The solar and storage project will eliminate the need for costly infrastructure upgrades. Image: Nexamp / National Grid.

US community solar and storage provider Nexamp is providing a co-located facility as a non-wires alternative to a substation in New York state.

The Watertown Renewables at the Coffeen substation in Watertown project pairs an 8.4MW solar PV array with a 31MWh battery energy storage system. The BESS is made up of 10 Tesla Megapack units, the EV giant’s utility-scale product.

The substation is run by the US subsidiary of the UK’s National Grid and the project will eliminate the need for additional transmission lines or substation upgrades. The project has been engineered to allow National Grid to call on the system for up to 5.7MW/29MWh up to 25 times per year, either from the BESS or the solar PV.

The project will also serve local residents through Nexamp’s community solar programme, allowing them to save on energy bills while delivering renewable energy to the grid. It is expected to be completed early next year.

“This project is significant because it represents a number of important firsts,” explained Chris Clark, chief development officer, Nexamp. “It is our first NWA (non-wires alternative) project and is the result of a lot of hard work and collaboration between Nexamp and National Grid.”

The company said it has dozens of other solar and storage projects in operation across the Northeast and elsewhere in the US. It recently completed two energy storage projects co-located with existing solar PV in Massachusetts, as reported by Energy-Storage.news.

Energy-Storage.news also recently interviewed the company’s VP for energy storage, Mark Frigo.

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SunPower, a residential solar technology and energy services provider, has expanded its portfolio of energy storage products with the launch of a 19.5 kWh and 39 kWh SunVault. These new battery configurations offer increased energy density and maximize space within the battery as compared to previous versions of SunVault, providing the ability to store more energy into a single box. For customers, this means they can purchase more energy storage for less money and fit it in less wall space, with the option to build a larger system as the home’s energy needs evolve. SunPower has also made design upgrades that can make SunVault faster and easier to install.

“Every homeowner has unique energy storage needs – some want the peace of mind that they can power essentials during a blackout like a refrigerator and WiFi, while others want the flexibility to also charge an EV or run their air conditioning,” says Nate Coleman, chief products officer at SunPower. “With these new storage sizes and higher power output through multiple inverters, SunVault’s modular configuration allows customers to get the storage size they need today with the reassurance that they can grow their system as their home energy requirements change.”

Homeowners can manage their SunVault energy storage with the mySunPower app to see how much energy is available during peak-demand to reserve for an outage or lower energy costs by using stored energy. Further, all SunVault energy storage systems are backed by a 10-year warranty, regardless of how much the battery is charged and drained over time.

With this launch, SunVault is now available in five configurations: 13 kWh, 19.5 kWh, 26 kWh, 39 kWh and 52 kWh. Some of these options include multiple inverters. SunVault configurations with multiple inverters and storage capacity of 26 kWh and more have the potential to power the whole home, so customers don’t have to choose between comfort and essential loads during an outage.

The new SunVault sizes will be available beginning early 2023.

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Ojjo, a provider of next-generation solar foundations, has closed a $40 million Series C funding round led by NGP ETP, the energy transition investing platform of NGP, with Ajax Strategies also participating. In addition, James Wallis, partner at NGP, has joined Ojjo’s board of directors.

The new funding will accelerate Ojjo’s growth and execution on its 9 GW active project pipeline. Ojjo’s patented Earth Truss System offers a fast and efficient means of securing ground mount solar systems. The company’s system has been contracted or constructed in over 1.6 GW of solar projects to date, including on the nation’s largest standalone solar and storage project, Gemini Solar. Ojjo has previously raised a total of $27 million across two prior funding rounds, with participation from Cthulhu Ventures and other investors.

“We’re thrilled to welcome our investors, NGP ETP and Ajax, who have long shared Ojjo’s vision for accelerating the growing and vibrant solar industry,” says Mike Miskovsky, chairman and CEO of Ojjo. “For too long, our industry has had to make do with pile foundations that were never designed for solar applications – often resulting in avoidable project costs and labor inefficiencies. As we enter the era of TW-scale solar, our industry will increasingly require optimized, solar-specific mounting and installation hardware. This investment is the critical next step to scaling Ojjo’s innovative technology and speeding the nation’s transition to solar.”

“Solar foundations represent a major untapped opportunity in the industry. We believe that Ojjo’s experienced team is perfectly positioned to deliver innovation, automation, and cost savings at a time when the industry needs it most,” states James Wallis, partner at NGP. “NGP’s extensive portfolio and deep expertise – spanning both traditional oil and gas as well as energy transition segments – allowed us to quickly recognize the benefits of Ojjo’s structural design and drilling-process innovations, resulting in dramatic reductions in pre-drill and remediation requirements. We are excited to offer our financial support and strategic guidance as Ojjo continues to expand and bring value to this market.”

“We’ve been early supporters of Ojjo’s team and technology, and our follow-on investment was a natural fit for our shared vision of delivering revolutionary solutions to solve climate change,” comments Matt Rogers, Ajax’s operating partner. “The timing couldn’t be better for solar innovations such as Ojjo with the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which enables consistent growth over the next decade for domestic renewable energy production. Ojjo has all the necessary capabilities to help the industry scale to take full advantage of this unique and timely opportunity.”

“Ojjo’s Earth Truss systems have been proven in the field on hundreds of megawatts of projects, in a variety of soil conditions. It’s clear the industry is hungry for technologies that can deliver project-level cost savings relative to today’s commodity offerings,” mentions Helena Kimball, president of Ojjo. “We have worked hard to establish the supply chain sophistication, drilling machine fleet uptime, and the field support to ensure our EPC customers have rewarding experiences installing Ojjo foundations. We are grateful to our investors for recognizing Ojjo’s advantage, and for providing us the financial stability to scale well into the future.”

Ojjo provides its Earth Truss hardware, field engineering services and automated Truss Driver machines to solar developers, EPCs and their foundation subcontractors. In addition, Ojjo has partnered with solar tracker manufacturers to develop streamlined, fully compatible hardware, further reducing steel componentry and overall system costs.

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Greg Shambo

Borrego, an EPC and O&M provider for large-scale solar and energy storage projects in the United States, has launched a new O&M customer portal. The web-based application gives operations and maintenance customers immediately actionable insights into project data, cases, reports and service contracts in one central location. The customer portal is available to all Borrego O&M customers, with access and training provided during the project onboarding process.

It provides Borrego customers with instant visibility into day-to-day service status across all of their projects. The portal features project data, in-depth reporting, service contracts, historical service details, and information on cases and work orders, including whether Borrego is waiting for customer permission to move forward with work.

“Having access to project-level O&M service details and status 24/7 will enable asset owners to be more productive and ensure high availability, particularly in the case of portfolio customers managing dozens or even hundreds of projects,” states Greg Shambo, VP of sales and business development for O&M for Borrego. “Customers trust Borrego O&M to provide real-time transparency and communication, and the customer portal takes that relationship to another level.”

The portal’s open API platform works with existing customer systems. Data from Salesforce.com and other software services can be integrated into a single place and customers can add portal data into other programs. The system architecture enables further expansion of the portal with rapid development cycles.

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Image: Gotion via Twitter.

US solar and storage EPC and O&M company Borrego has entered into a master supply agreement (MSA) with Gotion High-Tech for the latter’s DC block battery energy storage equipment, starting in 2023.

The MSA will provide Borrego with gigawatt-hours of secure, fixed-price volume capacity of Gotion’s product, available for customer delivery starting next year, the company said.

Borrego is a pure-play engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) and operation & maintenance (O&M) provider for solar PV and energy storage, having recently sold its project development arm to investment firm ECP (which then re-named the business New Leaf Energy).

A press release described Gotion as a “global tier-one vertically integrated stationary and EV battery and storage system manufacturer”.

Its energy storage modular solution uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells, which is growing in popularity for stationary energy storage thanks to better safety features and – before the spike in lithium carbonate prices – lower cost than nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries.

John duPont, vice president of business development and operations at Borrego said: “We have a multi-gigawatt-hour vendor pipeline of storage products at fixed pricing available for utility and distributed generation projects requiring delivery in 2023-2025.”

“This locked-in capacity will help our customers avoid expected supply chain constraints when the Inflation Reduction Act kicks in.”

Industry observers expect the Inflation Reduction Act, recently passed by US president Joe Biden, to boost both the upstream and downstream energy storage sectors domestically.

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Karl Miller

Jingoli Power has launched a new solar engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) division as part of its renewable energy services portfolio. Jingoli Power LLC is a professional services provider for complex electric utility construction projects and a subsidiary of Joseph Jingoli and Son, Inc, a 100-year-old privately held New Jersey-based construction firm.

Jingoli Power’s EPC Solar unit is currently supporting the execution of two U.S. EPC projects with Lightsource bp and plans to take on utility-scale solar projects up to 500 MW. The Jingoli team is a mix of engineers, trade supervisors, project managers, military veterans and utility line workers. The company’s core leadership team has worked together for over 15 years.

“Our team is optimally positioned to deliver on the growing demand for competitive and reliable utility-scale solar development,” states Karl Miller, CEO of Jingoli Power. “Our crews are eager to be part of helping to build the grid of the future.”

In communities where it has active solar projects, Jingoli Power will also provide job training and apprenticeships to residents and teens interested in STEM careers through its Competitive Edge program, which is designed to ensure a project’s investment dollars remain in the community to build a stronger local economy and workforce. Through Competitive Edge, Jingoli Power also recruits minority- and women-owned subcontractors, offers incentives for subcontractors to hire a diverse local employee base, and prioritizes purchasing from community-based suppliers.

“Not only can we help power our way to a clean energy future, but we can do so in an equitable and inclusive way to open up new job opportunities and career paths to new sources of talent and innovation,” adds Miller. “It’s an incredibly exciting and rewarding time to be in the electric construction industry.”

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Powin’s Centipede modular stacked energy storage system. Image: Powin.

Battery energy storage system integrator Powin has acquired EKS Energy, a provider of advanced power electronics and energy management solutions for energy storage and renewables.

Oregon-based Powin said the acquisition will enable it to deliver a complete AC energy storage platform that can interface with multiple generation assets, is capable of advanced control functionality to support microgrid applications and comply with the most challenging grid codes.

EKS Energy describes itself as a designer, manufacturer and system integrator of advanced power electronics and energy management solutions (EMS) for distributed energy generation/storage and grid management.

It appears to either be a carve-out or a re-brand of the company GPTech (Greenpower Technologies Group), which was founded in Sevilla, Spain. EKS/GPTech has deployed battery storage systems in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Chile while GPTech had revenue of €45 million in 2021 (US$44.5 million), according to Spanish outlets.

GPTech was in the top 10 energy storage inverter suppliers in IHS Markit’s Energy Storage (PCS) – Market Overview report for 2020.

The deal adds EKS’ Power Conversion System and Power Plant Controller to Powin’s offering, while other new products include PV inverters, DC-to-DC converters and multi-port inverters, which maximise performance and profits for utility-scale solar-plus-storage projects.

In an interview with Energy-Storage.news back in May, Powin CEO Geoff Brown agreed that providing a software package that covered renewable generation assets as well as energy storage was essential for system integrators.

When asked if the company would build these capabilities in-house or through acquisitions, at the time he said: “We’re evaluating all options but I would not necessarily agree that it’s a necessity to do it inorganically”.

In a press release announcing the acquisition, Brown said: “This landmark deal accelerates our mission to building the grid of the future by delivering safe, scalable and integrated storage solutions.”

Powin has gone through several changes in its financial and shareholding structure in the last few months. In June, it sold a minority stake to an investment arm of Samsung Group. Then, just a month later, it raised US$135 million from existing investors Trilantic, Energy Impact Partners and new investor GIC, the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund.

In project news, in August it entered into a partnership with a developer in Australia to deploy over 1.7GWh of its battery storage solutions across the country over a two-year period.

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Avantus’ Michael Foster, Fluence’s Kiran Kuraswamy, Lightsourcebp’s Sara Cayal, Form Energy’s Molly Bales and Carrie Bellamy of Malta Inc. Image: Andy Colthorpe / Solar Media

Lightsourcebp is considering which long-duration energy storage technologies would be best suited for integration with its US solar power portfolio.

Sara Cayal, global head of PV integrated solutions at the solar developer, was speaking on a panel discussion on long-duration energy storage (LDES) held on Day One of the RE+ 2022 clean energy industry trade event in California.

Recently ranked top among global utility-scale solar developers by Mercom, Lightsourcebp has been looking to add energy storage to its solar farms, Cayal said, and supportive policies in the US mean non-lithium LDES technologies could be chosen.

“We are looking at adding to storage to our solar farms; that can be battery storage, it could be green hydrogen,” Cayal said, adding that “this is exactly the time [when] we need to discuss long duration because we have incentives, and we now have the power to make it happen”.

Cayal later in the discussion noted that in regions like Texas’ ERCOT market, many megawatt-hours of renewable power are lost to curtailment during periods of excess generation, which LDES could be suited to solve.

As with some other sources Energy-Storage.news spoke to at the event, Cayal also added that “competing with electric vehicles (EVs)” for battery supply isn’t working, referring to the major cause of supply chain constraints for lithium-ion.

The session’s moderator, Michael Foster at developer Avantus – recently rebranded from 8minute Solar Energy – asked the participants for their definitions of long duration. Cayal and Fluence VP of growth and head of commercial Kiran Kuraswamy agreed that it would broadly be eight hours or more.

Anything over eight hours “goes beyond the constraint” of lithium-ion technology, Cayal said. When pressed by Foster whether that meant lithium would still be competitive at eight hours, said that when it came to evaluating technologies, it might be better to not compare purely in terms of hours stored and discharged.

The durability of some LDES technologies to perform many duty cycles over a long lifetime presents an opportunity to reduce the amount of planning required for augmentation, for example.

Molly Bales of Form Energy said different use cases will require types of energy storage, from the shorter duration applications performed by lithium-ion up to eight hours and diurnal storage beyond that, to storage effective over many hours, or even days.

Form Energy is developing and commercialising a proprietary battery technology based on an iron and air chemistry, designed to offer up to 100 hours of storage. Multi-day storage offers a different use case based on resiliency and reliability of energy supply, rather than daily market participation or peak shifting, Bales said.

Fluence’s Kuraswamy said that virtual transmission, where energy storage is used to directly enhance the transmission grid and ease congestion, could be a promising application for longer-duration storage.

The energy storage system integrator and technology provider is technology agnostic and continues to evaluate new technologies, Kuraswamy said. What alternative technologies to lithium-ion need to do, is prove not just that they are competitive for the applications lithium already does well, but that they can provide answers to applications lithium is not suited for.

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Jason Whitaker

Shoals Technologies Group Inc., a provider of electrical balance of systems (EBOS) solutions for solar, storage and electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, and utility-scale solar tracker company Nextracker LLC, have unveiled a new North-South Big Lead Assembly (BLA) trunk bus product.

To address challenges associated with site access, Shoals and Nextracker have collaborated to innovate a new North-South BLA trunk product, which is specially optimized for NX Horizon tracker rows. In this North-South BLA product, the trunk bus runs parallel, rather than perpendicular, to the torque tube and transition boxes along the North-South row step down the size of the trunk bus along the tracker rows. Without any structures to impede site access, ongoing power plant O&M is simpler and faster.

Compared to conventional in-field North-South wiring methods, Shoals North-South BLA delivers a 43% savings in PV wiring installation labor, a 60% savings in DC wiring O&M, and a 0.25% increase in energy yield due to less DC wiring voltage drop.

“We are proud to partner with Nextracker to make our leading solar ecosystems work optimally together, resulting in utility-scale solar that is more cost effective for our customers,” says Jason Whitaker, CEO of Shoals. “We will continue to innovate collaboratively with Nextracker to enhance our North-South BLA product to further optimize its architecture and installation methodologies, enabling even more cost savings.”

“This collaboration with Shoals provides a critical solution to an industry-wide challenge,” states Dan Shugar, founder and CEO of Nextracker. “We are excited this North-South BLA product is now available, helping more projects realize the long-term benefit of our independent row trackers.”

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Mukesh Sethi

Panasonic Eco Systems North America, a division of Panasonic Corporation of North America, has unveiled two new lines of all-black compact EverVolt solar modules. The new 430W/420W HK Black Series panels, with half-cut cells and heterojunction technology with gapless connections, offer the most powerful modules in the company’s portfolio. Adding to Panasonic’s suite of modules made with Passivated Emitter and Rear Contact (PERC) technology, the new 400W/390W VK Black Series modules provide eco-conscious homeowners with a greater range of solar options at a more accessible price point.

The 430W and 420W EverVolt HK Black Series modules have efficiency ratings of 22.2% and 21.7%, respectively, allowing homeowners to utilize high levels of power production while using less roof space. Homeowners can benefit from greater energy production throughout the day, including on the hottest days in the warmest climates, due to the modules’ industry-leading temperature coefficient of 0.26%/°C. With one of the industry’s lowest annual degradation rates, the Panasonic panels are expected to provide power output of at least 92% in the 25th year after installation.

Panasonic’s new 400W/390W VK Black Series modules, made with half-cut cells and PERC technology, have module efficiency of 20.5% and 20%, respectively, and power output of at least 84.8% after 25 years.

“Recent news that homeowners will be able to take advantage of the Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC), is making solar and battery storage an increasingly attractive investment” says Mukesh Sethi, director of solar and energy storage at Panasonic Eco Systems North America. “With over 40 years’ experience in the solar industry and more than a century of innovation, Panasonic is well-positioned to be a long-term partner to eco-conscious homeowners, whether they are considering solar solutions for the first time or looking to upgrade their current system.”

“We continue to develop and introduce to the market new solutions so that our valued installers are equipped with a wide array of wattage, sizes and price options to grow their business and meet the diverse needs of consumers who rely on their expertise,” adds Sethi.

Both new models are covered under Panasonic’s EverVolt AllGuard All System Warranty when purchased with EverVolt ESS 2.0, which covers solar panels and battery storage when bundled together. The EverVolt AllGuard All System Warranty covers product performance and labor across all major system components, including 25 years of coverage for Panasonic solar panels, 25 years for the racking system, 10 years for the inverter and 10 years for Panasonic EverVolt 2.0 ESS. If purchased independently of EverVolt ESS 2.0, the modules are covered under Panasonic’s Triple Guard and AllGuard warranties.

Both module series will be available Spring 2023. EverVolt ESS 2.0 will begin shipping in January 2023.

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