The developer secured construction approval for the project in July 2022 from the BLM, and shortly after that closed US$3.1 billion in project financing for a portfolio of 2.2GW near-term projects, of which Oberon solar was a part of it.

The other project that is fully operational, Arlington Solar Energy Center, is also located in Riverside County. It has 364MW of solar capacity and 242MW of battery energy storage and was developed by NextEra Energy, which brought online another solar-plus-storage power plant nearby last year with 485MW solar capacity.

In Arizona, the BLM started an environmental analysis of a 700MW solar and battery energy storage system project, dubbed Ranegras Plains Energy Center Project, which is wholly owned by solar developer Savion.

To read the full version of this story, visit PV Tech.

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It is important to note that Quinbrook’s renewables and storage development portfolio in the US, UK and Australia currently exceeds 50GW.

One project which could see the integration of CATL’s storage solution is the Sun Cable Project, an Australian-based 20GW solar and storage project situated in the Northern Territory. The two companies stated they will work together closely to assess the viability of integrating an 8-hour charge and 16-hour discharge energy storage solution for the project.

The companies will also assess the feasibility of deploying the first 1GWh+ EnerC Plus projects in Australia and the UK. In the US, Quinbrook has already deployed CATL’s storage technology in the Gemini solar-plus-storage project in Nevada.

Brian Restall, Quinbrook’s managing director for Australia and the co-chair of Quinbrook’s Global Procurement Committee said: “Quinbrook has a long history of working closely with CATL for our innovative stationary storage projects.

“We are impressed by the quality of CATL’s technology that consistently tops DNV’s annual Battery Scorecard report, their robust product supply chains and the company’s commitment to investing in research and development to maintain their cutting edge technical advantage. We look forward to continuing our working partnership and assessing the viability of CATL’s ultra long duration storage solutions as well.”

CATL is also ranked as the world’s biggest battery manufacturer, most recently in research by Korean firm SNE Research, which found it held a 37% share of the global market.

While that’s largely due to its presence in the electric vehicle (EV) space, it has been steadily growing its activities in the stationary BESS market, including as a supplier of cells as well as integrated solutions like EnerC.

Examples include a 10GWh, multi-year deal signed in late 2022 with US BESS system integrator FlexGen, which is using EnerC for its pipeline of North American projects, and another 5GWh deal for EnerC solutions in the US with energy storage project developer HGP Storage, for projects in the Texas ERCOT market. That deal was announced in March and begins with an initial single-site 450MWh project.

Another deal was signed in late 2022 by the manufacturer with UK-based energy storage investor Gresham House Energy Storage Fund, for an initial 7.5GWh, rising to a potential 10GWh, again thought to be focused around the EnerC solution.

CATL also continues to increase its presence in the Australian market. In September 2023, the company was selected to provide a battery energy storage system (BESS) for the Kwinana Battery Energy Storage System 2 (KBESS 2), a 4-hour 200MW/800MWh battery storage project being developed in Western Australia.

Commenting on the partnership with Quinbrook, Tan Libin, vice-president of CATL said: “We are excited to strengthen partnership with Quinbrook, which is experienced in leading investments and initiatives that support a stable transition to a decarbonised power system.

“Together with Quinbrook, we look forward to implementing more large-scale battery energy storage projects globally with our innovative solutions, so as to help addressing climate change and move towards a clean and sustainable future.”

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Each had gone public through mergers with blank cheque special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) entities between late 2020 (Eos) and early 2022 (Energy Vault), with ESS Inc getting its listing in October 2021.

To summarise that analysis from May, all had yet to recognise significant revenues from their core businesses and said that markets for their technologies were yet to take off. When they did, however, each claimed to be in the right place and the right shape to capitalise on opportunities from a global energy storage market seeking diversification from reliance on lithium-ion and looking for answers to solve the problem of providing cost-effective long-duration storage over periods of several hours.

Additionally, they were all also included in this look at the fates so far of energy storage companies that went through SPAC mergers, finding that a group of four (the other two being Stem Inc) had seen their average share price fall by 80% since going public.

Eos’ Q3 revenues just US$0.7 million, with US$399 million DOE loan incoming

Zinc battery storage provider Eos will not be profitable until its production lines are fully automated, company leadership has said, after just US$700,000 revenue was reported for Q3 2023.  

Eos Energy Enterprises, to give the long-duration energy storage company’s full monicker, released its third quarter financial results earlier this week (6 November).

Attention will likely be focused on the conspicuous plunge in revenue, down from US$6.1 million in the equivalent quarter of 2022. However, there were highlights alluded to, such as the beginning of deliveries for the company’s third-generation aqueous zinc hybrid cathode battery-based storage systems.

CFO Nathan Kroeker said in an earnings call to explain results that the Gen 3 product was designed “at half the cost of where we started” with its previous Gen 2.3 iteration on a kilowatt-hour basis.

Elsewhere, the company claimed that a shift in value proposition towards longer-duration storage favours its technology, while it had an order backlog of around 2GWh for a value of US$538.8 million as of the end of September, including just under US$93 million in orders booked in the year to date.

Perhaps most importantly, Kroeker said that gross margin profits will be recognised once Eos has fully automated production lines up and running.

Eos has a plan which it calls Project AMAZE, or ‘American Made Zinc Manufacturing’, which would see the company establish 8GWh of annual production capacity by 2026. The plan would require an investment of about half a billion dollars, and the pathway to get there looks like it might be made possible by a US government loan for around 80% of that sum, via the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO).

Eos could be further assisted by availing of US government incentives for manufacturing clean energy technologies domestically. CEO Joe Mastrangelo said in the call that tax credits could be worth up to US$45/kWh. However, the long-duration firm’s CEO claimed that while the tax credit “will help to accelerate our path to breakeven, we do not believe it is essential to achieve profitability”.

“We believe this business makes economic sense even without the tax credit, but it certainly acts as an added benefit to us over time.”

ESS Inc says profitability on flow battery product to come in H2 2024

ESS Inc’s CEO Eric Dresselhuys was a recent interviewee for Energy-Storage.news Premium, discussing how the “macro drivers for long-duration” are improving all the time, but that it and other companies in the space will at the same time need to achieve continuous improvements in cost reduction.

The company also needs to grow its revenues sooner or later, with Dresselhuys this week offering guidance that ESS Inc’s full-year revenues will be US$9 million for 2023, with year-to-date revenues standing at US$4.7 million as of the end of September.

That said, the year-to-date figure is an almost 700% increase from 2022, which strongly implies that ESS Inc – and perhaps others in the space – are really only just getting started. The company has also been helped by recent investment from Honeywell, which has also become a strategic partner and collaborator on flow battery technology as well as aiming to purchase around US$300 million-worth of the startup’s systems.

An agreement is also being finalised for ESS Inc’s biggest project to date, which is a 10-hour, 50MW (500MWh) project in Germany with power producer LEAG, while the iron flow battery technology has been licensed to a partner in Australia, Energy Storage Industries Asia-Pacific (ESI) for distribution, local production and sales to the Australian and wider APAC markets.

Like Eos, ESS Inc also said automated production and other process improvements would be key to achieving its target of non-GAAP gross margin profitability on sales of its Energy Warehouse product by the second half of next year.

ESS Inc’s Q3 revenue stood at US$1.5 million, and although adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was a loss of US$14.2 million, this was a sequential improvement of US$6.3 million, while the long-duration flow battery player’s cash and short-term investments position improved US$25 million sequentially to US$124.5 million.

Energy Vault revenues driven by US BESS business

As regular readers of Energy-Storage.news will likely know, Energy Vault’s recent earnings calls have painted a very different picture to long-duration rivals ESS Inc and Eos’, for the simple fact that instead of focusing solely on its proprietary gravity-based storage tech, the Swiss-American startup has pivoted to also work in the lithium-ion battery energy storage system (BESS) space.

That meant it was able to recognise US$172.2 million revenue during the third quarter, which came from “multiple customer sets in the US market,” according to CEO and chairman Robert Piconi. The biggest share of that came from the on-time delivery of a 275MWh BESS project in Southern California for customers Wellhead and W Power, with investor-owned utility (IOU) Southern California Edison as the project’s off-taker. What is also interesting is that the project, Stanton BESS, used the company’s proprietary system design and its own energy management system (EMS).

Energy Vault achieved a third quarter GAAP gross margin of US$7.1 million (4.1%), and nine month gross margin up to the end of September of 6.1%. While it continues to run at a loss, its net loss improved 28% sequentially, to -US$18.9 million and adjusted EBITDA improved 43% to -US$10.2 million.

Holding total cash and cash equivalents of US$132.2 million and without debt at the end of the quarter, Energy Vault reaffirmed previously offered guidance that full-year revenue will be between US$325 million and US$425 million, with a gross margin of 10% to 15%. Adjusted EBITDA for the year will be between -US$50 million and -US$70 million.

However, Energy Vault has far from abandoned its gravity storage business. The firm’s first large-scale project using that technology, a 100MWh system in China, nears completion and Piconi claimed there is “strong regional demand for our gravity energy storage systems in China, India, South Africa and the US market”.

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Elia said that 22 projects took part, adding up to 1,576MW. All projects bidding in the auction were successful, and although natural gas resources comprised the majority of bids, there was also a significant number of 4-hour duration battery energy storage system (BESS) projects in the mix.

That includes a mix of new-build and existing battery storage, and a handful of small-scale BESS totalling 25MW/100MWh alongside 560MW/2,240MWh large-scale or utility-scale projects.

The aforementioned 375MW of new-build is included here, each awarded 15-year contracts with the transmission system operator (TSO), as well as the remainder being existing projects.

Developers awarded new-build contracts were Storm, a Belgian wind farm developer diversifying into the new technology, which won three contracts of 60MW, 120MW and 25.2MW; Electrabel, a Belgian subsidiary of ENGIE which won two contracts of 55.51MW each; and Innotech, an electricity and heating services provider which won 40.8MW.

The annual auctions began in October 2021. After the first round, which was for the 2025-2026 delivery period, head of analysis at consultancy Clean Horizon Corentin Baschet told Energy-Storage.news that the award of contracts to 130MW/540MWh of BESS, all new-build, was a sign that the country’s energy storage market was maturing.

Baschet noted that while those assets would only earn €11,400 (at that time US$12,820) per MW/year, equal to roughly 7% of the revenues each would need to break even, the contracts were a nice bonus or “cherry on the cake” of a business case for BESS.

The long-term revenue certainty they offered for what would largely be an opportunity which required no additional cycling of the battery would be helpful to developers and investors, who would be looking to stack revenues from a number of different opportunities, Baschet said.

Those other revenue streams include ancillary services opportunities in the frequency control reserve (FCR) and secondary reserve markets. The latter offers high enough prices that “it would be stupid” to deploy BESS with less than 2-hour duration, while the market also offers arbitrage opportunities for energy traders, which also helps the case for the 4-hour systems of the type awarded in the CRM.

In the latest auction, average prices were much higher, at around €53,000 (US$56,600) per MW/year. Lars Stephan, policy and market development director at BESS system integrator and services provider Fluence noted in a LinkedIn post about the results that this would “probably reflect around 25% of revenues required” for projects to pencil out.

“Most certainly, such a 15-year contract in the bank, will bring a great amount of low-cost debt funding into these projects, which will help accelerate the market even further,” Stephan wrote.

Analysis firm LCP Delta found that in 2022, Europe’s top four markets for BESS by deployments were (in order) the UK, Ireland, Germany and France, but Belgium had two of the biggest projects commissioned last year, each of 100MWh.

In September, Giga Storage, a BESS developer based in the Netherlands, announced that it is planning a 300MW/1,200MWh project in Belgium which would be connected directly to the transmission network via existing 380kV high-voltage transmission lines nearby.

Read more coverage of the Belgian market on Energy-Storage.news.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 9th annual Energy Storage Summit EU in London, 21-22 February 2024. This year it is moving to a larger venue, bringing together Europe’s leading investors, policymakers, developers, utilities, energy buyers and service providers all in one place. Visit the official site for more info.

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According to a new report from Wood Mackenzie, China will hold more than 80% of the world’s solar polysilicon, wafer, cell and module manufacturing capacity from 2023 to 2026 following investments exceeding $130 billion this year alone.

“China’s solar manufacturing expansion has been driven by high margins for polysilicon, technology upgrades and for developing local manufacturing in overseas markets,” says Huaiyan Sun, a senior consultant at Wood Mackenzie and author of the report.

“China will still dominate the global solar supply chain and continue to widen the technology and cost gap with competitors.”

More than 1 TW of wafer, cell and module capacity is forecasted to come online by 2024, meaning China’s capacity is sufficient to meet annual global demand now through to 2032, based on Wood Mackenzie forecasts of annual demand growth.

Strong government policies in overseas markets have started to increase local solar manufacturing, but they are still not cost-competitive compared to Chinese supply. A module made in China is 50% cheaper than that produced in Europe and 65% cheaper than the U.S., according to the report.

The U.S. and India have announced more than 200 GW of planned module capacity since 2022, driven by the Inflation Reduction Act in the U.S. and the Production Linked Incentive in India.

“Despite considerable module expansion plans, overseas markets still cannot eliminate their dependence on China for wafers and cells in the next three years,” Sun says.

China will continue to be the global technological leader with its announcements to build more than 1 TW of N-type cell capacity, the next-generation technology after P-type. This represents 17 times more capacity than the rest of the world.

Looking outside China, India is forecasted to overtake Southeast Asia as the second-largest module production region by 2025, which will be driven by India’s strong PLI incentives.

Concerns about the market’s oversupply are mainly aimed at old production lines that produce lower efficiency products, such as the P-type and M6 cells. Demand for P-type cells began to decline in 2023, and Wood Mackenzie analysts expect it to be only 17% of supply by 2026.

“Oversupply will undeniably hinder some of the current expansion plans,” Sun adds. “More than 70 GW of capacity in China has been terminated or suspended in the past three months.”

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Veolia North America, a provider of environmental solutions in the U.S. and Canada, has partnered with Today’s Power Inc. to install a 5 MW single-axis tracking solar energy system at its hazardous waste treatment facility in Gum Springs, Ark.

The solar array is expected to produce over 250 million kWh over the next quarter century, making the Gum Springs plant the only one of its kind in the U.S. to capture and generate as much power as it uses on an annual basis.

The solar facility will be operational by the fourth quarter of 2024. The electricity from the solar panels will be used to meet the facility’s daily demands, with any excess going to feed the region’s main grid, leading to net zero output.

“This investment to bring clean, renewable power to our Gum Springs operation is a reflection of Veolia North America’s commitment to environmental sustainability and leading the ecological transformation,” says Bob Cappadona, president and CEO of VNA’s Environmental Solutions and Services division, which oversees the Gum Springs project. “As a leading provider of environmental services to communities across the U.S., we have an obligation to ensure that the facilities we operate are equipped to limit our impact on the environment as much as possible.”

“Today’s Power, Inc. is pleased to work with Veolia and South Central Electric Cooperative to provide this 5 MW solar facility to support their renewable energy needs. TPI will be building and operating this facility, and we look forward to a continued strong relationship with Veolia and South Central Electric Cooperative,” adds Today’s Power CEO/President Derek Dyson.

To make room for the new solar panels, Veolia recently cleared a 30-acre lot across the street from the facility.

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Vincent Sorgi

PPL Corp. subsidiaries Louisville Gas and Electric Company (LG&E) and Kentucky Utilities Company (KU) have received regulatory approval to retire 600 MW of coal generation and more than 50 MW of peaking units by 2027 and to replace them with cleaner energy.

In its unanimous decision, the Kentucky Public Service Commission (KPSC) authorized LG&E and KU to add 240 MW of company-owned solar, secure power purchase agreements for nearly 650 MW of additional solar, construct 125 MW of battery storage, implement more than a dozen new energy efficiency programs, and build one approximately 640 MW combined-cycle natural gas plant at its Mill Creek facility.

“We appreciate the KPSC’s comprehensive review of our generation replacement plan,” says PPL President and Chief Executive Officer Vincent Sorgi. “While the KPSC did not approve our entire request, which we believe offered the best and least-cost approach for our customers, the decision will ensure we can continue to reliably meet our customers’ future energy needs, further diversify our Kentucky generation, advance a cleaner energy mix and support the state’s continued growth and economic development.”

PPL says the level of expected investment is materially consistent with the originally proposed generation replacement plan, which projected $2.1 billion of investment overall, including $1.6 billion through 2026.

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Rob Kaiser

Global renewable energy developer Ørsted is deploying SparkCognition’s Renewable Suite across 5.5 GW of its land-based wind, solar and storage assets in the U.S.

By enhancing asset performance management with SparkCognition’s AI solution, Ørsted will increase energy production, decrease maintenance costs and improve operational efficiency.

“Meeting the rising demand for clean energy requires innovative solutions to ensure our assets run reliably and efficiently,” says Rob Keiser, vice president of asset management, Americas, at Ørsted. “By deploying SparkCognition’s cutting-edge Renewable Suite, we can improve the effectiveness and lifespan of our land-based assets and maximize energy output, propelling us toward a more sustainable future.”

SparkCognition’s Renewable Suite is a cloud-based asset performance management platform for utility-scale wind, solar and energy storage assets. It brings different data sets ranging from SCADA, ERP, financial, data from third parties such as weather, forecast and many more into a single view that enhances efficiency and collaboration. Powered by patented AI and machine learning technology, Renewable Suite provides predictive recommendations to identify impending failures, quickly identify underperforming assets, and ensure effective follow-through. Renewable Suite is highly scalable and can onboard a large fleet of assets in a short time.

“Renewable Suite provides renewable energy owners and operators, like Ørsted, with a high-quality data foundation and out-of-the-box, self-serve models to generate actionable insights and quickly diagnose asset issues, providing a platform to enable collaboration among multiple stakeholders,” says Dr. Sandeep Gupta, vice president at SparkCognition. “Our patented AI technology, combined with the deep energy expertise of our SparkCognition team and a focus on customer success, are keys to helping organizations succeed.”

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As the energy transition away from fossil fuels gathers pace, IRPs are playing an increasingly important role in mapping out how the US will get there.

Georgia Power filed its most recent IRP in 2022, but said in late October as the update was published that “extraordinary economic growth” in the US state – which is becoming home to numerous new industrial developments including electric vehicle (EV) battery factories – means it is having to revise its projections.

Approved by the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) in July last year, the 2022 IRP included estimates that the utility would require close to an additional 4,000MW of energy capacity by 2031 to keep pace with changing energy demand.

By 2035, the utility wanted to procure 6,000MW of renewable energy capacity. However, the company said on 27 October that the growth in demand by 2030 would instead be almost double what it had previously forecast, at 6,600MW by 2030.

In turn, Georgia Power said it anticipated a need to instead add approximately 10,000MW of renewable energy capacity by 2035, and expand its fleet of battery energy storage system (BESS), including renewables-plus-storage hybrid plants and distributed energy resources (DER).

“Georgia has continued to experience rapid economic growth since the filing of our IRP in early 2022. Many businesses coming to the state are bringing large electrical demands at both a record scale and velocity,” Georgia Power CEO, chairman and president Kim Greene said.

In addition to the low carbon resources, the utility, a subsidiary of utility holding group Southern Company is also seeking approval for other capacity, including the right to develop, own and operate three simple cycle combustion turbine (CT) gas power plants totalling 1,400MW at its Plant Yates power station complex.

It will also look to build out its transmission infrastructure to integrate the growth in capacity.

Request to own and operate 1,000MW of BESS

As far as BESS is concerned, the updated plan asks for approval to develop, own and operate up to 1,000MW of the technology at various sites, including retrofits at existing solar PV plants and integration with new PV plants.

That builds on a request to procure 500MW of energy storage systems included in the 2022 IRP, as well as a request to develop its own 265MW McGrau Ford BESS facility.

The company issued a request for information (RFI) in late September for prospective providers of capacity resources of between 100MW and 1,200MW each to come forward, with technologies including standalone BESS, renewables-plus-storage and thermal power plants eligible.

The company has taken a big leap into energy storage after its 2019 IRP – the last one before 2022 – was the first to include storage. In that IRP, Georgia Power requested, and got, permission to build, own and operate 80MW of BESS.

Related developments for the company include the coming online in mid-2022 of European energy company RWE’s largest solar-plus-storage project in the US, Hickory Park, which pairs 195.5MW of solar PV with 40MW/80MWh of BESS, and from which Georgia Power will buy energy through a 30-year power purchase agreement (PPA).

Georgia Power is also one of three US utilities so far to have agreed to pilot the deployment of a novel iron-air battery storage technology developed by startup Form Energy. The battery, which works by rusting and de-rusting iron as it charges and discharges, is intended to offer up to and around 100-hour duration of storage.

Our publisher Solar Media is hosting the 10th Solar and Storage Finance USA conference, 7-8 November 2023 at the New Yorker Hotel, New York. Topics ranging from the Inflation Reduction Act to optimising asset revenues, the financing landscape in 2023 and much more will be discussed. See the official site for more details.

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Established in early 2022 as a solar PV development platform within the SUSI Energy Transition Fund, ReFeel New Energy currently boasts over 750MW of battery storage capacity.

The company is eager to expand into the Italian BESS market, an area that Energy-storage.news has already reported to have considerable potential. Research firm LCP Delta recently noted that, after annual grid-scale deployments of just 20MW in the last few years, Italy is forecast to deploy 800-900MW in 2023/2024, second in scale only to the UK.

Italian transmission system operator (TSO) Terna released its ‘Study on Reference Technologies for Electricity Storage’ report in August, which noted that a total of 71GWh of new grid-scale energy storage needs to be deployed in Italy by 2030 for it to decarbonise its energy system in line with the EU targets.

Terna added that the average power rating of the 71GWh will need to be one-eighth of the energy storage capacity, meaning a total power rating of the new energy storage capacity of 8.875GW. The 8.875GW/71GWh is in addition to distributed energy storage resources and large-scale projects already procured through past capacity market and ancillary service auctions.

Italian storage potential

In June 2023, regulators in Italy approved new auction rules for grid-scale storage and gave the green light to a 200MW/800MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) project from UK developer Aura Power, while Eni Plenitude brought a 15MW BESS online.

The energy storage market in Italy doubled in capacity in the first half of the year. As of 30 June 2023, a total of 3,045MW and 4,893MWh of energy storage is installed in Italy according to ANIE Rinnovabili, the national trade body representing the renewable and clean energy sectors.

Around half of this capacity – 1,468MW/2,058MWh – was deployed in the first half of 2023 alone, meaning the market, led by the residential and commercial sector, doubled in size from the end of 2022 to the end of the first half of 2023. However, the market will likely slow down in H2 2023, as ANIE Rinnovabili expects a downturn in the residential and commercial segments to continue into the second half of the year.

In addition to the growth of the energy storage market, the European Union’s RePowerEU plan also outlined the Italian renewables targets, envisioning more than doubling the countries’ renewables capacity to 131GW by 2030, almost 20GW storage capacity will have to be brought online over the next six years.

Energy-storage.news’ sister publication PV Tech also reported that Italy is adding at least 4GW of solar in 2023.

Paolo Viscontini, president of trade association Italia Solare, said the country already installed almost as much capacity as the whole of 2022 (2.3GW) in H1, and is expected to finish the year with at least 4GW.

The main driver for the increase of solar additions in Italy could be explained through the 110% Superbonus scheme that supported the installation of solar panels in the residential market as well as the implementation of battery storage.

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