The project, which came online earlier this year, utilises Sungrow’s containerised lithium-ion grid-scale energy storage system (ESS) product PowerTitan. It has a discharge duration of two hours and contains C5 anti-corrosion technology which it said ensures resilience in harsh coastal conditions, while its DC-DC controller can control battery racks individually, improving performance.

It is providing peak shaving services and backup power to an unnamed customer (or customers) in the region, though Quartux managing director Alejandro Fajer told Energy-Storage.news last year that it would be deployed for a hotel site.

At the time, Fajer claimed it would be the largest BESS in Mexico and the largest consumer and industrial (C&I) sited BESS in all of Latin America.

Mexico is aiming for a renewable energy mix of 50% by 2050. Progress has been made recently on a 1GW PV, 190MW BESS co-located project in the north, which Fajer said represented a shift in government thinking on energy storage. In June, Spain-based power conversion specialist Ingeteam revealed it provided equipment for the first phase of the project.

Although some market sources have expressed concern that the US Inflation Reduction Act’s generous support for renewables and storage might “suck the oxygen out of” the Latin American market, grid-scale projects are starting to pick up in various countries across the continent, with Chile the main driving force.

Returning for the second edition in Santiago, Chile, the Energy Storage Summit Latin America will explore opportunities in countries such as Chile, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Join Solar Media on October 17-18 to meet with investors, policy makers, developers, utilities, network operators, technology providers, EPCs, consultants, law firms and more to make sure you are a part of the rapidly evolving storage landscape in Latin America.

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It is located in Qingdao North Coast Data Center (QNCDC), in the northeastern town, though the announcement contained some ambiguity over whether the project is being launched or has already been brought online.

It is the first application of sodium-ion batteries in new energy storage and new infrastructure of big data centers, the companies claimed. It will improve QNCDC’s energy efficiency and support the further construction of more green data centre infrastructure.

Technology provider Green Power has been developing its sodium-ion technology for three years, describing it as a “a combined strategy of layered oxide and polyanion systems”, achieving “multiple technology innovations and breakthroughs.”

The released added: “In the polyanion systems, a highly stable system has been constructed through material innovation, breaking through the core pain points of low energy density and revolutionising the life of sodium-ion batteries to over 6000 cycles. For the layered oxide system, a high-voltage system has been developed to increase the energy density to 150Wh/kg, with a cycle life reaching up to 3000 cycles.”

As well as reducing the energy costs of the data centre, the project will also participate in ancillary services to help the power grid’s reliability and stability.

Sodium-ion battery technology is regarded by some as most commercially advanced non-lithium battery tech. One year ago this week, Max Reid, research analyst in Wood Mackenzie’s Battery & Raw Materials Service segment, told Energy-Storage.news he estimated there would be around 1GWh of global annual production capacity this year rising to 5-10GWh by 2025.

What was claimed to be the world’s first sodium-ion gigafactory was opened in China in December 2022, by state-owned power company China Three Gorges Corporation.

See all our recent coverage of the sodium-ion battery space here, including a fundraise by Sweden-based Altris, a 100MWh sodium solid state battery factory in Germany and United Airlines investing in technology provider Natron Energy.

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The partners have jointly invested in the business and their first project will be a 15MW/48MWh lithium-ion battery energy storage system (BESS) asset in the coastal region of Himeji, in Hyogo Prefecture, just southwest of the major cities of Osaka and Kobe.

RENOVA said the launch came after a financing deal was agreed with SMFL Mirai in June. Construction on the BESS facility is set to begin during this month, with the start of commercial operations expected in October 2025.

Idemitsu Kosan will play a leading role in the JV. Holding the biggest stake at 51%, the fossil fuel major will also operate the energy storage facility and be responsible for trading its stored energy in the power market, as well as handling maintenance duties.

The project will also be built on Idemitsu Kosan-owned land, on the site of one of its former refineries.

The company is targeting carbon neutrality by 2050, in line with Japan’s net zero emissions policy goal. Alongside corporate pledges on “low carbon petroleum” and transforming its refineries and centres into so-called “Carbon Neutral Transformation (CNX) Centers”, and other adaptations of its core business, the company is also aiming to hold a bigger stake in batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and stationary energy storage as well as in renewable energy.

Idemitsu will develop decarbonised power sources and attempt to lower emissions from existing thermal power sources, but will also engage in activities to control and integrate variable renewable energy (VRE) using battery storage, according to a message on the company’s website from managing executive officer Soichi Kobayashi.

The company has already developed solar PV with energy storage in the US, most recently with its subsidiary Idemitsu Renewables signing a power purchase agreement (PPA) with community energy supplier Sonoma Clean Power for an 84MWp solar, 38MW/152MWh BESS plant in California in early June.

Idemitsu is also an investor in the vanadium flow battery space, having backed Australian company Vecco Group, which is developing vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) electrolyte production facilities and recently ordered a VRFB from another Japanese company, Sumitomo Electric.

The Hyogo project marks the latest step into the domestic battery storage market for a major player in the Japanese corporate world. Many of Japan’s major players in its energy sector have invested in grid-scale battery storage abroad, but have mostly waited until recent changes to the regulatory and policy environment that opened up the market within the country.

The country’s first energy trades from BESS assets were made in June by developer Pacifico Energy, marking the opening up of the JPEX spot power market following regulatory changes.

As with Pacifico Energy’s projects, Himeji Energy Storage Facility will receive government subsidies towards the capital cost of equipment. This is through an initiative of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) to promote the use of distributed energy resources with batteries or electrolysis.

A few days ago, NGK Insulators said it has received an order for a 69MWh, 6-hour duration battery storage system based on its sodium-sulfur (NAS) battery technology for an energy trading project with utility Sala Energy in Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture.

Energy-Storage.news Premium subscribers can read our recent feature interview with Pacifico Energy head of energy storage Mahdi Behrangrad here.

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Allan Riska

Renewable Properties, a developer and investor in small-scale utility and community solar projects throughout the United States, has closed its $53.5 million Fund 9 portfolio. The Fund 9 closing expands Renewable Properties’ successful relationships with tax equity investor SOLCAP and project lending partners 1st Source Bank and West Town Bank & Trust.

Fund 9 includes five projects in Maine, North Carolina and California. Totaling close to 22 MW, the solar projects are expected to produce enough energy to power 3,111 homes per year.

“Dependable financing relationships are key for expanding our pipeline of community solar and small-scale utility projects,” says Allan Riska, CIO at Renewable Properties. “Our ongoing partnerships with SOLCAP, 1st Source and West Town are enabling us to bring solar’s clean energy benefits to America’s rural areas.”

SOLCAP, a joint venture of KeyState Renewables and Corner Power, has been a reliable tax equity resource for Renewable Properties since 2021. Including Fund 9’s 22 MW portfolio, It has invested in three tax equity funds, supporting the construction and acquisition of 65.3 MW of Renewable Properties’ community solar and small-scale utility projects in five states.

Renewable Properties’ Fund 9 is the second portfolio supported by 1st Source. Since last year, the bank has provided construction and permanent loans for 21.6 MW of Renewable Properties’ solar projects. The closing of Fund 9 will support Renewable Properties’ acquisition of three Maine community solar projects, totaling 11.6 MW. Now under construction, the three solar arrays are scheduled to be completed by the first quarter of 2024.

West Town has also been a steadfast Renewable Properties fund investor. Since 2019, it has participated in three Renewable Properties’ portfolio financings, providing construction and permanent loans for 38.5 MW of projects, including Fund 9.

West Town’s investment in Fund 9 will finance a 6.62 MW solar project in Gibson, N.C., which will be complete in the last quarter of 2023. In addition, West Town will partner on a 4.2 MW community solar project in El Nido, Calif., scheduled for completion in May 2024.

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It posted US$8.8 million in sales in Q1 2023, up 166% year-on-year, and expects significantly less in Q2 – US$0.2 million – due to transitioning its product from Gen 2.3 to its Z3. Significantly larger is its reported backlog of 2.2GWh or US$535 million worth of revenue.

The backlog has been called into question by Iceberg Research, a largely incognito research house which has a short position in Eos. It published a note last week (27 July) in which it said that the parent company of an Eos customer – EPC and developer BridgeLink Commodities, which accounts for 1GWh or around half of Eos’ backlog – had its energy assets foreclosed and auctioned off in May this year.

Eos Energy Enterprises’ share price fell by as much as 45% from its US$3.59 open to a low of US$1.99 on 27 July, the day the note was issued, before making up a third of that fall by the end of the day. At the time of writing, it is at US$2.46, still 32% lower than before the note was published.

After market close on 27 July, Eos Energy Enterprises issued the following response to the note, which also claimed to expose another of its customers, International Electric Power, as a “dubious counterparty”:

“International Electric Power, LLC (“IEP”), who was referred to as a ‘dubious counterparty’, has partnered with Eos since 2020 to co-develop two energy projects in Texas, with Eos providing upfront funding that was repaid when the project secured financing. The first of these projects is currently scheduled to break ground later this summer with product shipments expected in 2023,” the company said.

Eos continued: “The report also referred to legal proceedings involving multiple Bridgelink legal entities. The Company believes that its customer, Bridgelink Commodities, LLC, is a separate legal entity which is not implicated in the legal matters highlighted in today’s statements. This customer, representing 45% of the company’s backlog, reconfirmed today that it continues to build pipeline and is actively seeking financing for energy storage projects covered by Eos’s multi-year Master Supply Agreement.”

“Eos’ commercial pipeline remains strong and continues to grow in line with independent third party market forecasts. The company believes its long-term business fundamentals are strongly supported by the secular shift occurring in the energy industry requiring long duration energy storage.”

A spokesperson for the company declined to comment further when contacted by Energy-Storage.news, referring back to the above announcement with CEO Joe Mastrangelo saying:

“I am very proud of our employees who have stayed focused on our business as we ramp Z3 production, deliver on our backlog, and begin installing the new Z3 systems in the field.”

Specifically, Energy-Storage.news asked it to comment on Bridgelink Commodities not being implicated by its parent company’s issues, and for an update on how advanced the 1GWh of Eos’ backlog it accounts for is.

It should be noted that all of the energy storage companies to have listed via special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), including Eos, Energy Vault, ESS Inc and Stem Inc, in the last few years also have to some degree been subject to substantial short seller interest and have been subject to class action lawsuits on behalf of investors.

Eos meanwhile continues to progress through the Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Programs Office’s (LPO) process for a Title XVII loan and is awaiting a conditional approval decision. Approval would come as the result of “a thorough and rigorous due diligence program conducted by the LPO and multiple external industry experts to evaluate the company’s technology and its ability to meet certain market and financial expectations”, Eos said.

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Sunrun customers in California have begun to share the excess solar energy they are generating on their rooftops with their neighbors — increasing grid resiliency during critical months of peak energy consumption.

Through an exclusive partnership with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Sunrun, a residential solar, battery storage and solar energy-as-a-service provider, quickly reached maximum enrollment and energy capacity goals of 7,500 new and existing residential solar-plus-storage systems and 30 MW in the Energy Efficiency Summer Reliability Program, also known as Peak Power Rewards. Due to very strong interest, the program rapidly expanded to 8,500 customers and 34 MW, respectively.

The program provides meaningful and flexible energy to support the grid, every evening from 7-9 p.m. during the months of August through October, when high temperatures challenge California’s grid to meet peak energy demand. California is among the top five states with the most hours of power disruption, making this program vital to overall grid health.

Mary Powell, CEO of Sunrun, says: “As we make significant progress in fortifying the grid and fostering partnerships with energy providers like PG&E, home storage networked into distributed power plants emerge as invaluable assets.

“This program extension plays a unique and positive role in enhancing our state’s electric grid, reinforcing our commitment to empowering customers and communities with greater energy resilience and energy security, in a time where outages have become increasingly more common.”

Eligibility for Peak Power Rewards requires Sunrun solar and battery customers in single-family homes to have an interconnection agreement with PG&E and not be enrolled in other demand response programs. Customers will receive an upfront payment of $750 and a free smart thermostat for participating.

Photo by Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash

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A special meeting of the SPAC’s stockholders was held 25 July, where 98% of votes cast went in favour of the business combination and completion was announced yesterday (1 August).  

Electriq Power makes battery energy storage systems (BESS) for the residential and small commercial market segments, designed to deliver benefits to the end customer as well as provide grid services – the company was one of the first to enrol in a California automated demand response programme.

The company exclusively uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells, with its flagship PowerPod 2 product starting off at 7.6kW inverter output and capacity from 10kWh to 20kWh. Unlike other manufacturers’ systems that ship fully assembled, PowerPod 2 is shipped as separate components on a single pallet to be assembled in the field.

It can be either AC-coupled or DC-coupled with solar PV. Electriq Power also makes a software suite for its equipment to make it part of a whole home (or building) energy management solution, including enabling the battery systems to be aggregated into virtual power plants (VPPs) and provide grid services.

The SPAC merger valued Electriq Power at around US$495 million pro-forma pre-money equity valuation, the company said back in November when it was announced. It had also said it would raise US$125 million in cash proceeds.

Yesterday, the company said the transaction raised US$45 million in equity through private placements, PIPEs, loan conversions and non-redemptions. Electriq Power also referred to its previously announced US$300 million deal with an unnamed “major US clean energy company” being a project equity financing transaction.

That US$300 million financing was enough to put Electriq Power in the top five rankings for VC funding into energy storage companies for the first half of this year, according to Mercom Capital Group’s reporting.

According to a Form S-4 filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company is aware that it operates in a competitive field with some big players as rivals. Naming the likes of Tesla, LG Energy Solution, Enphase, Generac, SolarEdge and SunPower, it also said the space is evolving and expanding rapidly due to drivers like the lower cost of renewable energy.

Electriq Power claimed its strengths include efficient installation, multiple modes of operation and adaptability and cost of its devices, but acknowledged that some of its competitors “have significantly greater financial capacity, product development, manufacturing capabilities, marketing resources and name recognition than we do”.

“However, while our competitors typically focus on the development and commercialisation of hardware offerings, our software-centric approach provides value throughout the value chain, from installers, fleet managers, consumers and utilities,” the company said in its Form S-4.

Read all Energy-Storage.news coverage of Electriq Power here.

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The facility will process an initial 10,000 tonnes of lithium-ion battery material a year, rising to 30,000 in future, to produce black mass, the resulting mixture of valuable battery metals including lithium, manganese, cobalt and nickel.

These would then be sent to a ‘hub’ sight which would use metallurgical processes to separate out the mixture into each metal, which can then be sold back into the battery supply chain for production of cells. The company is working with mining giant Glencore to repurpose an existing site in Portovesme, Italy, into its European ‘hub’ facility.

The firm’s North America hub and spoke model is closer to going live with operational spoke facilities in Ontario (Canada), New York, Arizona and Alabama and a ‘hub’ also in New York set to start commissioning later this year. Across the five spoke facilities now operational, the firm’s processing capacity is up to 81,000 tonnes annually. The company is planning additional spokes in France and Norway.

Facilities are typically separate because black mass processing is a significantly higher capital-intensive process than black mass production. Black mass production on the other hand requires a big focus on logistical networks, to retrieve battery material from the market.

The lithium-ion battery recycling market in Europe looks set to get a boost from new regulations approved by the European Union which will see minimum levels of materials to be recovered from waste batteries, and minimum levels of recycling content in new ones. Li-Cycle’s former CCO Kunal Phalpher has in the past said the regulations would be important for the market going forwards.

Although the majority of the battery material going into these spoke facilities will come from the EV sector, material from the stationary energy storage system (ESS) sector is starting to be seen too as the technology proliferates and projects age.

The battery manager for Sweden-based recycling firm Stena recently told Energy-Storage.news it was starting to see ESS volumes from the earliest pilot projects as well as after thunderstorms.

Companies in the recycling space may also increasingly become involved in the ESS sector through second life solutions due to the potential higher value that can be extracted by repurposing EV batteries rather than recycling them. Stena has a second life arm, BatteryLoop, while a partnership between Glencore, utility Ibedrola and waste management firm FCC will look at both recycling and second life.

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An additional 350MW output and 1,400MWh energy capacity has been added to the plant, bringing it to a total 750MW/3,000MWh.

This comes after the 300MW/1,200MWh Phase I was completed in 2020, followed by the addition of another 100MW/400MWh in Phase II the following year.

As with the first two phases, offtaker of the new batteries will be California investor-owned utility (IOU) Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E). The utility has contracted with Vistra for resource adequacy (RA), the California mechanism for ensuring electric load-serving entities in the state deliver energy reliably to customers and with sufficient supply.

RA is the main reason for California becoming a world leader in grid-scale BESS deployments. The fact that battery developers can secure long-term contracts with associated revenue streams from electricity supplier offtakers has seen the market surpass 5GW in the main CAISO grid service area.

RA requirements include delivery of electricity in four-hour blocks, which is why most new-build battery storage facilities in the state have durations of that length.

PG&E’s new contract for Moss Landing Phase III, also known as MOSS350, is under a 15-year term and was approved by California regulators in April 2022.

Vistra Energy noted that the expansion was completed on schedule within a 16-month timeframe, adding more than 110,000 battery modules in 112 containerised units. It comes after the company reported in May that the expansion was on track, as it announced its most recent financial results.

Being built on the same site as a Vistra natural gas power plant meant the company was able to leverage existing electricity grid infrastructure, while zoning was not an issue and allows for potential further growth of the BESS plant, Vistra Energy CEO and president Jim Burke said.

Aerial view of the Moss Landing site, including the Vistra natural gas plant which the site is historically better known for. Image: LG Energy Solution.

Vistra has previously said Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility could eventually host 1.5GW/6GWh of battery storage, if market conditions make that viable. PG&E also has a BESS plant that it owns, the 182.5MW/730MWh Elkhorn Battery project, at the Moss Landing site.  

“As we navigate this energy transition to cleaner fuel sources, the ability to balance that shift with both reliability and affordability is paramount,” Burke said.

“Continued investment in energy storage, like our Moss Landing site, allows us to harness and store a substantial and growing amount of power from intermittent renewables and then deliver that electricity when customers need it most.”

Moss Landing: Will likely be largest by megawatt-hours for a while

As regular readers of Energy-Storage.news will know, Vistra’s Moss Landing project has not had the easiest first few years of operation: between September 2021 and June 2022, both of the first two phases had to be taken offline after separate overheating incidents. PG&E’s Elkhorn project also had an overheating incident of its own in September 2022.

Nonetheless, Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility is thought to remain the largest BESS project in the world, a claim enhanced by the latest expansion.

Notably large projects in development include the Waratah Super Battery in Australia which will be at least 850MW/1,680MWh and on which construction is getting underway. In the UK, developer Carlton Power recently got planning consent for a 1,040MW/2,080MWh project near Manchester, England.

The biggest project to come online during 2022 meanwhile was Crimson Energy Storage, also in California, which is 350MW/1,400MWh.

Vistra has previously claimed it will have over 1.2GW of battery storage in its US portfolio by 2026. The company, which has a diverse fleet of assets including renewables, fossil fuels, nuclear and energy storage, is set to report its latest quarterly financial results on 8 August.

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The project is being developed by Atlas Renewable for customer China Tianying Group (CNTY), an environmental services company. Located near Shanghai, it will charge from a nearby wind farm and discharge to the grid during timeframes and at prices which have been pre-agreed with the utility.

But part of the appeal for CNTY is that the company could combine the construction of the composite blocks, which are lifted up and down to charge and discharge, with its waste remediation business where it is paid by the government to reuse waste materials like concrete debris and coal ash.

Energy Vault CEO Rob Piconi discussed the project at length in a recent wide-ranging interview with Energy-Storage.news (Premium access), in which we put widely-held scepticism about its claimed performance to him. Piconi claimed that iterations to the gravity energy storage system coming later this year would deliver the “lowest cost of storage in the world”.

The company also claims the EVx system has a round-trip efficiency of over 80%, superior to the other most prominent forms of long-duration energy storage (LDES) like pumped hydro energy storage (PHES), compressed air energy storage (CAES) and flow batteries.

In the commissioning announcement, Piconi commented: “The team’s pace and quality of development since the start of construction in March 2022 has been extraordinary, especially when considering the backdrop of two COVID related work stoppages in the first year of construction alone.”

“While this represents a significant milestone, our work in China is just beginning given recent local announcements of multi-GW hours of gravity energy storage buildouts, including projects announced in 2022 supporting China’s ‘Zero-carbon parks‘ initiative with Energy Vault’s gravity energy storage technology.”

A subsidiary of CNTY has entered into an agreement with the government of Huailai County, Hebei Province, to build an additional 100MWh gravity energy storage project there, Energy Vault added.

Eric Fang, Chief Executive Officer, Atlas Renewable, added: “We remain focused on an efficient system commissioning process in order to begin storing and dispatching renewable energy to China’s national grid in full alignment with local and state grid authorities. This first deployment of Energy Vault’s EVx technology will serve as a model for global decarbonisation technology partnerships, and as we have previously announced, are already working on multi-GWh deployments of Energy Vault’s gravity technology in China to support and ideally accelerate China’s current 30-60 net carbon neutral plans.”

Alongside its gravity energy storage solution, Energy Vault is also deploying short-duration battery energy storage projects for numerous customers in the US as well as green hydrogen. Read all coverage of the company here.

The company is targeting US$325-425 million million in 2023 revenues, lower than initial guidance communicated in late 2022.

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