Speakers included executives from Gore Street Capital, Low Carbon, Harmony Energy while there were also delegates from Field and Kona, alongside international players with a UK presence like Baywa r.e. and Eku Energy. 

However, other than Harmony Energy which has set up a Poland subsidiary, bidding 500MW of BESS projects in to the upcoming capacity market auction, as reported by Energy-Storage.news, their plans in Poland and the wider CEE region appear to be very, very early-stage. 

“Most UK developers are still formulating their strategy here, it’s still early days. It’s a nascent market for battery storage and they’re trying to get a feel for what’s out there,” one finance source said. 

“Many are not yet convinced by the fundamentals here but they need to be aware of what’s going on regardless. Any international developer needs to be aware of what’s happening in the big markets like Italy, Spain, Poland, Nordics etc.” 

The event, the first in the Energy Storage Summit series to focus on the CEE region, comes amidst a fall in revenue expectations and consequently valuations in the UK battery storage sector. 

A big part of mitigating against that fall is diversifying internationally, so an increased interest, even if it’s just interest at this point, by UK developers in markets like Poland should not come as a surprise. 

“A lot of developers are just looking at CEE not to get left behind, but their plans are not very concrete,” another finance source said. 

In an interview with Energy-Storage.news about its plans in CEE, Gore Street Capital only went as far as saying there were markets “of interest” in the region.

See the rest of our coverage of the event and the CEE energy storage market here.

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It marks the Japan-headquartered industrial ceramics firm’s first deployment in Eastern Europe for its proprietary ESS technology, designed for medium to long-duration energy storage (LDES) applications.

The tech has been deployed in the field for more than 20 years, logging almost 5GWh of cumulative installations across roughly 250 projects. NGK claims the NAS battery uses abundant raw materials such as sulfur, sodium and aluminium oxide, as well as specialty ceramic separators which the company itself makes.

NGK claims it can be deployed in locations with high or low ambient temperatures, and comes with an intended lifetime of around 20 years, or 7,300 cycles. Stacks of 1.2kWh battery cells that operate at temperatures of between 290°C – 360°C are combined into 20-ft containers of up to 250kW output and 1,450kWh each, with two containerised units deployed at Rollplast’s factory.

At the Kostinbrod site, the NAS system has been paired with onsite rooftop solar PV generation, and its main applications are to help increase the site’s consumption of that locally generated energy, as well as store surplus generation for sale to the grid.

NGK said the NAS technology was chosen after an evaluation process, due to its extensive track record of reliable operation in the field, as well as its technical capabilities for storing and shifting solar energy generated in the daytime for discharging at night. The combination of the battery units and rooftop solar will cover around half of Rollplast’s energy use at the site, according to NGK.

The customer made its order through NGK’s partner in energy storage, BASF Stationary Energy Storage, which is a subsidiary of German chemical company BASF. The formation of the pair’s partnership in 2019 marked BASF’s entry into the energy market, and they appear to have ramped up efforts considerably in the past couple of years, beginning perhaps in earnest with the 2021 deployment of a 5.8MWh system at one of BASF’s own premises in Belgium.

Numerous recent projects, customer orders and Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) announcements have been made around the NAS sodium-sulfur battery, with many representing entries into new territories and a variety of sites and applications.

This year alone, NGK NAS battery installations have been publicly announced at sites including a demonstration project for one of South Korea’s biggest utilities, Korean Electric Power Company (KEPCO), a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency ground station, a nickel-cobalt-copper mine in Western Australia, and a carbon-free water desalination system in the Maldives.

Meanwhile, the company’s biggest announced order this year, at 70MWh, is for a sodium-sulfur battery system which will play into newly liberalised energy trading markets in Japan, where the company is seeking further opportunities for both behind-the-meter distributed systems and larger utility-scale plays.

Earlier this month, BASF and NGK signed agreements to tie up with a manufacturing firm in Malaysia, Leader Energy, to develop LDES projects using the sodium-sulfur technology across Southeast Asia markets.

In terms of the newest market the partners have just entered meanwhile, attendees at the recent Energy Storage Summit Central and Eastern Europe heard that the region holds a great deal of promise, but may require government subsidies, market reforms and deep understanding of grids and the commercial and regulatory landscapes.

Meanwhile, representatives from battery energy storage system (BESS) integrator Fluence said the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region could leapfrog into a strong position on the back of gains made in more mature markets elsewhere, in an interview at the event hosted by our publisher Solar Media.

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That new capacity brings it in line with the upper end of what other leading providers are starting to offer and has been made possible by development of the company’s own larger format 306Ah lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells, the company’s regional leadership team told Energy-Storage.news.

The in-house developed cells have an expected lifetime of 12,000 cycles, which again is far beyond expectations of just a few years ago and gradually becoming more common at the top end of the market.

Further to that, other improvements have been made at system level, Edison Zhou, Trina Solar’s sales head for Australia and New Zealand told Energy-Storage.news. These include a “highly integrated design” that reduces the footprint by 26% versus the previous iteration, rack level battery management which increases the batteries’ expected lifetime and a reduction in the cost of its liquid cooling system due to an “intelligent” management system, Zhou said.

Battery storage safety is of course a major topic of conversation for the industry and public alike today, and in Australia, customers have said that safety is even more important than performance itself, according to Edison Zhou and colleague Andre Gilhooly, head of Trina Solar’s Asia-Pacific utility, commercial and industrial (C&I) solutions business.

“We apply cell level monitoring within the battery management system (BMS) to very carefully monitor cell performance and control and mitigate any possibility of thermal runaway events, such as we’ve seen in the local industry recently,” Gilhooly said in an interview with Energy-Storage.news today.

“It’s most definitely safety first – and then performance,” Gilhooly said, with Trina Storage’s products fully certified to IEC and UL standards, making it able to meet North American, European and Australian codes and standards.   

Horizontal integration strategy: PV modules, trackers, BESS

Trina Storage was officially launched at the Energy Storage Summit EU by the China-headquartered solar company in 2021, although the parent company has been involved in energy storage project design and integration since about 2015. Trina Solar is a member of the Solar Module Super League (SMSL), as coined by our colleagues at PV Tech, ranking it among the top manufacturers in the world.

Key to its market strategy in solar PV has been vertical integration to capture the full value chain from raw materials to finished products and even services like project development.

There is also a sense of that vertical integration being important for its BESS business, with the company having established a dedicated line with more than 2GWh annual production capacity for battery cells, but perhaps even more important is the sense of horizontal integration.

Having a BESS business alongside its solar manufacturing and PV tracker division Trina Tracker, will allow the company to sell as much of the complete system solution to customers as possible.

The reason for debuting Elementa 2 at the Melbourne show, and to the Australian market first was a question of timing, rather than there being specific projects or deals to announce, although Gilhooly hinted that some customer conversations were at advanced stages and likely to bear fruit in the near future.

Trina Storage’s first 50MW/56.2MWh BESS project was completed in 2022 in Burwell, England, using the first generation Elementa solution. Image: Trina Storage

Trina Storage has to date supplied and/or integrated BESS at 100MWh of projects in the UK, as well as more than 2GWh in China, and it is understood talks with customers in the US are also progressing.

However, on the Australia market, Zhou and Gilhooly said it is a market of “staggering” potential – which makes sense in light of modelling from national agencies like the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and Rystad Energy which have shown the enormous need the country has for energy storage to facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Rystad Energy said the National Electricity Market (NEM), which covers most of the country, had the most intraday price volatility of 39 different electricity markets around the world the research and analysis firm looked at. It would take around 46GW/640GWh to mitigate that volatility by 2050, the year Australia is targeting hitting net zero emissions, the firm said, while Trina’s representatives also pointed out the urgent need for storage in Western Australia’s South West Interconnected System (SWIS).

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EDPR NA Distributed Generation (EDPR NA DG) is building a 23.27 MW DC ground-mounted solar array system coupled with a 60 MWh energy storage system for Mohave Electric Cooperative (MEC), a not-for-profit distribution cooperative in Arizona.

Together, the solar+storage system will help MEC provide renewable power, mitigate peak period energy use, and stabilize energy costs for its 36,700 members.

By supporting the development of solar+storage, MEC is increasing its local generation resources that can help isolate the co-op from any transmission issues and delays and avoid unstable price points in the generation market.

“We are pleased to be working with EDP Renewables on Mohave Electric Cooperative’s first solar plus storage project,” says Tyler Carlson, CVEO. “This project demonstrates MEC’s proactive planning to increase reliability, meet renewable energy mandates and support the overall electrical grid.”

The Mohave project’s ground-mount solar array system, , will help MEC offset 36,247 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is the equivalent of carbon emissions from 7,053 homes’ electricity use in one year or the carbon sequestered by 43,225 acres of U.S. forests in one year.

EDPR NA DG is partnering with Prometheus Power to construct the solar array and with Stem for the energy storage. The project’s energy storage system will be operated by Athena, Stem’s AI-driven clean energy optimization software.

EDPR NA DG and MEC held a ribbon-cutting ceremony and on-site tour on this week to inaugurate the new solar array. Dave Harper, head of tribal engagement at the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, led a blessing ceremony that recognized the Mojave spiritual content of the land and emphasized that continued environmental stewardship will result in people working together for the betterment of all.

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Most of the capacity of the plant, 70%, will be supplied to the company’s own industrial plants in the US Golf Coast region, while the remaining 30% will be supplied to real estate firm Kilroy Realty under a 15-year corporate power purchase agreement (cPPA) indexed on merchant prices.

Interest in Texas keeps increasing, both at a downstream and upstream level, with the US state second to California in terms of installed solar capacity, but is expected to add the most solar PV in the coming five years, with more than 40GW, according to trade association Solar Energy Industries Association.

In order to achieve this, Texas will need to invest in upgrading its transmission grid if it wants to avoid any curtailment across the state as projections expect Texas to more than double its solar and wind capacity by 2035.

TotalEnergies is currently developing a 720MW solar farm in the state, for which it recently secured a PPA with French building materials manufacturer Saint-Gobin for 100MW of the plant’s capacity.

To see the full version of this article go to PV Tech.

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“Scaling up battery storage would be crucial in most cases to improve the alignment of solar PV output with electricity demand patterns and system needs,” the report said.

“In the NZE Solar Case, utility-scale battery deployment in 2030 is close to double the level in theSTEPS. Measures to modernise and expand networks, facilitate demand response and boostpower system flexibility would also be necessary.”

In the NZE scenario, deployments are close to 200GW, while in the STEPS scenario it is only around 100GW.

The report also contained a table detailing the major risks associated with each segment of the clean energy transition, with battery storage having a high “critical minerals” risk, with low-to-medium ones elsewhere.

Including electric vehicles, demand for lithium is set to grow five-fold by 2030 under the STEPS scenario and sevenfold in the Announced Pledges Scenario, the middle scenario between STEPS and NZE.

For a deep-dive into the solar figures in the IEA’s report read coverage on our sister site PV Tech here.

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The wind farm and battery belong to utility Vattenfall, which Newland describes as a pioneer in the space, being the first company to co-locate the two technologies at scale in the UK. The pair have worked together since 2022, when Vattenfall’s first wind-plus-storage site went live, and Arenko’s enterprise software Nimbus has now been in use to optimise operations at its second for about three weeks.

Arenko began optimising a 22MW/16MWh short-duration BESS at Vattenfall’s 228MW Pen y Cymoedd (PYC) Wind Farm in Wales from mid-2022, marking the UK’s first example of that co-location. In the more recent example, in Northumberland in northern England, a 20MW/45.5MWh battery storage system is paired with Vattenfall’s 54.4MW Ray Wind Farm.

There’s a big difference between the two and how the different technology types interact. The first co-located project, which Arenko began optimising after its contract to supply the enhanced frequency response ancillary service to the grid ended, had a grid connection sufficient to allow the BESS and the wind farm to operate fully independently.

“The first one (PYC) was a battery that had a clear headroom to operate on that site. So essentially, the grid connection was larger than the overall output of the wind farm so the battery can operate as a sort of standalone battery,” Newland told Energy-Storage.news in an interview.

“The second project is restricted by the wind [generation]. So the grid connection is a fixed level, it’s a constraint on the overall nexus of battery and wind. So if the wind is generating, then the battery cannot [output to the grid], and so you’ve got to optimise around the wind.”

Optimising a portfolio

Finding a solution to that at the second co-located site at Ray was “hugely challenging,” according to Newland, requiring the integration of live wind data, including wind and expected output forecasts, into the Nimbus platform. The fact that all of this data is constantly changing made this all the more challenging.

“You need to be able to understand how that wind farm is going to perform, in order to then be able to optimise the battery that sits around it. Being able to understand that relationship in a in a great level of detail, allows you then to fully automate the operations, the battery system, around the performance of the wind,” Newland said.

Asset owners and investors in renewables are recognising that there is value in putting battery storage onto their solar PV or wind generation sites in future, but find the technical challenge of controlling two assets – one dispatchable and controllable (BESS) and the other variable (renewables) – that essentially “compete” for the same grid connection, to be a barrier.

The rewards of being able to do it, as Arenko claimed it can, begin with enabling a particular site to generate much higher return on investment and optimise the performance of that asset, or assets. But a much more important takeaway from the co-location case study, according to Newland, is the lesson it teaches for how to manage and optimise assets of different technology types at portfolio or fleet level.

Arenko’s customers include other big multinational energy companies like ENGIE, with which it is doing the first onboarding of a solar-plus-storage plant onto the Nimbus platform, and investors in the UK market like Foresight Group and Gresham House Energy Storage Fund.

More and more customers are seeking to optimise at portfolio level, and across a sometimes quite diverse range of technologies, including BESS, solar and wind and ‘conventional’ generation assets, Newland said.

That’s precipitating a “rapid move into renewables” for the company, which both manages assets via Nimbus and sells or licenses the software platform.

“The co-located deals are the first step into that renewable space and we’ve had to solve many of the kind of very, very challenging data management and operational challenges associated with automating wind power in this instance, but we’ve also done our first solar deals, which will be online later this year.”

A blueprint for co-location

The new BESS at Vattenfall’s Ray wind farm has been “performing brilliantly” so far, the chief executive claimed.

“We’re incredibly proud of the performance and it’s something that we’ll be talking more and more about as we get more and more definitive data to prove the performance,” Newland said.

“It’s been pretty windy recently as well. So it’s [the battery storage] been quite heavily constrained, so it’s a real proof of concept.”

Renewable energy markets, including the UK, are seeing increasing amounts of solar-plus-storage, but far less co-located wind-plus-storage. This is partly due to the much less predictable nature of wind generation, which makes optimisation alongside batteries more difficult, while batteries themselves are perhaps the most complex of any generation asset to optimise, Newland believes.

Being able to do so successfully means understanding the performance of each asset, potentially creating “a blueprint for actually being able to do this at scale across multiple different sites at all times”.

“And that is the same proxy for a diversified portfolio as well,” Newland said.

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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But a closer look shows the CEC’s figures may differ slightly to those issued by grid operator CAISO.

The CEC said the 6,617MW breaks down as 5,234MW in the utility-scale sector, 540MW in the commercial and industrial (C&I) sector and 843MW in the residential sector.

However in June CAISO said the quantity of grid-scale alone was 5.6GW as of the start of that month, while CEC’s figures are as of the end of July.

The CEC did break down its figures in an interactive dashboard, an infographic of which is shown below, which breaks down installations by segment, number of installations and zip code. The interactive dashboard is viewable here, although is best viewed using data visualisation platform Tableau.

“Energy storage systems are a great example of how we can harness emerging technology to help create the equitable, reliable and affordable energy grid of the future,” said CEC Vice Chair Siva Gunda.

“California is a global leader in establishing climate policy, but more importantly, it is leading the pack when it comes to putting policy into action and rapidly building projects that add clean, zero-carbon capacity to the grid.” 

Most grid-scale BESS projects in the state have 4-hour durations in order to qualify for the full payment under Resource Adequacy, CAISO’s framework through which most BESS are paid by utilities for capacity under long-term agreements.

Gore Street secures US$60 million financing for first California BESS

In related news, UK-based investment fund Gore Street Energy Storage Fund plc (GSF) has secured a US$60 million loan to fund the remaining construction of its 200MW/400MWh BESS project in California.

The Big Rock project, acquired in February 2023, has so far been funded using GSF equity but the loan, from First Citizens Bank, will see it through to its completion and operation in the second half of 2024.

LS Energy Solutions will be providing the BESS technology for the project, its largest to-date, using its AiON-ESS solution.

The loan is for an initial 3-year term and is expected to be refinanced with longer-term project finance once Big Rock becomes operational.

Although the project’s nameplate duration is 2-hours, it will submit a lower power capacity with a 4-hour duration into Resource Adequacy to qualify.

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The NEM interconnects power markets in the Australian states of Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales (NSW), South Australia and Tasmania. Drivers of the volatility being seen are outages at coal power plants, the impacts of natural disasters on transmission infrastructure and the increasing penetration of variable renewable energy on the grid, mainly from solar PV.

For Rystad Energy’s analysis, volatility was measured as the difference between highest and lowest prices recorded for any given hour during the average one-hour intraday spread from data collected over a year.

The answers appear to be aligned with two of the main stated priorities of the Australian federal government when it comes to energy policy: built out and upgrade transmission networks, and deploy more energy storage – much more.

Rystad concluded that by 2050, balancing the NEM will require 46GW/640GWh of energy storage, which the research firm suggested would be provided by a combination of utility-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) assets and pumped hydro energy storage (PHES).

If anything, the Rystad forecast is perhaps on the conservative end of figures produced by Australian state organisations: the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has identified a need for between 44-96GW output and 550-950GWh energy storage capacity in the NEM by the middle of this century.

Similarly, national science agency CSIRO has said that storage capacity in the NEM needs to increase somewhere around ten to 14 times over in the years 2025-2030 to be set up to meet the 2050 net zero emissions target.

Currently, there are about 2.5GW of utility-scale batteries and pumped hydro participating in the NEM, according to Rystad Energy analyst David Dixon.

Furthermore, the AEMO said earlier this year that there is an urgent need for long-duration energy storage (LDES) to balance the NEM, noting for example that while it took in applications for 461MW of BESS projects between August 2022 and February 2023, this only corresponded to 604MWh of capacity – meaning that few projects were of durations above 2-hours and certainly almost none of 8-hour or above.  

Incidentally, AEMO, which is overseer of the NEM as well as Western Australia’s Wholesale Electricity Market, found that Western Australia alone needs 12GW-17GW/74GW/96GWh of storage in its market by 2050.

“Volatility can be unsettling for retailers who lack proper hedging strategies and for consumers who bear the brunt of resulting cost fluctuations,” Rystad Energy’s David Dixon, a senior analyst, said.

“To tackle this, Australia should prioritise the enhancement of transmission infrastructure and invest in storage solutions to mitigate the impact of volatility. This will help to create a more stable and affordable electricity market for all Australians.”

Government tenders can unlock Australia’s required investment

While reliability is sometimes cited as a reason for maintaining reliance on fossil fuel plants, it is largely due to unplanned outages at coal power plants that resulted in much of the volatility cited by Rystad.

Clean energy transition expert Stephanie Bashir of Nexa Advisory told Energy-Storage.news that Australia’s ageing coal power plants are becoming “more unreliable”.

Meanwhile, the country has an “unrivalled opportunity to be powered by renewable energy,” due to its geography and climate, Bashir, Nexa Advisory’s CEO, said.

The reasons why growing shares of solar PV meanwhile contribute to volatility is due to what happens both in the daytime and at night: during daytime hours, high production of solar-generated electricity depresses prices in the NEM, but at night, presently natural gas plants are used to fill in the gap left by the solar, driving prices up.

Energy minister Chris Bowen (left) visits a battery storage project. Image: Transgrid.

Australia’ coal plants are also retiring, and government statistics show that from contributing 84% of electricity generation at the beginning of the millennium, it fell to below half (47%) in 2022. Meanwhile, renewables comprised 32% in 2022, and there was 25% growth in solar PV capacity. Utility-scale solar PV generation grew 29% from 2021 to 2022, and by 78% over five years as of the end of 2022.  

“To ensure that Australians have the secure, reliable and affordable power they need, and deserve, we need to ensure proper ‘firming’ of these renewable technologies is considered,” Stephanie Bashir told Energy-Storage.news.

Australia’s energy storage sector is definitely on the up, with nearly twice as much battery storage being built during 2022 as in the previous year, from 921MW/1,169MWh being built during 2021, to 1380MW/2,004MWh last year.  

However, that still seems far off from getting to the levels Rystad, AEMO and CSIRO have all recommended will be required. The good news, Stephanie Bashir said, is that the Capacity Investment Mechanism – a scheme of tenders and auctions for dispatchable renewable energy capacity with mandatory inclusion of energy storage – is on the way.

Launched at federal level, but set to be administered by the individual states, the Capacity Investment scheme has been described by Australia’s energy minister Chris Bowen as a sort of de facto energy storage target or national energy storage strategy of the type many clean energy advocates were angling for.

It would provide investors with some degree of revenue certainty and has been warmly welcomed by many sources Energy-Storage.news has spoken to, including Nexa Advisory’s Stephanie Bashir.

“At present the market structures and price volatility are enhancing risks for consumers and investors. We see the federal government’s Capacity Investment Scheme playing a critical role in providing the certainty needed to unlock investment in the battery storage sector,” Bashir said.

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EagleView, a provider of software and services for the solar industry, has introduced SolarReady, a solution designed to help solar contractors better identify and acquire viable residential properties for potential solar installations.

The solution helps installers create proposals that include detailed visualizations and PV system production modeling to help educate homeowner prospects. In addition to helping quickly qualify potential solar projects, SolarReady also provides estimated electrical production and system efficiency, which helps inform project value and determine return on investment.

“With SolarReady, we’re providing a game-changing solution that accelerates the adoption of solar energy by simplifying and expediting the assessment process,” says Peter Cleveland, VP of EagleView’s solar business. “Now, a solar company could arm their canvassers with specific data to talk to homeowners at scale. It’s a powerful marketing tool.”

Key features of SolarReady include the following:

API-Driven efficiency: SolarReady harnesses the power of APIs to swiftly generate solar potential data for any given property;

Accurate solar potential: Through advanced data analytics and imagery, SolarReady provides accurate insights into a property’s solar potential;

Lead qualification advantage: Solar companies can now seamlessly filter potential leads based on their solar potential, ensuring resources are allocated efficiently and effectively, empowering sales with address-specific data;

Instant proposal generation: With SolarReady data at their fingertips, professionals can create near-instant proposals, delivering a superior customer experience.

“We know our customers win more business when they have better data,” adds Tripp Cox, EagleView’s CTO. “SolarReady leverages our industry-leading property data and analytics expertise to deliver a valuable prospecting and business development solution for solar contractors.”

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