Rendering of a large-scale Energy Vault project. The only megawatt-scale system the company has built to date is a 5MW demonstrator in Switzerland, based on its old design concept of cranes mounted onto towers swinging large blocks in the air. Image: Energy Vault.

Energy Vault has got its New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) listing after the gravity-based energy storage company’s merger with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Novus Capital Corporation II completed. 

The SPAC’s shareholders voted to approve the business combination at a meeting last week. Energy Vault shares list on the NYSE today (14 February) under the ticker ‘NRGV’. Its warrants list as ‘NRGV WS’. 

The combination raised around US$235 million in gross proceeds for the company. US$195 million of that is a private investment in public equity (PIPE) commitment from Korea Zinc and Atlas Renewable — strategic partners in Energy Vault — along with a host of funds and accounts including Softbank Investment Advisors. 

On those two strategic partners, Korea Zinc had upped its PIPE commitment from US$100 million to US$150 million, Energy-Storage.news reported in January. Korea Zinc saw Energy Vault’s novel technology as a possible means to decarbonise its own extraction and refinery operations, including Sun Metals, a subsidiary in Australia. 

Atlas Renewable meanwhile partnered with Energy Vault on commercialising the technology in China, with a 100MWh project claimed to be set to begin construction in the second quarter of 2022 in Jiangsu Province.

Altas Renewable’s main shareholder is China Tianying Inc, a waste processing and recycling group. Atlas counts Jeb Bush, brother of former US president George W Bush, as its chairman. Energy Vault said a US$50 million technology licensing deal had been made between the two, as well as a US$50 million PIPE commitment.

In an interview with IPO Edge a few days before the vote, Energy Vault CEO Robert Piconi said the principles of the gravity storage tech mirror those of pumped hydro energy storage, except that instead of water going downhill, an “energy elevator” is taking large composite block weights up and down to turn motors to discharge energy.  

“This is all with fully automated AI and computerised control software,” Piconi said. 

In forms filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Novus Capital Corporation II said it had been seeking an investment opportunity to acquire a target company from early 2021 before its announcement in September 2021 that Energy Vault had been selected. 

Novus noted that the gravity storage technology does not have the same geological siting constraints as pumped hydro and is designed to be less at risk of supply chain challenges than other energy storage technologies like batteries. 

However in a Form S-4 filed in October last year, Energy Vault outlined that its technology and design of its large-scale energy storage systems had not yet been finalised and that it did face challenges in making those cost-competitive.

The merger gives the combined entity a value of US$1.07 billion based on a price of US$10 per share. 

An Energy Vault representative told Energy-Storage.news the proceeds raised, along with a recently closed US$107 million Series C funding round, provided Energy Vault with more capital than it anticipated requiring in its business plan to deploy units and execute a growth strategy. 

It’s the latest in a wave of energy storage and related sector companies to go public through SPAC mergers. The last year or so has seen the likes of iron flow battery company ESS Inc, zinc-air battery company Eos, distributed commercial energy storage provider Stem Inc and recycling specialist Li-Cycle all go through the process.

In a March 2021 Guest Blog article for this site, finance expert Charles Lesser at clean energy transaction consultancy Apricum wrote of the high risks and potential pitfalls, as well as rewards, of the SPAC route.

Continue reading

John King

Hyperlight Energy, a developer of Hylux, a concentrated solar power (CSP) technology, has signed an exclusive license agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for its patented receiver design technology. The design improves the performance of linear Fresnel reflector (LFR) receivers used in Hyperlight’s CSP platform.

The improved performance facilitated by NREL’s receiver design, combined with Hyperlight’s low-cost reflector system, will increase the value of the Hylux platform for customers. Hyperlight is prioritizing rapid optimization and deployment of this technology at a time when companies and industries are pushing through the world’s toughest decarbonization challenges.

“We’ve worked in partnership with NREL on our in-house developed world-beating low-cost reflector system for close to a decade,” says John King, CEO and co-founder of Hyperlight Energy. “We’re thrilled to now be executing on our plan to add best-in-class performance to our offering by integrating their proprietary receiver design methodology into Hylux.”

Traditional CSP projects require large quantities of expensive steel to construct, leading to scalability challenges. By contrast, Hyperlight makes Hylux using domestically sourced recyclable plastic. Hylux can be installed on-location and designed to fit a range of industrial settings. The end result is a platform which uses mirrors to capture and reflect the sun’s heat, generating steam to efficiently power industrial processes, manufacturing, oil extraction and more.

“The new technology from NREL offers a breakthrough in design methodology that optimizes optical capture, with no additional cost for the hardware,” states Guangdong Zhu, inventor and senior engineer at NREL. “Up until now, the receiver design process started with an equation followed by a ‘guess-and-check’ approach through optical modeling of multiple iterations of the curve. However, the best way to do it is to use optical modeling from the start and let that tell you the optimal design with no guess work involved. You end up with the same material and production cost, but with a boost in performance for free.”

Continue reading

Freedom Forever’s extensive sales network will use Aurora Solar‘s Sales Mode AI product to deliver accurate solar proposals to homeowners in real time. Sales Mode AI uses proprietary, machine-learning algorithms, trained on millions of 3D roof models, as well as LIDAR and imagery data, to automatically create a 3D solar design in less than 30 seconds.

“We have become one of the fastest-growing residential solar providers because we are always looking for new ways to make our processes more efficient,” says Brett Bouchy, CEO of Freedom Forever. “What’s most exciting about this relationship with Aurora is the impact we can create with this innovative technology – we can deliver an even better customer experience and lower installation costs. Together, we will be able to make solar more accessible and move one step closer to a greener future.”

“We are delighted to team up with Freedom Forever and look forward to seeing hundreds of thousands of homes adopt solar that much faster,” states Samuel Adeyemo, co-founder of Aurora Solar. “Freedom is committed to maintaining the highest standards in solar installation, and with technology like Sales Mode AI they can do that at scale.”

Continue reading

Saticoy, a 100MW/400MWh battery storage project by Arevon, inaugurated last year in California. Image: Arevon Asset Management.

Progress has been made on 1.8GWh of battery energy storage projects in the service areas of California investor-owned utilities (IOUs) San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E).

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) yesterday (10 February) authorised SDG&E to build three battery energy storage system (BESS) facilities totalling 161MW/664MWh. The facilities are expected to be completed in late 2022/early 2023.

Also made public yesterday were further details of the 300MW/1,200MWh Nighthawk BESS project which will be built in PG&E territory, by developers Tenaska and Arevon.

Each of them are part of a series of new projects stemming from CPUC directives to the state’s load serving entities (LSEs), including utilities, to procure additional energy resources to bolster the grid. The state has suffered numerous power shutoffs due to the recently increased wildfire risk and plans to have a zero-carbon electricity system by 2045.

“Investing in advanced technologies like energy storage is critical to advancing our state and region’s aggressive climate goals, including getting to net zero greenhouse gas emissions, with the added benefit of making the energy grid more resilient,” SDG&E Vice President of Energy Innovation Miguel Romero said.

SDGE’s three are the latest in a series of projects which are SDG&E-owned and operated totalling 145MW by end-2022 and around 300MW by end-2023.

CPUC approved engineering procurement and construction (EPC) contracts signed by SDG&E for the 161MW of projects with Mitsubishi, Fluence and one build-own-transfer contract with ConEd Development. The three projects’ estimated total cost was given at US$399.2 million.

Project / LocationTechnologyCounterpartyOutput (MW)Duration/ Capacity (MWh)Contract typeContract lengthPala-Gomez Creek / Pala, California Lithium-ion BESSMitsubishi10MW6 hours / 60MWhEPC10 yearsMelrose / Vista, CaliforniaLithium-ion BESSFluence20MW4 hours / 40MWhEPC10 yearsWestside Canal / Imperial Valley, California Lithium-ion BESSConEdDev131MW4 hours / 524MWhBOT10 years

PG&E for its part has opted for procuring capacity and services from third party-owned BESS projects rather than directly invested and operated ones.

Nighthawk is the second-largest of nine BESS developments totalling 1.6GW/6.4GWh that PG&E announced agreements to procure from last month, the largest of which is an extension to Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility, the biggest in the world. These will bring the company’s BESS capacity to 3,330 MW by mid-2024 with 20% completed and connected to the state grid already.

Developer Tenaska said the Nighthawk project will be connected to a substation at Sycamore Canyon, which receives large amounts of solar generated in the California desert to be distributed to the San Diego area.

The BESS itself will be sited in an existing industrial park and its year-long construction is expected to begin next year.

Tesla Megapack storage systems will be used: Arevon already brought into operation 250MW/1,000MWh of projects in California and Nevada by the end of 2021.

In September Energy-Storage.news reported that the renewable energy company had signed a 2GW/6GWh master supply agreement with Tesla for Megapacks to be used in a portfolio of nine projects Arevon is co-developing with Tenaska across the three California IOUs’ service areas.

SDG&E’s new projects are specifically in response to the CPUC’s Emergency Reliability rulemaking proceeding while PG&E’s nine relate to its June 2021 ‘Decision Requiring Procurement to Address Mid-Term Reliability’. The latter requires LSEs to procure or contract for 11.5GW of additional resources, to begin delivering energy to customers by June 2026, with tranches phasing that in over 2023, 2024 and 2025.

The Mid-Term Reliability ruling has also led to a world-first procurement for long-duration energy storage, with a contract awarded to an eight-hour duration lithium project awaiting approvals.

With its 2023/24 pipeline agreed already, PG&E will issue a phase two competitive selection later this year for resources to start delivering energy over 2025/26.

Continue reading

Powin’s modular Centipede BESS platform will be used for the projects. Image: Powin Energy.

Powin Energy has signed framework agreements with four developers for 5.8GWh of battery storage solutions to be delivered in the 2022-2024 timeframe. 

The Oregon, US-headquartered energy storage system integrator said yesterday that the systems would be deployed at multiple projects in the US and in Taiwan. 

The company, which sources cells and other key components and assembles them into its manufactured battery energy storage system (BESS) solutions, would supply the undisclosed developers with full integrated systems. 

Those would include the battery cells, battery management system (BMS), battery stacks, enclosures, cabling, transformers and inverters as well as software and controls system architecture. 

Powin Energy builds its systems at multiple locations from its own factories as well as through manufacturing partners in China and Taiwan — deciding in 2020 to ramp up production capacity at facilities in the latter territory from 700MWh to 2.5GWh as a counterpoint to political and trade tensions between the US and China. 

More recently, towards the beginning of this year, the company announced a ‘nearshoring’ deal to establish scaled production closer to its largely US customer base. Powin’s partnership with design, manufacture and supply chain specialist Celestica will see Powin units manufactured in Monterrey, Mexico.  

The majority of the 5.8GWh supply announced yesterday would be manufactured at that site, the company claimed. They will also all be based on Powin’s recently-launched Centipede hardware platform. 

Centipede enables the easy combination of multiple Powin Stack750E BESS units, with up to 200MWh of capacity able to be fitted into a single acre footprint. Even prior to the latest agreement, Powin had already logged more than 2GWh of orders for Centipede — equivalent to the amount of systems the company has deployed in its history to date — from a total contracted pipeline of 5GWh of orders. 

If the new framework agreements solidify into solid order intake, Powin would commission the systems and provide long-term services from operations and maintenance (O&M), to augmentation and 20-year extended warranty support. 

“With the significant strides that Powin has made as a company in the previous 12 months, these agreements signify that we have built a superior level of trust within the energy storage industry,” Powin CEO Geoff Brown said. 

“These agreements are with some of the industry’s most well-respected developers with healthy pipelines of projects located near some of the largest power hubs throughout the American West and Northeast, as well as Asia.”

The company sources the majority of its lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells from China, including through two large master supply agreements with CATL and EVE, but has said that it would like to see more dispersed production capacity closer to customer demand, especially in the US. 

Powin Energy executive VP Danny Lu took part in our recent Year in Review 2021 interview blog series, offering more insights into the company’s strategies and how it views the energy storage market of today.

Continue reading

Fluence said some extra costs were associated with the roll out of its sixth generation battery storage solution, the Fluence Cube, launched in 2020. Image: Fluence.

Fluence has reaffirmed its guidance of US$1.1 billion to US$1.3 billion revenues for the 2022 financial year, with the company’s CEO claiming expectations were exceeded in the first quarter “despite short-term headwinds”.

The energy storage technology and services provider said ongoing product shipping delays and temporary closures of customer sites are expected to be resolved sooner rather than later when issuing its Q1 2022 financial results this week.

It also highlighted that historically, a large portion of its customers’ projects come online in the peak summer months, subjecting its business to a seasonality which sees about 60% of its annual revenue recorded in the third and fourth quarters of the year. 

In the company’s fiscal Q1 2022, which ended 31 December 2021, it recorded US$175 million revenues, which was a 50% increase on the same period of 2021.

It signed contracts for 600MW of energy storage products, a 525% increase from Q1 2021, which CEO Manuel Perez Dubuc said in a conference call to discuss results was in excess of expectations for what has historically been one of the quieter periods of the year as the company said revenues are on track for the full-year guidance offered back in December. 

Fluence has also diversified into optimisation services for renewable energy as well as energy storage assets and added 250MW of contracts in the first quarter for its Fluence IQ automated bidding platform.

The 1.1GW Fluence IQ deal with AES Corporation reported this week and booked after the end of the quarter, meant targeted 2022 revenues for Fluence IQ contracts have already been achieved, the CEO pointed out. 

The company floated its IPO in October last year, which raised just under a billion dollars and valued Fluence at US$4.7 billion, but meant it immediately paid back outstanding debts of about US$100 million and paid other associated costs of the transaction. 

A net loss of US$111 million was recorded for the quarter, nearly 10 times Q1 2021’s US$12 million net loss and adjusted EBITDA US$-43 million, nearly four times the US$-11 million recorded in the same quarter of 2021.

Raw materials indices-based pricing to be introduced

Shipping delays and customer site closures resulting from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic took their toll.

Chief financial officer Dennis Fehr said that US$41 million of non-recurring expenses were incurred during the quarter, which included US$31.3 million from project charges and other costs attributable to the pandemic’s effects, as well as US$5.6 million excess shipping and other non-recurring costs. 

Some of the other losses were due to the cost of rolling out Fluence’s sixth generation energy storage products, accounting for US$13 million costs, which Fehr said meant gross profits were negative. 

The company also paid US$60 million in advance for battery equipment to secure supplies amid ongoing supply chain disruptions. 

CEO Perez Dubuc noted that inflationary pressures and raw material price increases are a “concern for many in our industry,” although Fluence’s current backlog — US$1.9 billion as of 31 December 2021 including US$1.6 billion in energy storage orders and US$0.3 billion in recurring revenues from Fluence IQ and energy storage services — has been hedged by fixed price contracts signed with suppliers and customers, he said. 

Future contracts will include pricing based on raw material indices (RMI), which could minimise exposure to fluctuations in future commodity prices. 

The company also expects new production facilities to come online through contract manufacturers in North America in the fourth quarter of the company’s fiscal year, and in Europe in Q1 2023.

It held cash and cash equivalents of US$632 million as of 31 December 2021 and expects to realise US$125 million of delayed revenue from Q4 fiscal 2020 within the first half of this fiscal year, but expects the total forecast for shipping and pandemic-related non-recurring expenses to be in the range of US$50 million to US$55 million.

In Energy-Storage.news’ recent Year in Review 2021 interview blog series, Manuel Perez Dubuc said that energy storage, like nearly every other industry, had been dealt severe challenges by COVID related to shipping costs.

“Global shipping delays are impacting anyone who wants to bring goods from Asia to the Americas or Europe. While we cannot predict the shipping markets, we’re seeing the situation start to stabilise in terms of price and reliability, and we expect it to normalise by Q4 of the 2022 calendar year,” he said, with Fluence considering it likely to be a “brief speed bump in the clean energy transition”.

Project sizes grow, along with available markets and applications

Fluence is seeing its orders from repeat customers grow in scale as well as number, Perez Dubuc said in the conference call, and the whole energy storage industry grows as sites are “becoming bigger and bigger because the technology has been understood and they (customers) really see the benefit”.

The CEO highlighted the example of a 200MW/200MWh order for four systems in Lithuania, which will help strengthen the transmission network and followed a successful 1MW pilot. In this way energy storage could be a vital tool to ease transmission network congestion and save money on infrastructure build out, with Perez Dubuc name checking Chile, Germany and Vietnam as perfect examples.

Chief product officer Rebecca Boll agreed that the transmission space is one the company sees opportunities begin to open up, as well as newer use cases like data centres. 

Megawatt-hour durations of sales are also increasing independent power producers (IPPs) and utilities are increasingly replacing fossil fuel generation with energy storage and combining energy storage with renewables, Perez Dubuc said. 

Growth is being seen in new geographic regions, Rebecca Boll added, citing the example of India, where Fluence recently announced a forthcoming joint venture (JV) with renewables company ReNew Power. 

Not only do these new regions present new contract opportunities, but as with more established markets like California and Australia, they are expected to move over time from shorter to longer duration energy storage solutions, Boll said, helping to grow the total available market.

Conference call transcript by Seeking Alpha.

Continue reading

An employee runs diagnoses on heliostats at a solar thermal facility in Nevada. Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL

Concentrating solar power (CSP) has long-held promise as a renewable energy technology. To spur CSP industry advancement and achieve an energy cost goal of 5 cents per kWh, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Gen3 CSP program funds research to explore the potential of several heat transfer mediums. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) researchers are contributing to this effort, tackling several challenges related to the use of one potential medium – liquid-hot molten salt – for energy transfer and storage.

CSP uses mirrors, or heliostats, to harness the power of the sun by heating and storing an inexpensive medium such as sand, rocks, or molten salt for on-demand energy dispatch.

Three years ago, the Gen3 program established three pathways to potentially reach the CSP energy cost goal: a liquid pathway (exploring use of molten salt as a heat transfer material, led by NREL), a particle pathway (using sand-like particles as a heat transfer material, led by Sandia National Laboratories), and a third pathway exploring the use of gas as heat transfer material (led by Brayton Energy).

In March of 2021, DOE down-selected among the three pathways to fund further research into particle-based storage, but also created an opportunity for NREL to further develop the liquid pathway over the next two years.

Craig Turchi leads thermal energy science and technologies research at NREL. He says that molten salts are a desirable option for a heat transfer and storage material – liquids are easy to work with as they can be pumped through pipes and heat exchangers to move around a CSP system. Unfortunately, some practical challenges also remain, which are the focus of current NREL research.

“Everyone initially thought that salt corrosivity would torpedo this effort,” according to Turchi. While easy to move around, salts are also corrosive to the tanks and pipes that hold them. “We actually solved that problem by and large. NREL and partners did a lot of great science on the salt chemistry – how to purify it, how to make it relatively noncorrosive if you control the chemistry, and we demonstrated that in the lab.”

So, corrosivity is not the biggest problem with using molten salts. Instead, the challenge lies in achieving very high temperatures needed for a high-efficiency power plant. The salt’s energy density requires relatively large – and therefore, expensive – storage tanks and one must keep the salts from freezing in the pipes (while thermally stable as a liquid to very high temperature, these salts freeze at a not-so-chilly 400°C).

“We had performed testing to show which materials could work but hadn’t actually built a tank to demonstrate that it did work,” adds Turchi. “Our design is a steel tank, but whereas the current tanks are insulated on the outside, our proposed tank was insulated on the inside to protect the steel.”

DOE awarded NREL $2 million to build a prototype tank to evaluate its integrity when filled with molten salt. The tank is currently being built and will be operated on the mesa above NREL’s Golden, Colo. campus.

There is more than one kind of salt, so NREL’s work developing the Gen3 CSP liquid path also involved selecting and experimenting with new salts. Commercial molten salt systems use nitrate salts; however, these start to degrade once the system reaches a certain temperature. The NREL team wanted to reach higher temperatures to achieve more efficient energy conversion for higher efficiency power plants, so they explored an alternative – chloride salts.

Youyang Zhao is an NREL researcher who has been studying salt chemistry for the Gen3 liquid pathway project for the last three years. Zhao says he started out by finding ways to reduce the impurity levels of industrial salt. Additionally, Zhao says, “We were optimizing the salt composition to lower the melting point of the salt. The lower the melting point, the more time we have to work with the material.”

Zhao’s work led to the decision to design the new prototype tank for chloride salt.

This new opportunity is an important continuation of their efforts. “At a high level,” Zhao explains, “we are connecting fundamental science to future engineering. I’m not creating the component design, but trying to find out the basics, such as chemistry and material knowledge, to provide information so people can design systems better.”

Kerry Rippy is an NREL expert in inorganic chemistry and has supported the Gen3 CSP liquid pathway in several capacities. In the lab, her team explored and demonstrated electrochemical methods to remove corrosive impurities in molten chloride salt. Now, they are continuing this work with the University of Wisconsin to demonstrate the reliability of the purified molten chloride salt as it flows through a scaled-up prototype that mimics an industrial system.

Rippy is also supporting the mesa top tank testing project. The cost of the containment vessels is high, so the team is investigating new materials to store the salt, at varying temperatures and in large volumes for up to 10 hours at a time. Rippy is helping to develop an electrochemical sensor inside the tank to monitor the purity of the salt during experimentation.

Rippy says a molten salt chloride pathway merits further exploration for the benefit of CSP and beyond. “There are multiple potential avenues for this research to be valuable. It can be beneficial for solar fuel synthesis; it could enable high-temperature fuel cells, and the nuclear industry is also really interested in this research.”

“The nuclear industry is developing a number of ‘Gen4’ reactors of its own, some of which use molten chloride salts,” agrees Turchi. Results from the upcoming tank testing could drive down tank costs for a number of energy industries.

Continue reading

Swell Energy Inc., an energy and smart grid solutions provider, has rolled out GridAmp, its proprietary Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS). The enhanced DERMS platform aggregates Distributed Energy Resources (DER), including solar and battery storage devices, into virtual power plants (VPP) to provide advanced grid capabilities to utilities.

GridAmp will control multiple grid service operations with behind-the-meter solar-powered batteries within Swell’s Home Battery Rewards program, an 80 MW distributed VPP being developed on O‘ahu, Maui and Hawai‘i islands – as contracted with Hawaiian Electric and approved by the Hawai‘i Public Utilities Commission.

“Working with Power Partner grid service aggregators like Swell is an essential part of reaching Hawaiian Electric’s goal to cut carbon emissions from power generation 70% by 2030 and achieving net zero carbon emissions from power generation by 2045 or sooner,” says Yoh Kawanami, Hawaiian Electric’s co-director of customer energy resources.

Swell’s GridAmp software is designed to maximize revenue across multiple utility and customer value streams using optimization algorithms and machine learning models that inform and automate DER and VPP operations. GridAmp provides a differentiated ability to co-optimize or “stack” multiple grid services to support a variety of energy objectives at the customer, utility and wholesale market levels.

The software supports interoperability and customization for various utility markets and DER integrations. GridAmp is designed to be inclusive across various technologies and manufacturers, expanding the breadth of Swell’s VPP partnerships and geographies. The DERMS platform is integrated with Swell’s operations and customer facing platforms to further enable rapid turnkey deployment of DERs and enhance participation in VPPs.

“GridAmp co-optimizes the VPP experience for end-users and the utility, fundamentally enhancing value and customer participation in generating, consuming, and transacting renewable electricity,” states Suleman Khan, CEO of Swell. “Through our various technology partnerships and a comprehensive ‘VPP in a Box’ solution, Swell unites homeowners, businesses, industry partners, and utilities behind the shared goal of utilizing VPPs to yield reliable, cost-effective, flexible energy in an equitable manner.”

Swell’s first GridAmp enabled VPP in Hawai‘i will simultaneously balance three separate grid services, namely Capacity Build, Capacity Reduction and Fast Frequency Response, to help manage Hawaiian Electric’s energy supply by absorbing excess renewable energy from the grid as production spikes and dispatching energy when needed, thus reducing peak demand and providing 24/7 fast frequency response to balance the three island grids.

Solar-powered energy storage systems located at homes and businesses of Hawaiian Electric customers will collectively and autonomously meet the customer’s demands and respond to the grid’s dynamic needs. In return, Swell’s VPP customers receive GridRevenue and gain additional GridSavings by shifting their energy use throughout the day. These capabilities and services are available to utilities across the country.

Continue reading

Solariant’s 41.3 MW solar plant in Kagoshima, Japan

Solariant Capital LLC, a renewable energy investment and development company, has entered into a strategic co-development and co-investment partnership with Daiwa Energy & Infrastructure Co. Ltd. (DEI), a subsidiary of Daiwa Securities Group Inc.

The partnership will initially focus on developing Solariant’s portfolio of U.S. renewable energy projects and acquiring other development stage projects. The initial portfolio of projects is located across the Southeast and Southwest U.S. with over 1 GW AC of solar and 2.5 GWh of BESS projects under development.

“With the current favorable environment for renewable energy in the U.S. driven by the recent administration’s aggressive climate goals and support from state and local governments, we believe this partnership is a great opportunity for DEI to expand our footprint into the U.S. market,” comments Morimasa Matsuda, CEO of DEI. “Solariant Capital is a great partner and well-positioned to take advantage of the expanding renewable energy market in the U.S.”

“We are excited to be working with Daiwa (DEI), a globally respected energy and infrastructure investment firm,” says Daniel Kim, Solariant Capital’s managing director. “This partnership will strengthen our position in the market and help us accelerate our goals to expand our operations across new markets.”

Continue reading

Hundreds of gigawatt-hours of battery manufacturing capacity have been committed to in Europe. Pictured is Northvolt’s gigafactory in Sweden, which recently started up its production lines. Image: Northvolt.

European lithium battery industry trade body RECHARGE has warned that some parts of the EU’s Draft Report on Batteries and Waste Batteries may stifle the industry and not deliver on objectives, ahead of today’s vote. 

The European Parliament Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) will today (Thursday 10 February) vote on the report which provides clearer definitions about which batteries can be admitted to market and introduces minimum requirements for the content of recycled material in batteries.

Some Energy-storage.news sources fear the measures will make Europe’s comparatively nascent battery industry less competitive than established Asian industry producers, who are larger but also have experience of local battery recycling regulations.

RECHARGE, which overall welcomes the proposals in principle, reiterated these fears yesterday in a statement: “European battery manufacturers will introduce many innovations over the coming years and therefore caution needs to be applied in a fast-paced environment not to overregulate product design and to not over-narrowly define product performance.” 

“Such measures could hamper the ability of the industry to innovate and to meet new and future more complex customer demands.” 

Claude Chanson, RECHARGE General Manager, added that the measures needed to be properly implemented and controlled at the member state level by avoiding being too broad in scope. 

“This would not only jeopardise the competitiveness of the still nascent European batteries industry, but would also open the door for green-washing and for non-compliant products to enter into the EU,” he added. 

The industry could create about 800,000 jobs by 2023 at the current pace, according to RECHARGE. RECHARGE has even suggested that some recent proposals may put safety controls at risk.

The main worry for industry participants is a diminishment of the EU market’s attractiveness leading to supply constraints at a time of rising demand for lithium-ion batteries, especially from EVs, and the ensuing higher prices.

Lithium-ion battery costs have increased in the last six months for the first time in a decade due to supply chain constraints for the underlying materials. 

Following adoption in the Committee, the draft report will be submitted for vote in Plenary during the February Session.

See more information about the ENVI Committee vote and the legislation including proposed amendments here.

See RECHARGE’s full statement here.

Continue reading