Michael Stein

Genie Renewables, a division of energy services supplier Genie Energy Ltd., says it has acquired site rights to a community solar generation site in Upstate New York. 

Once built out and brought online, the proposed project is expected to have an aggregate generating capacity of approximately 6.25 MW. 

“Community solar and other utility-scale solar generation are essential to meaningful reductions in carbon emissions,” says Michael Stein, chief executive officer of Genie Energy. “Now, improved economics are driving strong project demand in our current markets and energizing implementation of solar generation initiatives in new markets across the country.”

Genie Renewables also says it received a favorable coordinated electric system interconnection review and estimate of interconnection cost from Con Ed for its 3 MW proposed community solar project in downstate New York. The company expects to receive its notice to proceed and begin construction in the coming months subject to negotiating a land lease and obtaining local permits.

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A Texas energy storage plant

The technology group Wärtsilä has reached commercial operation date (COD) for two major interconnected energy storage systems in South Texas totaling 200 MW and owned by Eolian L.P., a portfolio company of Global Infrastructure Partners. 

The Madero and Ignacio energy storage plants will be operated using Eolian software, enabling full participation in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) market. This will add year-round reliable operational ramping capacity to the system. 

Construction of the projects began in January 2021 to meet the flexibility and reliability needs of the ERCOT market. The facility reacts instantaneously to sustain electricity output and keep the lights on when power generation fails or cannot respond quickly enough to rapidly-changing conditions. 

“Adding new flexible resources today thereby preserves this older generation for more limited use in rare reliability events until they eventually retire and ensures an orderly transition during the natural replacement cycle of aging infrastructure,” says Aaron Zubaty, CEO, Eolian.

Wärtsilä’s GEMS digital energy platform monitors and controls the flow of energy, enabling these projects to provide grid support during periods of grid instability. With Wärtsilä’s Storage+ Solution, the projects will deliver ancillary services required for grid stability, such as fast frequency response and frequency regulation. 

The project includes Wärtsilä’s GridSolv Quantum, a fully-integrated modular and compact energy storage system that offers low life cycle costs, fast deployment times, quality control and flexibility. GridSolv Quantum is a certified UL 9540 compliant design fitted with several safety features.

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Thrive Renewables acquired the Feeder Road battery energy storage site in March 2021. Image: Jim Johnston (Thrive Renewables).

British renewable energy investment company Thrive Renewables is offering Bristol Energy Co-operative up to 20% investment in its new 20MW/30MWh battery energy storage project, in a first for co-ownership.

Local residents will have the opportunity to own a share of the Feeder Road battery in Bristol, which the company acquired in March 2021, and is currently being commissioned.

According to the company, this is the first time the owner of a commercial standalone battery storage project has offered the local community the opportunity to co-own the asset.

“Thrive was set up nearly 30 years ago to power the UK’s clean energy transition by connecting people to clean energy – offering co-investment to community groups helps us deliver that. To ensure a just transition, we need the benefits of renewables to be local, giving everyone the opportunity to access cleaner energy, cheaper bills and new green jobs,” said Matthew Clayton, managing director of Thrive Renewables. 

“Battery storage is a critical technology for the UK to reach net zero, storing electricity when renewable power is abundant and making it available during peak times when consumption is at its highest. We’re thrilled to be working with the local community on this project, which not only supports the UK’s net zero goals, but Bristol’s ambition to become a carbon neutral city by 2030.”

Thrive is a Bristol-based company and has invested £29 million in clean energy infrastructure in the area, including in the 8.2MW Avonmouth wind farm and providing a £4 million loan to Community Energy in 2022 to develop a community-owned onshore wind turbine.

Bristol has 133MW of clean electricity projects in operation or construction including storage projects, with Thrive having funded 37% of these (32.4MW).

The Feeder Road battery energy storage project has had community involved from its inception. The site was originally set to become a diesel-fuelled STOR plant in 2020, but local residents from St Phillip’s Marsh formed Residents Against Dirty Energy (RADE) to fight against this, and the planning application was ultimately rejected.

“Community energy gives people agency to take practical action on climate change in their local community,” said Andy O’Brien, co-director at Bristol Energy Cooperative.

“This project is a perfect example of how the community coming together can bring about real change. People power fought off a highly-polluting diesel scheme and replaced it with the storage technology we need to help us go net zero.”

Other companies involved in the development of the site include developer Aura Power, renewables consultancy Everoze, EPC G2 Energy and Trina Storage supplied the physical battery system.

With construction of Feeder Road complete, Thrive is undertaking a landscape plan to help protect and enhance the site’s biodiversity, which will see it invest an additional c.£100,000 in upgrades.

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In the US, 7.2GW of utility-scale storage projects saw delays last year due to rising battery costs. Image: NextEra Energy Resources.

The global energy storage capacity has been on the increase as a total of 16GW was added last year, equivalent to a 68% of year-on-year growth, according to BloombergNEF (BNEF).

BNEF’s Energy Storage Market Outlook series unveiled that 2022 was the global energy storage’s record addition. However, the growth is expected to continue in the following years. BNEF is forecasting a 23% compound annual growth rate until 2030, with annual additions reaching 88GW or 278GWh.

Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) added 4.5GW of capacity last year. Residential batteries, particularly in Germany and Italy, led installations in the region, and this trend is expected to continue until 2025 thanks to high retail electricity prices and government incentive programmes supporting household deployments. Currently, the residential segment is proportionally the largest in the region.

EMEA will account for 24% of capacity deployed in 2030 and is expected to reach 114GW, or 285GWh, cumulatively by the end of 2030, with the UK, Germany, Italy, Greece and Turkey leading the growth. Pipeline projects in Greece, Romania, Spain, Croatia, Finland and Lithuania will also spur the growth.

The Asia-Pacific region (APAC) is likely to dominate capacity growth in the coming years, representing 44% of additions in 2030. China is forecast to lead in deployments in the region, driven by local targets and compulsory renewable integration policies. China is expected to overtake the US as the largest energy storage market in terms of MW by 2030, as BNEF said it had increased its China forecast by 66% to account for new provincial energy storage targets, power market reforms and industry expectations supporting significant new capacity.

In Japan, subsidy programmes for utility-scale batteries were announced by federal and local governments, while South Korea set a 25GW, or 127GWh, storage target by 2036. Meanwhile, India announced a plan to fund 4GWh of grid-scale batteries in its 2023-2024 annual expenditure budget.

Therefore, the cumulative deployment for APAC is expected to increase by 42% to 39GW, or 105GWh, in 2030.

The Americas is forecast to represent 21% of annual energy storage capacity on a GW basis by 2030. Led by large-scale projects in California, the Southwest and Texas, the US is the largest market in the region. In the US, 7.2GW of utility-scale storage projects saw delays last year due to rising battery costs.

In other countries in the Americas, market reforms in Chile could pave the way for larger energy storage additions in Latin America’s nascent energy storage market, as should increasing volumes of solar and wind across Chile and Brazil, as well as grid challenges in Mexico due to underinvestment.

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The Parque Solar Los Girasoles plant

MPC Energy Solutions (MPCES) says it has completed construction and grid connection for its Parque Solar Los Girasoles, a solar photovoltaic plant in Colombia, with an installed capacity of 12.3 MW. 

Parque Solar Los Girasoles is the third project in the company’s portfolio to commence operations this year, following Santa Rosa & Villa Sol in El Salvador, and Neol CHP in Puerto Rico, and the fourth operational plant overall.

MPC Energy Solutions is selling the generated power through a long-term power purchase agreement (PPA) with Spectrum, a Colombian energy trading firm and electricity supplier. Parque Solar Los Girasoles is located in Colombia’s region of Norte de Santander and will supply around 23 GWh of solar energy per year, helping avoid the emission of close to 100,000 tons of CO2 throughout its lifetime. The project is expected to generate an annual revenue of around $1.3 million during the PPA tenor.

“Parque Solar Los Girasoles is a significant milestone for Colombia’s renewable energy targets, and a testament to our commitment to helping diversify the energy mix in the country and across Latin America”, says Juan Esteban Hernández, head of project development LATAM of MPC Energy Solutions. “We are excited to see our portfolio of operational projects grow and contribute to the region’s energy resilience and next-generation infrastructure.”

MPC Energy Solutions invested $11 million equity to develop and construct the project and intends to secure debt financing post commissioning. Colombian company Socolco S.A.S. acted as the engineering and construction contractor, and key components, such as solar panels supplied by TRINA and inverters by Huawei, were procured by MPCES directly.

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BLUETTI is slated to release its new PV420 solar panel in Europe and the UK.

PV420 features solar power of up to 400 watts and a max 23.4% high-converting rate. It’s capable of capturing about 2 kWh solar power with six hours of prime sunshine.

BLUETTI equips PV420 with monocrystalline solar cells and multi-layered ETFE to ensure better light transmittance, higher conversion efficiency and a longer lifespan. The ETFE coating surface has a rating of IP65 to protect from water splashes, scratches and dust, making it ideal for working even under extreme weather conditions. It also has a kickstand that can be adjusted to the optimal orientation to make the most of the sunshine. 

PV420 is compatible with BLUETTI power stations, including AC200P, AC200MAX, AC300, AC500, EB150, EB240, EP500 and EP500Pro, as well as other third-party power stations which have MC4 connectors and consistent voltage output with PV420.

Photo by Nuno Marques on Unsplash

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Joe Buckler

Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises Inc. says its subsidiary Babcock & Wilcox Solar Energy Inc. has been awarded contracts totaling more than $15 million by Summit Ridge Energy LLC (SRE), a commercial solar company in the U.S., to engineer, procure and construct five community solar power installations in Illinois.

B&W will also manage subcontractors, site coordination and supervision and the electrical tie-ins to the grid. The projects, totaling approximately 15 MW, are scheduled for completion in 2023.

This is the second set of contracts awarded to B&W by SRE. In August 2022, B&W was awarded contracts totaling more than $20 million to build seven photovoltaic solar farms.

“The market for community solar projects in the U.S. is growing substantially thanks to high demand for affordable, clean energy, as well as state and federal incentives for renewable energy, including for solar power,” says Joe Buckler, B&W senior vice president, clean energy. “In particular, the recently signed U.S. Inflation Reduction Act includes provisions for all types of solar projects, including community solar, that are driving increased interest in development.”

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Manish Nayar

OYA Renewables, an energy transition solutions platform, says it has secured backing from City National Bank (CNB), a wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada – with a $27.1 million long-term loan facility. 

In addition to this, OYA also received funding from Greenprint, the tax equity investor for the four projects, as the projects reached the substantial completion milestone.

“As our community solar project pipeline continues to see significant growth within New York State and beyond, having robust financial backing from CNB allows us to focus our attention squarely on efficient and effective project execution,” says Manish Nayar, chairman and founder of OYA Renewables. 

The funds from CNB and Greenprint were used to complete the term conversion of the four projects.

The 6.7 MW DC solar farm on Robinson Road in Jefferson County, N.Y., is expected to generate approximately 10,490,000 kWh annually, the equivalent of offsetting an estimated 7,400 metric tons of carbon and providing enough clean energy to power over 1,400 households annually.

The 6.8 MW DC solar farm on State Route 122 in Franklin County, N.Y., is expected to generate approximately 10,330,000 kWh annually, the equivalent of offsetting an estimated 7,300 metric tons of carbon and providing enough clean energy to power over 1,400 households annually.

The 4.6 MW DC solar farm in Pulaski, Oswego County, N.Y., is expected to generate approximately 7,626,197 kWh annually, the equivalent of offsetting an estimated 5,400 metric tons of carbon and providing enough clean energy to power over 1,000 households annually.

The 6.7 MW DC solar farm on Wayside in Jefferson County, N.Y., is expected to generate approximately 10,647,000 kWh annually, the equivalent of offsetting an estimated 7,500 metric tons of carbon and providing enough clean energy to power over 1,400 households annually.

OYA has five additional New York community solar projects expected to reach commercial operation by mid-2023, adding to its pipeline that already exceeds 600 MW in the state.

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Key Capture Energy’s 20 MW project KCE NY1, completed in 2019, was the state’s first grid-scale BESS project and has been one of the few to benefit from the original NYSERDA Market Acceleration Bridge Incentive. Image: Key Capture Energy.

The New York Public Service Commission (PSC) has given the state’s Joint Utilities until the end of 2028 to put in place large-scale energy storage resources, extending a previous 2025 deadline.

The PSC said earlier this month that in addition to the extension on the required in-service date, contracts for energy storage procured by the utilities can now have a maximum 15-year term, rather than the 10 years previously set.

Through legislation put in place in 2018, six utilities across the state had been each handed a mandate to procure megawatts of energy storage. New York at that time had in place a 3,000MW by 2030 storage target, which has since been doubled to 6,000MW. That figure correlates to 20% of peak load forecasted for the New York grid by that time, putting energy storage at the heart of the state’s energy transition.

There has been some concern around the energy storage industry and clean energy advocates that utilities had been slow to act on this responsibility, analyst Vanessa Witte at Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables told Energy-Storage.news in a recent interview.

For instance Con Edison, one of those utilities, was handed a 300MW target through the state’s first Energy Storage Roadmap, created by public agencies NYSERDA and the Department of Public Service. It hasn’t fulfilled that procurement yet, and there was “definitely frustration” from developers that it hadn’t been done, Witte said.

“I think there’s like a lot of frustration from the developers that Con Ed in particular and some of the other utilities are not procuring a lot of volumes. There’s definitely frustration over Con Ed not procuring their 300MW and needing an extension. 300MW isn’t an insanely large number,” Witte said.

Although Con Edison has put out some requests for proposals (RFPs), Witte has had feedback from developer sources that “whatever price Con Ed wants to pay is essentially not reflective of market price”. Some sources Energy-Storage.news spoke with at the utility said that their teams were working hard to put that right.

As law firm Foley & Lardner pointed out in a corporate blog post on the recent extension, the 31 December 2025 service date was itself an extension from an April 2021 deadline that had already been pushed out.

Stumbles after Bridge Incentive

The PSC acknowledged that out of the 350MW utilities are expected to have procured by now, just 120MW of contracts have been executed. These have received state investment of half a billion dollars, but at the same time, a US$350 million scheme called the Market Acceleration Bridge Incentive Program introduced in the Roadmap has paid out less than half its allotted funds.

That programme aimed at accelerating development of energy storage in New York at utility-scale, or ‘bulk storage’ facilities of over 5MW as it was defined, non-residential commercial and industrial (C&I) or community-scale (‘retail storage’), and residential.

Its impact on stimulating the bulk segment was limited, but it has set up the retail storage segment nicely, Dr William Acker, executive director of the NY-BEST trade and technology group, said in a recent interview.

The successor Roadmap 2.0, published just before the end of last year, proposed a new solicitation programme, called the Index Storage Credit, to allow NYSERDA to contract for bulk storage through competitive solicitations.

It is designed, Acker said, to guarantee some revenue certainty to developers and investors while also derisking the investment of public money; storage assets are paid the difference between a strike price bid in reverse auctions and a reference price based on expected market revenues set by the state.

That could come into place in around a year’s time pending regulatory approval and any amendments along the way.

Along with growing demand for storage to integrate renewables and clean energy like offshore wind growth and rising demand for electric vehicles in New York, and big picture headwinds like the influence of the Inflation Reduction Act, the state will see a robust grid-scale energy storage market in place by around 2025, according to CEO Jeff Bishop of energy storage developer Key Capture Energy.

Bishop and fellow developer Kelly Sarber of Strategic Management Group were interviewed, along with Acker and Witte, for an article on New York’s energy storage market in the newest edition of our quarterly journal PV Tech Power (vol.34).

The first wave of 2018 procurements had not gone as smoothly or quickly as anyone hoped, and while there were mitigating circumstances to that, not least of all the COVID19 pandemic and supply chain constraints, but Roadmap 2.0’s Index Storage Credit and other frameworks are likely to change that.

On that, all of the interviewees were in agreement. However there was also acknowledgement that in order to arrive at the 2030 target of 6GW in time, the state – and the industry and its stakeholders and partners, not least of all the utilities – must act fast.  

Read the feature article ‘Hunting the ‘missing money’ in New York’s energy storage market’, in PV Tech Power (vol.34), by subscribing to the journal here, or you can read it free as part of a PV Tech Premium subscription. Every edition of PV Tech Power includes ‘Storage & Smart Power’ a dedicated section contributed by the Energy-Storage.news team.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media is hosting the 5th Energy Storage Summit USA, 28-29 March 2023 in Austin, Texas. Featuring a packed programme of panels, presentations and fireside chats from industry leaders focusing on accelerating the market for energy storage across the country. For more information, go to the website.

 

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A ceiling-based fire sprinkler system. Image: Brandon Leon / WikiCommons

The second high-profile battery storage failure due to a faulty sprinkler system could mark the beginnings of exclusions from insurance policies if certain providers develop a negative track record, a source said.

Sprinkler systems being activated when they shouldn’t have been responsible for battery failures at two major battery storage projects in California recently: Terra-Gen’s Valley Center and Vistra’s Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility, the latter the largest project in the world which was taken out of service for months as a result.

While it’s still early days, a source working in the battery storage insurance sector said that these kind of incidents are likely to come up more and more as deployments grow, and that insurance policies could start to take account of them in future.

“If a certain manufacturer or EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) contractor has developed a negative track record with any part of their equipment – in this case sprinkler systems but we could just easily be talking about blades on wind turbines or inverters at a solar facility – then those will start finding their way into exclusions in insurance policies,” they said.

“You have to disclose all your equipment and who your EPC is, and if someone develops a bad enough track record the insurer will say I don’t think I want to insure this policy. And if I do, I’m putting this specific exclusion in. But those aren’t standard and a client will want to avoid those situations if they can.”

“So I would say that’s not the position at the moment, it’s so far so good, but watch this space. We’re very much at the embryonic stage of mass scale deployment and as more and more projects are deployed, just as with wind and solar, these things will start to crop up.”

As Energy-Storage.news wrote recently, some in the sector say that battery insurance costs are generally falling as insurers better understand the risks involved.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 5th Energy Storage Summit USA next week on 28-29 March 2023 in Austin, Texas. Featuring a packed programme of panels, presentations and fireside chats from industry leaders focusing on accelerating the market for energy storage across the country. For more information, go to the website.

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