Edison Power and Gotion executives sign the deal. Image: Gotion High-Tech.

Chinese battery manufacturer Gotion High-Tech has continued recent moves into new markets across Asia, signing a deal with Japan’s Edison Power.

The two companies will target growing demand in the Japanese market for large-scale stationary battery energy storage systems (BESS), as well as developing a joint offering on battery recycling.

Renewable energy solutions company Edison Power will “introduce Gotion’s batteries into the Japanese market,” according to a press release, with an initial 1GWh planned sales target over the first year of cooperation, set to rise to 2GWh in the second year and expected to continue growing from there.

This comes following changes of Japanese energy market regulations in mid-2022 via the country’s Electricity Business Act, which now allows large-scale BESS assets to be categorised within the electricity generation business and apply for grid connection points.

While that has brought numerous entrants into the Japanese industry including private investors, according to various sources it is expected to take a year or two to stimulate market demand – the latter a stated aim of the government as it targets a national ‘Green Transformation’ (dubbed ‘GX’) and increase its share of renewable energy on the country’s grid network.

Japan wants more than half of its electricity to come from low carbon sources by the 2030 financial year, with 20% to 22% to come from nuclear, and between 36-38% from renewables.

Headquartered in Heifei, Anhui Province, Gotion is relatively new among the Tier 1 lithium battery makers in China being founded in 2006, but in 2015 became the first among them to go publicly listed.

It manufactures batteries for a range of applications that includes electric vehicles (EVs), stationary battery energy storage systems (BESS) and electric power transmission and distribution (T&D) equipment. That includes holding patents for battery cell materials and cell structural designs as well as battery management system (BMS), testing and evaluation, recycling technologies and more.

Gotion will supply battery cells, modules, BMS and other components, while Edison Power, a provider of renewable energy solutions since 1991, will look after customers, carry out engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) duties, operation and maintenance (O&M) and provide other various “market-side services”.

Edison Power’s website already features the company’s containerised BESS solution, including the legend ‘Powered by Gotion’. The system, which is being advertised as available from this year, uses Gotion lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells, with 2.7MWh energy capacity per 20ft container.

Energy management system (EMS) and BMS are integrated into the containers. Edison Power lists two smaller-scale reference projects it has deployed in Japan, one of 300kWh and the other of 780kWh, as well as a 8MW/16MWh project in Singapore and a 10MW/10MWh project in the US, so far.

Electricity Business Act reforms set to open up Japanese market

The revision of electricity law, which is partly aimed at increasing liquidity in the Japanese energy sector and reducing voltality of spot prices, effectively lifts a “ban” on market transactions for BESS, Edison Power said on its website, opening up “a new energy business that has never existed before” in the country.

The two partners will also work to commercialise a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery recycling business.

In an article published in the most recent edition of our quarterly technical journal, PV Tech Power (Vol.34), analyst Chris Wilkinson at Rystad Energy looked at the present status of the solar PV market in Japan.

Solar PV will “undoubtedly” play a prominent role in addressing Japan’s energy security, energy supply and decarbonisation concerns, Wilkinson wrote. However, the scale-up of renewables faces several major challenges, and opening up the market to battery storage will be an important step to achieving those aims, Wilkinson wrote, along with other regulatory changes like a new ‘Feed-in Premium’ successor to the Feed-in Tariff, paying higher prices for energy inputted from renewables to the grid network during peak times.

“As a country with some of the most densely populated cities in the world and a firm commitment on supplying electricity from renewable sources, the solar industry in Japan has large potential,” Rystad’s Chris Wilkinson wrote.

“To fulfil this potential and in order to significantly reduce its current reliance on foreign fossil fuel imports, a fully developed BESS industry will be necessary to provide developers the flexibility they require to avoid curtailment, earn revenue and further promote development of not only solar but all renewables.”

Gotion meanwhile recently broke ground on Vietnam’s first-ever LFP cell factory, and is in a joint venture (JV) to explore building out production facilities in Thailand. In the US, the company signed a battery storage supply deal with US renewables platform Borrego last September.

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

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A map of the proposed solar-plus-storage project from AES’ environmental impact assessment (EIA). Image: AES Chile / Typsa.

The Chile arm of global energy firm AES Corporation is looking to build another large co-located battery energy storage system (BESS), this time with a capacity of 2,710MWh.

AES Chile filed an environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the Cristales Photovoltaic Park project with the country’s EIA authority at the start of the month (2 March).

The project in Antofagasta, part of the Atacama desert region, would pair a 379MW solar PV park with a BESS unit of 542MW power and five-hours of discharge duration. That makes the potential total energy storage capacity stand at 2,710MWh or 2.71GWh.

The project would require the construction of a 220kV high-voltage line to take the energy to the Monte Mina substation, where it would then be injected into the National Electric System, the country’s grid.

If approved, construction could start on 10 January, 2024, and the project could be online by the first quarter of 2028 according to AES’ EIA submission. The company is pegging the investment needed at US$710 million.

In a comment on why it chose the location, the EIA submission said: “The site has a high potential for solar use for the exploitation of photovoltaic solar parks, given that with the information available in the Solar Explorer of the Ministry of Energy, the daily average horizontal global irradiation is 7.47kWh/m2/day, with a minimum of 4.74kWh/m2/day and a maximum of 9.81kWh/m2/day as a monthly average.”

It is the second project of this scale that AES Chile has submitted an EIA for in the space of a month. In February, as reported by Energy-Storage.news, it proposed a solar, wind and BESS hybrid project with an energy storage capacity of over 3,000MWh.

Chile has seen a raft of large-scale energy storage projects paired with renewables proposed in the last year, a trend which has accelerated since it passed a bill to incentivise the deployment of energy storage and EV take-up in October 2022.

In the same month as AES’s 3,000MWh-plus hybrid project, developers Fotowatio Renewable Ventures and oEnergy submitted EIAs for projects with a combined 500MW of battery storage. At the end of 2022, Engie Chile ordered a 638MWh BESS from Sungrow for a solar-plus-storage project also in Antofagasta while a few weeks earlier utility Colbun inaugurated the first of 800MW of battery storage projects.

Read all Energy-Storage.news coverage of the energy storage market in Chile here.

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Lars Christian Bacher of Morrow and Jon Anders Hammersmark of Eldrift shaking on the deal. Image: Morrow / Eldrift / Mynewsdesk.

Norwegian firms Morrow Batteries and Eldrift have announced a non-binding offtake agreement for 1.5GWh of Morrow’s lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries.

The agreement sees Eldrift, a new battery storage system solutions firm, commit to buying 1.5GWh of Morrow’s batteries starting in 2024 when the latter’s gigafactory starts production.

Morrow Batteries is building a LFP battery cell production facility in Arendal, Norway, which will have a 1GWh annual production capacity in its first phase. In its second phase, Morrow plans to increase that to 43GWh, by 2028.

“We are excited to partner with a battery energy storage company on the rise as we continue to develop our unique battery technology,” said Lars Christian Bacher, CEO of Morrow Batteries, who took the helm in November last year after previous incumbent Terje Andersen stepped down in May.

In the past the firm has indicated it was targeting the EV market rather than energy storage systems, although this is its first announced offtake partner that Energy-Storage.news is aware of.

Fellow Norway-based firm Freyr Battery has also ended up targeting the ESS sector in a big way. In an interview last year, CEO Tom Jensen told Energy-Storage.news that half of its eventual production could go to the ESS market, since which it has announced even more offtake deals with energy storage system integrators like Powin and Nidec.

In August 2022 Morrow signed a deal with the Industrial Development Corporation of Norway (SIVA) to kickstart construction of the site while in February that year it got a NOK25 million grant (US$2.3 million) from the government of Norway for the project.

It is also working with North American lithium-ion battery recycling firm Li-Cycle to set up a lithium-ion battery recycling plant in Norway.

Eldrift is a recently-formed company, part of NMI Holding, which offers mobile charging solutions for EVs and industrial processes, as well as behind-the-meter ESS systems.

A render of Morrow’s gigafactory in Arendal, Norway. Image: Morrow Batteries.

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Melissa Seixas

Duke Energy Florida says its first floating solar array pilot will begin construction later this month in Polk County.

The almost 1-MW floating solar array will feature more than 1,800 floating solar modules and occupy approximately 2 acres of water surface on an existing cooling pond at the Duke Energy Hines Energy Complex in Bartow.

“We’re excited to get hands-on experience with Duke Energy Florida’s first floating solar project at one of our own power plant sites,” says Melissa Seixas, Duke Energy Florida state president. “Unique pilots like floating solar are helping us better understand the capabilities of innovative clean energy technologies that can benefit our Florida customers and communities now and in the future.”

Crews will construct and assemble the module floating system on land in segments before securing it with anchors in the water. The project will take approximately five to six months.

The pilot is part of Duke Energy’s Vision Florida program, which is designed to test innovative projects such as microgrids and battery energy storage, among others, to prepare the power grid for a clean energy future.

Duke Energy Florida, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, owns 10,500 MW of energy capacity, supplying electricity to 1.9 million residential, commercial and industrial customers across a 13,000-square-mile service area in Florida.

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Electriq Power’s Power Pod2 as it would look in a customer’s garage. Image: Electriq Power.

Electriq Power, a US provider of battery storage solutions for residential and small business customers, has secured a deal that could be worth more than US$300 million.

The company designs and manufactures a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) lithium-ion battery storage system, Power Pod 2, which in addition to storing onsite generated solar energy and providing backup power, can participate in automated demand response (ADR) programmes in Electriq Power’s home state of California.

Last September, Electriq Power said that its fleet of battery systems played a role in helping keep lights on during heatwaves as California’s CAISO grid strained to deal with high peak demand.

The fresh funding has come from an unnamed “major US clean energy company” which has a platform for solar PV and energy storage design, proposal, and financing across the country, backed by what Electriq Power said is a major player in clean energy financing.

The value given for the 30-month deal is estimated at more than US$300 million, based on the terms of the agreement that cover a large number of customer installations as well as a 25-year joint operations partnership. The deal could encompass a grid services offering.

The announcement comes as Electriq Power prepares to go publicly listed, through a business combination with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) TLG Acquisition One Corp.

That merger was agreed in November last year and is expected to close in the first half of this year. The battery storage company said then that it expects it to get a valuation close to US$500 million and provide up to US$125 million in cash proceeds.

As well as producing Power Pod 2, Electriq Power offers full turnkey solar PV and storage solutions at no upfront cost. The packages include solar PV and battery equipment, software, project development, financing, installation and enrolment in grid services where applicable.

Along with the expected uplift to the US clean energy market as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives, Electriq Power said its business case will be boosted by the introduction of California’s Net Energy Metering (NEM) 3.0 regulations.

NEM 3.0, which has been controversial for many in the solar industry, is California’s latest iteration of the net metering programme, which has seen customers paid an above-market rate for selling electricity to the grid. NEM 3.0 instead cuts that rate down severely and aims to incentivise homeowners to store their energy in batteries and use it themselves or sell to the grid at peak times when it’s most needed.  

 Various residential battery storage companies have said they expect NEM 3.0 to stimulate demand for batteries, with one provider, Sunnova, saying this week it will offer some eligible customers a free system worth US$8,000 when they purchase and install a solar PV system at the same time.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host 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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Onslow Dam at Lake Onslow, New Zealand. A PHES plant at the site was conceptualised by Associate Professor Earl Bardsley from the University of Waikato in 2004. Image: Mohammed Majeed.

The government of New Zealand is considering the viability of pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) among its options to plug energy deficits of between 3TWh and 5TWh.

As the country increases it share of renewable energy on the grid, along with solar PV and wind, hydroelectric power (hydropower) will play a major role in the energy mix.

However, in ‘dry years’, which the government said are hard to predict coming but have occurred roughly twice per decade in the last 20 years, can cause that energy deficit, equivalent to about 10% of New Zealand’s annual energy needs.

That finding comes from NZ Battery Project, which the government set up in 2020 to help tackle that problem and overcome the shortfall issue without the use of fossil fuels.

Minister Megan Woods, who has a portfolio that includes energy and resources as well as infrastructure, said yesterday that NZ Battery Project has been progressed to its next stage, which is to explore the feasibility of pumped hydro energy storage as an option along with what was described as “an alternative, multi-technology approach”.

“Until we address the dry year problem, we will continue to rely on burning expensive and polluting fossil fuels to produce our electricity. That’s bad for the climate and our power bills. Pumped hydro is an ingenious way of storing energy in a big reservoir, which is released into a lower reservoir when more power is needed, like a giant battery,” Woods said.

One PHES project being considered is at Lake Onslow, a large man-made lake in the Otago region of New Zealand’s South Island.

Estimates put the cost of the project, which would take roughly seven years to build, at NZ$15.7 billion (US$9.81 billion), following geotechnical investigation and other work carried out by Te Rōpū Matatau, an engineering consortium headed by Mott MacDonald and appointed by NZ Battery Project.

PHES scheme could cover full 5TWh shortfall

Some media outlets jumped on that cited cost announcement – while minister Megan Woods had acknowledged the capital cost had risen from an earlier estimate of NZ$13.5 billion, albeit with a higher operating cost included – both figures were significantly higher than the NZ$4 billion quoted in a 2006 study.

That study however, was described as a “desktop study” developed by the government’s Interim Climate Change Commission, and the scheme currently being explored would be considerably larger than the 2006 plan.

In fact the NZ$15.7 billion estimate would be against a reference case in which the Lake Onslow scheme could provide the entire 5TWh upper range figure, meeting the entire 10% shortfall from one single project.

“We always knew that any dry year battery storage solution will require significant investment, that’s why it’s important we thoroughly test these scenarios and get it right,” Woods said.

“Now some more detailed work has been done we have a much clearer picture of the projected costs which differ significantly from the 2006 high level costings. The next phase will be to dig even further before we look at spending such a huge amount of money, but one thing we do know is that doing nothing to plan for climate change is not an option.”

The Te Rōpū Matatau studies represent part of Phase 1 of the NZ Battery Project, with Phase 2 set to look at funding and financing models, should the Lake Onslow option continue to progress through the required stages.

Other options being considered for New Zealand, according to Woods, are biomass, flexible geothermal and hydrogen, along the possibility of a smaller PHES scheme.

While PHES could be a solution for long-duration energy storage (LDES) for New Zealand’s energy networks, in terms of shorter duration facilities New Zealand currently only has two grid-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) projects in operation so far, both of a megawatt output each with around 2-hour duration.

Meanwhile a much larger BESS, at 100MW/200MWh is currently under construction through state-owned utility Meridian Energy. Saft is supplying the BESS equipment for that project, Ruakākā Battery Energy Storage System. Construction was cleared to proceed late last year, as reported by Energy-Storage.news.

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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Infracapital invested in Infram through Infracapital Greenfield Partners. Image: Infracaptital

Independent power producer Amarenco has purchased a 90% stake in PV developer Infram from investment company M&G’s infrastructure equity investment arm Infracapital.

Both Amarenco and Infracapital agreed on a joint venture (JV) in January 2017 with a 19MW operational project and two seed projects, with 25MW combined, in the late stages of construction. According to Infram, it constructed a portfolio of 220 sites with a capacity of over 125MW from an initial operational portfolio of 19MW.

Infram focuses on building roof-mounted PV solar panels placed on top of newly-built barns and greenhouses to be used by local French farmers. Infracapital invested in Infram through Infracapital Greenfield Partners I (IGP I), with a strategy of building, delivering and operating essential greenfield infrastructure.

“Infram has an important role to play in providing affordable and clean renewable energy to address growing energy demands and reduce CO2 emissions. We look forward to seeing the business’s further expansion under Amarenco and Infram’s management team over the coming years,” said Michele Armanini, greenfield managing director of Infracapital.

Apart from this transaction, Amarenco has also raised €300 million (US$317.75 million), which enabled asset management firm Arjun Infrastructure Partners to acquire a minority stake in the company.

The new round of financing will help Amarenco expand its solar, energy storage and agrivoltaic infrastructure, focusing on corporate offtakers by collaborating with them to achieve their net carbon ambitions and work on their long term power price hedging strategies.

This story first appeared on PV Tech.

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Eku Energy’s Head of Technologies EMEA Andy Hadland, second from left, at the Energy Storage Summit in London last month. Image: Solar Media.

The European Commission has cleared an investment by Canadian pension fund BCI into Eku Energy, a new utility-scale BESS platform launched by Macquarie last year.

The deal was approved last week (10 March) by the Director-General for Competition at the EC, the EU’s executive arm. Global investor Macquarie only launched Eku Energy in November last year through its Green Investment Group (GIG) arm, reported by Energy-Storage.news at the time.

That was quickly followed by Canada-based pension fund manager British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI) announced it was acquiring an interest in Eku Energy in January 2023. The EC’s approval described the deal as the two firms acquiring “…joint control over the whole of the undertaking…” of Eku Energy.

The new platform has 190MWh of projects in late-stage development with a total pipeline of 3GWh in the UK, Australia, Japan, and Europe.

The 190MWh refers to projects which were already in development by GIG prior to forming Eku which were wrapped into the new entity alongside the 3GWh pipeline. Those are a 40MW/40MWh BESS project in England it acquired in June 2021 and a 150MW/150MWh BESS at a former fossil fuel site in Australia.

Financial terms of the deal or Eku Energy were not disclosed in the companies’ announcements. However, the EC’s minimum size threshold for looking at deals in this way is spelt out in this document.

Speaking in January, interim CEO of Eku Chris Morisson said: “We are delighted to receive the backing of BCI. BCI’s investment recognises the quality of our team and platform, as well as the size of the opportunity for battery storage technology as the shift to clean energy accelerates.”

“We look forward to working with teams from Macquarie Asset Management’s Green Investment Group and BCI as we develop our global pipeline of opportunities in battery storage and establish Eku Energy as a leading contributor to the energy transition.”

The company’s Head of Technologies EMEA Andy Hadland was amongst the speakers at last month’s Energy Storage Summit in London, where he discussed the question of revenues for grid-scale BESS projects.

Read more of our coverage from the Energy Storage Summit 2023.

For more information and to register for next year’s 9th edition of the Summit, taking place 21, 22 February 2024 in London, visit the official website.

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Domestic and international battery manufacturers have been supported by the European Commission’s European Battery Alliance to date, but the latest announcements aim to provide a framework to boost industrial competitiveness and accelerate the EU’s energy transition. Pictured is a lithium battery cell produced in Sweden by Northvolt, a European startup supported by the Alliance. Image: Northvolt.

The European Commission’s proposed Net Zero Industry Act was published today, and the categorisation of energy storage technologies included is a “huge victory,” one source said.

A key part of the European Union (EU) Green Deal Industrial Plan, the Act will create “a regulatory environment that allows us to scale up the clean energy transition quickly,” according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who announced it earlier today.

The Green Deal Industrial Plan is being formulated to stimulate economic activity in the bloc’s clean energy sectors, and is basically considered the EU’s response to the US’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

While an earlier leaked draft of the Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA) had stipulated a target for 85% of batteries deployed annually in the European Union to be domestically manufactured by 2030, it had been short of explicitly mentioning energy storage technologies.

In Article 3 of today’s proposal, which covers definitions of net-zero technologies, “electricity and heat storage technologies” is included for the purposes of the Act’s regulation, along with renewable energy technologies, renewable fuels, heat pumps, grid technologies and others like electrolysers and fuel cells, small modular nuclear reactors, carbon capture and storage.

The late inclusion of energy storage was hailed as a “huge victory,” by one industry source Energy-Storage.news spoke to.

The source said however that they were unsure what the significance will be overall once the Act and Green Deal Industrial Plan are voted on and adopted, but speculated that it could mean EU Member States “will have an easier time providing state funding to European based energy storage supply chains”.

The broader Green Deal Plan also encompasses the EU’s efforts to reform its Electricity Market Design (EMD), which has also included explicit mention of support for energy storage and been welcomed by the industry, as well as the Critical Raw Materials Act, which von der Leyen also announced today in its proposed form.

The Critical Raw Materials Act takes measures to “significantly improve the refining, processing and recycling of critical raw materials here in Europe,” the president said today.

“Raw materials are vital for manufacturing key technologies for our twin transition – like wind power generation, hydrogen storage or batteries. And we’re strengthening our cooperation with reliable trading partners globally to reduce the EU’s current dependencies on just one or a few countries,” von der Leyen said.

More to follow…

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Pedro Azagra

AVANGRID, a sustainable energy company and part of the Iberdrola Group, has begun construction on two new solar farms in Texas and Ohio. These sites will generate 523.5 MW of power.

“With solar projects like True North and Powell Creek, we are strengthening our mission of helping the U.S. meet its ambitious clean energy goals,” says Pedro Azagra, CEO of AVANGRID. “These solar farms, and many more throughout the U.S., will also boost local economies by creating quality jobs while providing clean, affordable and renewable energy for business and communities.”

True North, under development in Falls County and AVANGRID’s first solar project in Texas, will generate 321 MW of renewable energy once it reaches commercial operations by early 2025. During its construction and operation, True North will create over 200 local jobs, and is expected to pay over $40 million in property taxes over 25 years.

Powell Creek, a 202.5 MW solar farm under construction in Putnam County, Ohio, is expected to generate clean energy to power more than 30,000 homes per year and will create up to 400 jobs during its construction process. Additional local revenue to communities resulting from this project exceeds $38 million over the life of the facility.

With more than 8.6 GW of installed renewable capacity, the company has a pipeline of more than 25 GW under development, encompassing solar, onshore wind, offshore wind and battery energy storage

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