Edison (SCE), the company has been evaluating flow batteries for some time.

In a February 2021 interview with Energy-Storage.news, Nicole Bulgarino, the company’s executive VP and general manager for its Federal Solutions division, said that Ameresco had been studying flow batteries for projects that require longer discharge periods, as well as for projects in remote locations.

A study the company conducted around that time with the US Department of Defence’s Environmental Security Technology Certification Program compared flow batteries with lithium-ion BESS.

At that point, after modelling but prior to field deployment and testing, the flow batteries “had potential”, but came up short versus lithium on metrics including cost performance and efficiency, Bulgarino said.

Since then, the steep decline in the cost of lithium batteries which had been experienced for around 10 years has halted due to factors including rising demand from the electric vehicle (EV) sector, while supply chain constraints have affected global deployments, including Ameresco’s projects for SCE.

Redflow and Ameresco are working on a 40kWh commercial demonstration system incorporating the zinc-bromine flow batteries to an Ameresco customer installation. The demonstrator will utilise four of Redflow’s batteries, which are in 10kWh units. Redflow launched its third generation of flow batteries in July last year.

In addition to a smaller-scale system for remote microgrids and commercial and industrial (C&I) sites, the pair are also working on a utility-scale version.

The integrated system was described as fire-safe and sustainable, made with abundant and recyclable raw materials as well as being cost-competitive with lithium-ion. Within the US market, the flow batteries will qualify for incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and could be manufactured domestically, earning further adders under those schemes.

While most flow battery providers are focused on vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) tech, using vanadium solution for the electrolyte, Redflow is among a handful commercialising a different electrolyte chemistry tech. Others include ESS Inc’s iron electrolyte flow battery, while recent product launches from Lockheed Martin and Honeywell use electrolytes with as-yet undisclosed chemical compositions.

Shift to non-lithium technologies ‘happening as we speak’

Non-lithium energy storage technologies are likely to carve out a share of the market sooner rather than later, US Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Programs Office head and clean energy industry financier Jigar Shah said in a recent interview with our journal PV Tech Power (vol.34).

“The amount of innovation in the battery space is so high that it is hard to see any of the existing incumbent technologies in their current form having dominant market share in 7-10 years,” Shah said.

One industry dynamic driving change is that EV companies will continue to be the much bigger offtaker of lithium cells, effectively pricing out the BESS market, triggering “a rapid shift away from lithium-ion in the utility sector towards other chemistries, which is happening as we speak,” Shah said, echoing views Energy-Storage.news has heard from representatives of major players in the BESS space including Fluence and Wärtsilä.

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