EDPR NA Distributed Generation LLC (EDPR NA DG), a renewable energy operator in North America, and Lufthansa Technik Puerto Rico (LTPR), an aircraft maintenance company, have executed a 21-year power purchase agreement (PPA), allowing EDPR NA DG to install a 2-MW rooftop solar system at LTPR’s Aguadilla Facility. The partnership is a step toward making the grid and transportation sector in Puerto Rico cleaner and more resilient.

This installation will supply between 95-100% of the site’s annual energy needs and save the maintenance, operations and repair facility more than $10 million in operating costs. The system will also generate roughly 3 million kWh annually.

EDPR NA DG is a subsidiary of EDP Renewables North America LLC (EDPR NA). A company focused on delivering a reliable energy grid with distributed technologies, EDPR NA DG has gained significant expertise from the acquisition, construction and operation of 290 MWp of distributed generation and community solar projects to date across North America.

LTPR is a subsidiary of Lufthansa Technik (LHT), which is part of the Lufthansa Group. This collaboration is EDPR NA DG’s first with an aviation company. The PPA will result in greater control and predictability of future energy costs and an instant reduction of emissions, supporting Lufthansa Group’s sustainability goals.

EDPR NA DG will develop the project with Puerto Rico-based Carpe Diem Developers. “Through our work with EDPR NA DG, we are launching an exciting new era of distributed energy generation,” says David Denny, partner, Carpe Diem Developers. “LTPR has shown exemplary leadership through its local community engagement, and we are excited to help build this tangible symbol of their commitment to sustainability in Puerto Rico.”

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The system will shift renewable production from peak generation times to peak consumtpion times, optimising the park’s output.

“Burgenland has set a clear goal: We want to and will be climate-neutral by 2030, energy-independent and therefore also price-independent”, said its Governor Hans Peter Doskozil at the presentation and press conference in Eisenstadt, Austria.

“One could have had it easy and relied on lithium-ion energy storage,” he continued. “But this would not have aligned with our morals that we want to gain the energy from natural and fair sources. Adopting storage solutions where we promote exploitation through mining on other continents is not an equitable energy transition. This is why we chose a research cooperation with CMBlu Energy to achieve and create a European model for 100% renewable energy.”

Dr. Peter Geigle, CEO of CMBlu, said: “With this successful delivery the foundation has been laid for testing our technology in a wide range of applications. Our focus for the coming weeks will be to evaluate our technology’s performance and then deliver further storage systems with a total capacity of 300 MWh to Burgenland.”

The battery uses proprietary organic flow technology, whereas most flow battery technologies use vanadium such as those from Invinity Energy Systems, although flow batteries with some other electrolye chemistries are on the market such as zinc bromine (Redflow) and iron (ESS Inc). CMBlu won its first US deal in February this year, securing an order for a system to be installed at a thermal plant in Wisconsin.

US utility Xcel Energy and liquid metal battery company Ambri have settled on a 300kWh system size for a previously-announced pilot project, they said today (19 July).

Nearly a year after the pair first announced plans to deploy Ambri’s technology at the Solar Technology Acceleration Center (SolarTAC) in Colorado, they have announced they will jointly test the 300kWh system for 12 months with installation set to begin in early 2024.

It should come online in late 2024 and will use the GridNXT Microgrid Platform at SolarTAC to integrate multiple generation sources, such as solar and wind, along with inverters, load banks, and 3-phase distribution connections and communications.

“Xcel Energy is a forward-thinking and ambitious utility, and their enthusiasm for testing our system highlights the huge potential for Liquid Metal batteries,” said Adam Briggs, Ambri CCO. “Xcel Energy clearly understands the significant value that can be achieved by integrating innovative storage technologies into their renewable portfolio.”

Xcel Energy is also deploying the first large-scale projects to use the iron-air battery technology from Form Energy, one of which recently got local approval to begin construction.

The SolarTAC project is the first field-deployed utility pilot system for Ambri. Throughout the demonstration, Xcel and Ambri will test various use cases, including solar and wind integration, capacity management, arbitrage, ancillary services and more.

NGK Insulators receives sodium-sulphur battery system order for Hitachi project in Maldives

Japan-based NGK Insulators has received an order from BASF Stationary Energy Storage for a demonstration project in the Republic of Maldives.

The project will use NGK’s proprietary sodium-sulfur (NAS) battery technology, for which BASF and NGK recently signed a sales and marketing agreement for global distribution in power-to-gas (P2G), power grid and microgrid applications.

The NAS battery will be a single-container, 250kW/1,450kWh system, and is expected to be energised in July 2024.

The demonstration project will be at a decarbonised seawater desalination system developed by Japanese industrial and engineering group Hitachi Zosen (not part of the larger Hitachi conglomerate).

The NAS batteries were selected by Hitachi Zosen under the “Financing Programme to Demonstrate Decarbonization Technology for Realizing Co-Innovation”, a publicly solicited project by the island country’s Ministry of Environment.

The project aims to build a decarbonised seawater desalination system that uses solar power and emits no greenhouse gases on the island of Gaafaru Atoll.

NGK’s technology was selected because of its environmental resistance and past operational achievements in off-grid and remote island microgrid projects globally. BASF recently wrote a sponsored article on Energy-Storage.news in which it said there are nearly 5GWh of NAS batteries deployed worldwide, across 250 projects.

The Maldives has amandated that 30% of the power source for seawater desalination plants, which are indispensable for securing fresh water on remote islands, be derived from renewable energy sources by 2030.

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Watlington Solar

RWE, a renewable energy company, has signed eight long-term utility-scale power purchase agreements (PPAs) with Dominion Energy Virginia for seven solar projects in the state totaling more than 300 MW capable of producing more than 750,000 MWh of generation.

“As a company, we are well-positioned to leverage our vast experience to deliver the highest quality solar energy projects, optimizing costs, while providing tailor-made solutions to our customers,” says Mark Noyes, CEO of RWE Clean Energy, a subsidiary of RWE AG. The utility-scale project portfolio in Virginia includes:

Pleasant Hill Solar: 20 MW located in the City of Suffolk – came online in April.

Watlington Solar: 20 MW located in Halifax County – came online in June.

Wythe County Solar: 75 MW located in Wythe County – under construction and expected to be online in 2024.

Switchgrass Solar: 69 MW located in Suffolk County – in development.

360 Solar: 52 MW located in Chesterfield County – in development.

Groves Solar: 15 MW located in Westmoreland County – in development.

Harrisonburg Solar: 15 MW located in Rockingham County – in development.

Each project has a PPA in place with Dominion Energy Virginia, the regulated utility company providing electricity to more than 2.8 million customers in the state. RWE Clean Energy will serve as the long-term owner-operator of each project.

Together this portfolio of projects has the capacity to power more than 70,000 homes in the Old Dominion state.

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Rosemary Colaert, energy storage analyst for Clean Horizon, said the reported offers for the annual aid payments are ranging below 100,000 k€/MW/year and show “…aggressive bidding when compared to the 115,000€/MW/year cap”.

Colaert added that the level of revenues the bids are seeking “suggests that bidders are expecting additional revenues for the remaining 10 years of operation of the battery system after the 10-year support scheme. This is a strong assumption as it is hard to assess how the energy and ancillary services markets will stand in 10 years.”

“We think the main message here is that players are willing to take risks in order to have an operating asset in Greece. This strategy has been witnessed in other countries where tenders were being held for the first time, for example in Portugal where the capacity payments for PV-plus-storage projects turned out to be negative.”

As Energy-Storage.news reported in March, developers are submitting energy storage projects in Greece for electricity market licenses in preparation for the auctions which will total 900MW, including the current 400MW process. The country is aiming to have 3GW online by 2030.

Clean Horizon (with which Energy-Storage.news did a November 2021 webinar on the Greek market) has analysed the total volume of battery storage which has been licensed and totals a whopping 23.6GW of all durations.

The chart below (data to May) shows the volume by company, with Madrid-headquartered renewables independent power producer (IPP) EDP Renewables the largest with around 1,500MW licensed. Greek firm PPC Renewables is second with a little over 1,000MW while DIREEN, part of Narada Power, is third with over 800MW.

The firm cautioned however that many projects have been submitted through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) which can make it hard to identify the ultimate parent company. Not all of the projects will have entered the auction either, since it required a two-hour duration.

Source: Clean Horizon.

Since then, another 24 battery storage projects totalling around 1.6GW was submitted for approval, local reports said.

Many projects are being paired with wind or solar generation to avoid curtailment thereby increasing revenues, by saving the generated energy during peak production periods and shifting it to peak demand, lower production periods.

Greece was highlighted as one of the five most attractive energy storage markets in Europe by another research firm, Aurora Energy Research in April this year, along with Germany, Great Britain, Ireland and Italy, while UK-based energy storage fund manager Gore Street Capital described it as an “interesting market” in an interview with Energy-Storage.news last year.

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The group produces quarterly reports on activities in the energy storage and smart grid sectors, with the latest edition rounding up trends and activities observed during the first half of 2023 as well as the most recent quarter just gone.

In Q1 2023, Mercom found a considerable drop both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year, with just US$2.2 billion raised from 27 deals, versus US$12.9 billion from the same number of deals in the same period of 2022 – an 83% decrease.

The good news is, that sum was more than doubled in Q2 2023, with Mercom reporting that US$4.9 billion of corporate funding was raised during the three month period across 32 deals, marking a 126% quarter-on-quarter increase.

Comparing the first six months of 2023 versus 2022 however, corporate funding was down 55% year-on-year. There were 59 deals reported accounting for US$7.1 billion in H1 2023, versus 60 deals that totalled US$15.8 billion in H1 2022.

However, as Mercom Capital pointed out, the US$10.7 billion IPO by LG Energy Solution that took place early in Q1 2022 distorts the year-on-year comparison. Without that IPO being included, the first half of last year’s figure of US$5.1 billion puts this year’s activity so far in a more favourable light.   

Still, 2022 was a breakout year for the sector’s corporate funding activity, with an all-time high of US$26 billion raised, jumping 55% from the US$17 billion raised during 2021.

In both years prior to this one the sector fared much better than it did in a pandemic-depressed 2020, when just US$6.5 billion was recorded by Mercom for the entire year. That said, the sector raised more than double even in 2020 than it did in 2019, when just US$2.8 billion was reported by the group.  

Nonetheless, strong tailwinds for the market, particularly in the US following the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) late last year made energy storage companies “across the supply chain, from materials to developers” an attractive destination for investors, Mercom said.

VC funding chart (mostly) topped by battery makers

Venture capital (VC) funding recorded in the first half of 2023 was up 27% year-on-year. In H1 2022, US$3 billion VC funding went into the sector from 48 deals, and in H1 2023, US$3.8 billion funding was pumped in via 43 deals.

The quarterly comparison was even more pronounced, seeing a 148% increase from Q1 2023 to Q2 2023, with US$2.7 billion VC funding committed across 24 deals in Q2, and US$1.1 billion in 19 deals during Q1 of this year.

That being said about the whole supply chain attracting investment, of the five top recipients of VC funding in the quarter just gone, four are upstream battery companies and just one is more focused on downstream energy storage systems and deployment.

South Korea’s SK Innovation took both first and second place with two VC deals of US$944 million and US$400 million respectively, while Chinese battery manufacturer Libode was in third place with a US$375 million deal. Electriq Power, a residential battery storage company headquartered in the US and currently planning to publicly list through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) combination, came fourth with its recent US$300 million financing. Another US company, battery manufacturing startup Our Next Energy (ONE), was in joint fourth place with US$300 million also raised.   

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In response to a series of questions asked by Energy-Storage.news (in full below), a spokesperson said the firm focuses early stage startups in the energy storage and battery and component manufacturing sectors in North America. The latter sector is set to expand massively from virtually nothing in light of generous federal incentives as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Manuel Terranova, CEO and President of Peaxy, said: “Our customers are finding that managing their battery data is becoming more and more challenging and costly. This funding round expresses confidence in our vision for a unified, AI-driven solution for battery data management and digital twins. With the support of our investors, we’re poised to lead the industry with a mature and proven product offering and the deep domain experience Peaxy brings to its customers.”

With most battery energy storage system (BESS) failures happening within the first three years of a project’s lifetime, and the number increasing as the technology proliferates (figures from the Electric Power Research Institute, EPRI) the role of battery analytics in the market is becoming increasingly important.

Germany-based firms Twaice and Accure both wrote whitepapers on the role of analytics around BESS commissioning for the most recent volume (35) of PV Tech Power, Solar Media’s quarterly technical journal for the downstream solar industry. Both have also secured funding rounds in recent years, Twaice raising US$26 million in 2021 and Accure raising US$8 million last year.

In the following Q&A, we asked Peaxy about its unique value proposition, what parts of the market it is focusing on, and what major industry challenges it promises to solve.

Energy-Storage.news: What makes Peaxy stand out amongst other analytics providers?

Peaxy: Before even tackling data analytics, we specialise and have expertise in “first mile data challenges” where we deploy custom hardware for edge data capture, transformation and storage. Our customers have found that this capability combined with their other available data sources results in higher quality analytics and machine learning insights.

Which markets (geographically or grid-wise) and market segments (residential, C&I, utility, etc) is Peaxy targeting and why?

We focus on early stage startups in the energy storage and battery and component manufacturing sectors in North America. Our solution allows small to mid-sized companies to have pilots running in as little as 90 days, and to quickly ramp up to full production lines and grid-scale storage as they expand using our cloud-based, modular software approach.

What has gone into creating the Peaxy offering(s) and what’s the expertise the company can leverage?

Peaxy was founded in 2012 and brings extensive experience of how industrial equipment and batteries work together, including propulsion and power generation through our work with the U.S. Department of Defense. We have worked with complex, vertically integrated, enterprise, test, and edge systems and understand how to move data securely at very large scale between systems.

What are some of the main challenges facing battery storage system owners and operators that analytics solutions like Peaxy’s can solve?

We hear over and over about how hard it’s becoming for battery storage systems owners and operators as well as battery manufacturers to deal with large amounts of battery data.

While battery analytics is a powerful end solution, and often receives the most coverage and attention in the media, we also spend a lot of time working with customers on the foundations of their battery data — where it comes from, how it gets stored and tracked, and how it can be conveniently referenced from one place.

And most importantly, how to trace battery data down to the individual cell level, tagged by serial number, over its lifetime to enjoy the benefits that provides in cost savings and improved safety and performance.

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Renewable Energy Zones are large areas of land zoned specifically to host a mixture of large-scale renewable energy generation sources, enabling the transition away from dependence on fossil fuels, while also bringing investment into regional economies.

Most of Australia’s states are planning to have them, with Queensland recently announcing the development of 12 such facilities is underway, as reported by our colleagues at PV Tech.

Central-West Orana REZ

One of the two new battery projects approved is called Apsley, about 6km away from a township of the same name, in rural NSW. The 120MW/240MWh project will connect directly to a nearby existing transmission line, and in the words of its developer ACEnergy, “provide support to central NSW”.

It will charge from the electricity grid at off-peak times when energy is cheap and abundant, and then discharge when it is most needed, supporting stability of the grid network as well as matching supply to demand.

The project will be sited within NSW’s Central-West Orana REZ, which is a 20,000 hectare site chosen by the state government after a geospatial mapping exercise in 2018 to find optimal locations that had a combination of renewable energy resource potential, proximity to existing electricity network infrastructure. Consideration of how the REZ will interact with existing uses of land in the area was also accounted for.

The NSW claimed Central-West Orana REZ will unlock 3GW of renewable energy capacity by the middle of this decade, while bringing in AU$10 billion investment by 2030. Together with new infrastructure to take electricity from the REZ, energy storage will be a key part of optimising the zone’s value.

Hunter Central Coast REZ

The other project, Muswellbrook, is a 150MW/300MWh BESS proposed by developer Firm Power. It will be sited in the Hunter Central Coast REZ, which like Central-West Orana is in development through state authority Energy Corporation of New South Wales (EnergyCo).

It was also site-selected through geospatial mapping, undertaken in 2021. As the name implies, it is near to the coast, and therefore has potential to connect NSW to new-build offshore wind projects in a proposed Commonwealth Offshore Wind Zone.

The region of Hunter also offers land and infrastructure in the form of rehabilitated mines and thermal power plant sites, while the area is also expected to play host to a number of newer industries to the state like green hydrogen, ammonia and metals production.

A Registration of Interest (ROI) process run by the government in late 2021-early 2022 was responded to with proposals for more than 40 large-scale projects including 24 solar PV farms, 20 wind projects, a staggering 35 BESS projects and eight pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) projects.

“Giving these batteries the green light will play a critical role in securing reliable, renewable energy across NSW,” the state’s minister for energy Penny Sharpe said.

“The transformation of our energy system needs to occur as soon as possible. Batteries are not only critical to supporting our state’s transition to net zero, they will assist us to get there sooner.”

Colleague Paul Scully, minister for planning and public spaces, added that the BESS assets “will be used during peak power consumption times and provide backup during outages or extreme weather events reducing the need for costly distribution upgrades or emergency generators”.

In related news from New South Wales, the state will be home to Australia’s biggest approved BESS projects, the Waratah Super Battery, which the national Clean Energy Finance Council (CEFC) recently committed AU$100 million towards. The state meanwhile is hosting a tender through which 550MW of long-duration energy storage (LDES) procurements could be made alongside 950GW of new generation procurements.

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PVcase, a software-as-a-service company specializing in solar project design, has secured a joint investment of $100 million, bringing the company’s total funding to more than $123 million. Highland Europe, Energize and existing investor Elephant all participated in the round.

Considerable investments in the solar market notwithstanding, the solar engineering industry is devoid of the digitization needed to keep pace with demand. PVcase is adding speed, efficiency and precision to solar project design while solving the solar industry’s growing problem of data risk.

Data risk arises from many factors. Utility-scale solar’s rapid global growth has led to a lack of qualified designers and engineers, contributing to developers’ use of software to automate tasks in design and ongoing operations. However, data sources for that software – particularly in Europe – are in older formats, such as PDFs and hard copy records. And most solar software platforms were designed independent of each other, built to automate only a handful of tasks.

As a result, developers must now use as many as 70 different data sets, most with fields of data that must be manually matched when moving from one software platform to the next. These multiple, time-consuming and customized transfers inevitably degrade data quality, creating data risk.

“For solar data, there are no standards for how much to collect, when and how often to collect it and what the data should cover,” says PVcase CCO Douglas Geist. “PVcase’s momentum won the confidence of these investors that we can address this challenge.”

PVcase will streamline every step in the design and operations process in a single platform. This investment comes on the heels of the company’s recent acquisition of solar siting firm Anderson Optimization. The two platforms’ data fields have already been matched, enabling transfer with a few mouse clicks. The merged product line carries numerous benefits. The biggest is ensuring developers only spend time and resources on viable sites notes PVcase CEO David Trainavicius.

“In utility-scale solar design and construction, the physical output can only be as good as the software and data inputs,” says Peter Fallon, general partner at Elephant. “PVcase is building the end-to-end solution in the category, allowing its customers to more effectively design and develop scaled solar projects.”

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The project is expected to come online in 2025 and Solariant will remain involved in the project to see it through the development and construction stages. Construction is expected to start in 2024.

The Alamogordo project will help the Southern state to meet a 100% zero carbon electricity target for 2045, as per the state government’s 2019 Energy Transition Act. The energy storage system will help shift the solar PV into the evening hours as generation tails off.

To this end, the New Mexico Senate in March passed a bill which would require investor-owned utilities (IOUs) in the state to have 2GW/7GWh of energy storage online by 2034. Half of that needs to have come online by 2028. The main three IOUs, which serve 73% of the New Mexico population, are the Public Service Company of New Mexico, El Paso Electric and Xcel Energy.

“Greenvolt is delighted to partner with Solariant on this important project in New Mexico,” said Weronika Nowak, Deputy Country Manager for Greenvolt Power U.S. “Greenvolt is committed to partnering with communities and industry leaders to accelerate the energy transition, and our goal is to continue to expand into additional markets across the country.”

The announcement added that Greenvolt “sees great opportunities with quality off-takers” in New Mexico.

Last week saw another developer D.E. Shaw start construction on a 200MW solar, 100MW storage project in the state, set to come online next year.

Greenvolt started out of Portugal as a biomass company and says its product is the ‘main reference’ when it comes to energy production from residual forest biomass in the country. It has also expanded into broader renewables development, with a pipeline of 6.9GW of projects in Europe and the US, of which 2.9GW will be ready-to-build (RTB) before the end of 2023.

It went public in 2021, two years after first announcing the plans (covered by sister site PV Tech).

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New York’s energy sector is undergoing a major overhaul to both enable the transition to cleaner energy sources, and cope with growing demand for electricity as trends like building and transport electrification pick up pace.

The state has a target in place to reach 70% renewable energy-generated electricity by 2030, and eventually hit net zero emissions across its electric system by 2040. In order to get to those goals, New York’s governor Kathy Hochul set a target for the deployment of 6GW of energy storage, while new transmission buildout is being planned.  

While storage technologies like batteries can help shift energy demand, manage transmission congestion and provide ancillary services to the grid, thus benefiting the transmission network, there are other more specific applications for energy storage that can further help.

In some cases, where storage is treated as what’s called a “non-wires alternative” resource, rather than a market resource as in the applications above, it can reduce the need for expensive and time consuming upgrades to the transmission system itself.

To give a real world example, in Germany, grid operators have contracted with battery energy storage system (BESS) providers to put large-scale BESS systems at the end of long transmission lines that can increase their hosting capacity and reduce the need for N-1 redundancy. System integrator Fluence was recently awarded one such 250MW project, the company’s second for network providers in the European country.

Back in the US, New York energy storage trade association and technology accelerator group NY-BEST in January published a study which looked at use cases such as the German TSO’s ‘Grid Boosters’, as well as others more specific to New York.

In each case, storage was found to offer significant savings against the capital cost of more traditional transmission assets. In one instance, a 200MW/200MWh BESS as an alternative to new transmission wires would cost about US$120 million, which sounds like a lot until the US$700 million cost of new transmission infrastructure to do much the same job is considered.

There would also be annual savings of about US$10 million to both the area local to the asset, and about the same sum if not more in savings to the state-wide energy system, the NY-BEST study found.

NY-ISO urged New York authorities to adopt the storage as transmission paradigm, while another grid and market operator in the US, ISO New England, produced its own study at the beginning of this year that also found in favour of the storage as transmission model.

Regulatory definition and treatment needs some work

However, Zoellmer’s report points out, energy storage is still treated as a generator asset in NYISO’s tariffs, meaning it cannot be evaluated as a transmission asset in the interconnection process, and there are no methods by which it could be operated as one.

The earlier study by NY-BEST found that allowing energy storage systems to serve wholesale market applications as well as transmission asset services could be an effective way to reduce the capital cost of investment and enable returns for developers.

Yet, as pointed out in Zoellmer’s NYISO report, storage as transmission proposals filed with federal regulator FERC by other ISO and RTO organisations across the US are for ‘storage as transmission only assets’ (SATOAs). That means they would not be eligible to participate in other wholesale markets.

Even though FERC itself recognised that wholesale market participation would allow developers and other stakeholders to recover costs of investment in storage systems, there are a number of regulatory barriers and hurdles to dual participation. These include the need for ISOs and RTOs, effectively the customers of the storage system, to be independent and stay out of market participation.

In the next steps for NYISO, the feasibility of creating specific rules for storage as a transmission asset (SATA) will be examined, as will use cases specific to the ISO’s service area.

New York State does have a couple of non-wires alternative projects in operation already, but these are at the distribution network level. Key Capture Energy, one of the developers of one such project, for utility Orange & Rockland in Upstate New York, is part of a consortium proposing a large transmission network project led by Avangrid, which would include 600MWh of BESS alongside new wires infrastructure.

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