By a vote of 34 to 24, the House Committee on Appropriations last week approved a Fiscal Year 2024 Energy and Water Development spending bill that would devastate Department of Energy (DOE) funding for clean energy and grid deployment.

While the committee states that the bill “prioritizes funding for agencies and programs that bolster our national security, energy security and economic competitiveness,” many amendments proposed by Democrats during the markup period were rejected by Republicans. They included amendments that “continued wasteful funding for projects under the Title 17 loan authority and climate initiatives within the Inflation Reduction Act.” The final bill also included a provision that “reins in wasteful Washington spending by rescinding $5.58 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).”

Gregory Wetstone, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), offers his thoughts on the legislation: “The Energy & Water spending bill approved by the House Appropriations Committee slashes funding for critical DOE programs, including the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and the Office of Electricity, bringing them to well below Fiscal Year 2023 enacted levels. These funding cuts would take us backward when we urgently need to deploy more clean energy and modernize our grid to enhance reliability and better enable our electric power system to withstand increasingly frequent extreme weather events. We urge the Senate to reject these spending cuts and maintain funding for DOE efforts that are critical to meeting our energy security and climate goals.”

Image by TravelScape on Freepik.

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Eran Mahrer

Leeward Renewable Energy (LRE), a renewable energy company, and Southern California Edison (SCE), one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, have entered into a 15-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for LRE’s 126 MW Antelope Valley BESS facility in Kern County, Calif.

Antelope Valley BESS is located adjacent to LRE’S 100 MW solar and storage Rabbitbrush project and 174 MW solar and storage Chaparral Springs project. Construction will begin this year and is expected to create approximately 70 union jobs during peak building. The project will generate significant property tax and economic benefits for Kern County.

Antelope Valley BESS is expected to be operational in early 2024. The facility will be LRE’s first standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) and will be capable of storing over 500 MWh of clean power that can be dispatched during the busiest load times. Its storage capacity will enable it to power the equivalent of more than 100,000 homes for up to four hours.

“Antelope Valley BESS marks a significant milestone for LRE,” states Eran Mahrer, chief commercial officer at LRE. “We are proud to partner with Southern California Edison to help meet California’s zero-carbon goals and facilitate the transition to a cleaner and more reliable power grid that will directly address the urgent need for energy capacity in the state.”

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‘Refractory’ means it is made of material that retains its strength and form even at high temperatures, and is resistant to heat, pressure or chemical decomposition. In Rondo’s case, the materials used are oxygen, silicon and aluminium.

Targeting applications for decarbonising heat-intensive industrial processes, Rondo Energy has claimed it is a heat storage medium with more than 90% efficiency, rising to as much as 98% as system sizes scale up. In addition to aiding decarbonisation, it could offer industrial customers a way to lower and manage energy costs.

Rondo made the Heat Battery commercially available in 2022, making its first deployment for California biofuels producer Calgren under a heat-as-a-service contract at no upfront cost to the customer. The 2MWh system would enable Calgren to utilise high temperature heat at a much lower cost than equivalent gas-fired generation, it was claimed earlier this year when the project was announced.  

Alongside Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ VC-funding, other investors in the startup include sustainable energy investor Energy Impact Partners, and Siam Cement Corporation, a major Thailand-based conglomerate which is also Rondo’s manufacturing partner.

When it made the investment into the thermal storage company in September last year, Siam Cement Corporation (SCC) said the technology could be applied to many of SCC’s own industrial operations in sectors as diverse as cement, chemicals, paper and packaging. The pair planned to offer large-scale renewable energy-based Heat Battery solutions to industrial customers across Southeast Asia, working up to a global offering.

SCC executive VP Thammasak Sethaudom said the company “can leverage our 70 years of technical expertise in the refractory business and supply chain to support Rondo’s mission to decarbonise industrial process heat” and that it was “happy” to be increasing production to meet expected rising demand.

Working out of an undisclosed location in Southeast Asia, Siam Cement Corporation’s Rondo Heat Battery (RHB) manufacturing line already has annual production capacity of 2.4GWh, but there are plans afoot to scale that up massively. However, a timeline for the ramp up was not given in a release by Rondo Energy.

Ramp up announced as activity in thermal storage heats up

Interest in thermal energy storage around the world has been gradually ramping up too: Breakthrough Energy Ventures has invested in a number of others, for example. Spanish utility major Iberdrola just made a modest VC investment into one, Sweden’s Kyoto Group, which Energy-Storage.news reported a few days ago.

The government of Spain a few weeks ago announced a €160 million (US$170 million) grant programme to support the deployment of 600MW of energy storage by 2026 in the European country, and included thermal storage among eligible technology options.

One startup, Israel’s Brenmiller Energy, recently broke ground on what it claimed was the first thermal storage ‘gigafactory’, with 4GWh annual production capacity for bGen, the company’s technology that involves rocks that can be heated to 750°C.

A report published in late 2022 by the Long Duration Energy Storage Council (LDES Council) global trade association found that meeting global decarbonisation goals will require several terawatts of thermal energy storage deployments.

With nearly half of global emissions coming from heating or cooling processes, and industrial applications representing a significant portion of that, the economic case for thermal energy storage for industry is very strong, the LDES Council report claimed.

LDES Council CEO Julia Souder offered an overview of some thermal storage technologies and providers in a recent article for our quarterly journal PV Tech Power (Vol.35), which you can read in full with an Energy-Storage.news Premium subscription, or read an extract of it on the site here.

Read more of Energy-Storage.news’ coverage of the thermal energy storage space here.

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Lindsay Latre

ESA, a clean energy development and decarbonization platform, has formed a strategic co-development partnership with Nautilus Solar, which will acquire a portfolio of up to 270 MW DC of community solar projects in the Midwest from ESA, an early-stage venture bringing community solar initiatives in the Great Lakes region.

This new relationship bolsters ESA’s sustainable growth trajectory, ensuring continued profitability while championing the core values of environmental stewardship and renewable energy advancement. ESA will remain 100% owned by its original founding partners, reinforcing its commitment to its founding principles.

“This collaboration harnesses ESA’s expertise in renewable energy and Nautilus’ financial might and nimble transactional abilities,” says Lindsay Latre, CEO of ESA. “Together, we aim to create a lasting impact on the communities we serve, turning widespread renewable energy adoption into reality.”

Piper Sandler Companies, an advisor in the sector, played a key role in facilitating this strategic co-development partnership. Their expertise and guidance were instrumental in ensuring a transparent, mutually beneficial and robust agreement that aligns with both ESA’s and Nautilus’s strategic objectives.

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Whether for recycling or reuse, the used EV battery space is highly fragmented and transparency is a major issue. The firm’s platform aims to connect buyers and sellers and increase the availability of data on the batteries, both in terms of what is in them but what they have been used for.

The latter was pointed out as a major challenge to reusing batteries in second life energy storage by Stena Recycling in a recent interview with Energy-Storage.news.

In this Q&A, founder and CEO William Bergh and CMO Eden Yates discuss the platform and the batteries going through it. We also get the company’s reaction to the new EU Battery Regulation, which was voted through last week and creates new requirements around minimum recycled content and data transparency.

How fast is the market of available second life batteries is growing in Europe from your data?

On our platform, the number of batteries added per week is growing on average 5% month-over-month. The most important growth we have seen, however, is from discontinued projects and companies adding hundreds of MWh in large batches. Furthermore, pioneering stationary storage manufacturers are starting to see a return of their first deployed battery systems.

So, you can see a trend developing there: more batteries coming to the end of their first life and available for second life. In aggregate, we have seen over 400MWh available for second life (note, this is not reflecting the volumes we have traded).

How concentrated the supply is in terms of vehicle OEMs?

As you can expect, Teslas do have a high demand and are fairly well developed in terms of price discovery and appetite from the market. Modules that come from off spec production or off spec integration, which likely have not previously been in a vehicle, are also emerging as a strong supply source.

From the Cling perspective, there’s not much we can say (at the moment) on those trades as they are pilot ones and commercially sensitive, but it’s something we believe will be more important as a supply source in the coming decade. And more transparent, with the need for greater awareness on end life traceability.

What percentage of used EV batteries end up not being suitable for a second life application and then have to be recycled?

The vast majority of trades we are dealing with are for second life and we are catering to demand with those aims very clearly communicated to us. The consolidated volumes of batteries unsuitable for second life, and suitable for recycling, have yet to really spike. It’s also fair to say that gives some time for the various recycling plants and processes to get up and running and refined. Eventually being able to judge that optimal flow between second life and recycling is where we want to be.

What are the use cases that second life EV batteries are being repurposed for and the role state-of-health (SOH) plays here?

The use cases we see are mostly for energy storage system (ESS) applications or being reused – for example, in a classic car that is being retrofitted from an ICE to an EV. SOH is important for both, and above c.70% is something market participants tend to be looking for.

What is the rough price/kWh that second life EV batteries generally trade for?

Clearly there is a big spread of different types of batteries, chemistries, form factors, parameters that goes into that sample of second life batteries, so it’s worth consider that context. It spans from single-digit €/kWh to well above €200. Modules tend to be priced 10-30% higher than packs as they have lower logistic costs and repurposing costs.

How much time have EV batteries spent in a vehicle before arriving on your platform?

The majority of batteries on the platform were produced between 2017-2021 and tend to have a mileage lower than 100km. It’s early days for this data so the obvious caveats apply about correlation and causation but we’re excited to see how that graph will look in a couple of years time. Interestingly, there was a big uplift from 2016 to 2017.

What are the main near term implications of the new EU Battery Regulation?

It’s helpful. Not least it provides some momentum for Europe compared to the progress in other regions. Energy security is pivotal, and batteries can be a key way of achieving that if used to their full potential.

For us, the Regulation finally removes some of the ambiguity on recycling, repurposing, EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) transfers, and circularity as a whole. For the industry, that could mean more certainty for investors deploying capital.

It should also mean more companies can participate in what is a nascent market. That participation inevitably requires more transparency on IP (raw material content, SOH etc) that was hard to access previously; we think more participation in circular flows is a good thing in the long term.

The passport still has some months to go before being implemented so it’s hard to make a call on its effectiveness. End of life supply chain events of change of ownership do need the appropriate trading infrastructure for the passport’s vision to be realised, and that’s what we want to be able to provide at scale.

One way of thinking about it is that battery passports need passport controls. Otherwise it will be nothing but an expensive table of contents.

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The net proceeds will be used for working capital, the expansion of development capabilities the development of new business models expansion into new geographies.

The company provides BESS solutions to the commercial and industrial (C&I) and grid-scale segments, both front-of-meter (FTM) and behind-the-meter (BTM) with its offering ranging from 70kWh to 100MWh. It said that that range of project size will account for two-thirds of the 231GWh per year market for stationary energy storage expected by 2030 (according to Wood Mackenzie).

Its main product lines are the scalebloc (commercial), scalestac (indoor) and scalecube (grid-scale).

Intilion has grown by an average compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 147% over the last few years, and expects €70 million (US$77 million) in the year to 31 March, 2024. That is faster than the wider market’s growth of 98% a year in that period, the firm claimed.

Recent projects it has worked on include a 60MWh order in April for Deutsche Telekom’s data centre and an ‘Innovation Tender’ solar-plus-storage project commissioned in March, both in Germany.

It is currently focused on the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) but wants to expand into the UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

It would become one of only a few listed pure-play BESS integrators, including the largest such company Fluence and the smaller, predominantly BTM C&I-focused Stem Inc, both listed in the US.

In the ‘medium term’ Intilion wants to reach revenues of €250 million and an adjusted EBIT margin of 4-10%.

It was spun off from Hoppecke subsidiary Hoppecke Rail Systems GmbH in March this year. Whilst exhibiting at Ees Europe in Munich earlier this month, the Intilion announced an insurance deal with Munich Re.

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In this piece, we interview executives from three developers looking to gain a foothold in the market: Aquila Clean Energy, Field Energy and Innovo Group.

This is an extract of a feature which appeared in Vol.35 of PV Tech Power, Solar Media’s quarterly technical journal for the downstream solar industry. Every edition includes ‘Storage & Smart Power,’ a dedicated section contributed by the team at Energy-Storage.news.

Since it went to press, 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.

Transmission system operator (TSO) Terna says that some 94GWh of new energy storage will be needed to integrate the country’s renewable energy pipeline, although this may include some pumped hydro energy storage (PHES).

“Mainstream, recognised and with more players coming in”  

“In 2020, storage was not on the radar of many players but it is now moving mainstream in Italy as it has done in the UK, Germany and elsewhere, because of similar factors to those countries,” says Kilian Leykam, Investment Manager Battery Storage for Aquila Clean Energy. which announced plans to develop battery storage projects in Italy in early 2022.  

“There is a recognition that renewables need to be deployed a lot faster and that gas is a bad way to provide flexibility to the grid and manage peak demand.”  

With that came a policy recognition from Terna last year that it needed energy storage to achieve that. In February 2022, just before it handed out over 1GW of capacity market contracts to battery storage projects, the TSO called the technology the “indispensable new lungs of our electricity system”.  

UK battery storage developer Field Energy has since announced plans to join Aquila in the market, with the setting up of an Italy office and the appointment of Emanuele Taibi as country manager.  

Rodolfo Bigolin is CEO of Innovo Group, which last year formed a 50:50 JV – iCube Renewables – with Spanish utility Iberdrola to deploy solar, wind and also battery storage projects in Italy.  

He says the recognition that storage is needed to integrate Italy’s big renewables pipeline has been combined with a capital market which is now more comfortable with and willing to invest in energy storage.  

“Last year was the first in a decade where we saw a real, multi-gigawatt renewable energy development market take shape. The regulatory environment has been trending towards a really strong deployment of renewables, and then once you’ve got that of course you need storage,” Bigolin says.  

Field’s Taibi dives into the specifics of the regulatory changes. The regulator’s consultation 393 from 2022 outlines a specific mechanism dedicated to energy storage to be procured via auctions run by Terna, the TSO, he says. 

With the mechanism’s rules approved, Terna will now consult with the industry, allowing stakeholders and operators to comment on the proposed new auction system. This timeline means the implementation of the new regulation – and the first energy storage auctions carried out by Terna under it – should take place in late 2023/early 2024, Taibi and Bigolin both say.   

The revenue opportunities in Italy

The market opportunity in Italy started similarly to the UK, as Aquila Capital’s Leykam explains.  

“The market started with the fast reserve auction which gave the initial impetus to start the battery business case, with fixed revenues for the first five years, similar to the first UK FFR auctions which also provided firm revenues over several years,” he says.  

The fast reserve auction in Italy took place in late 2020 and saw five-year contracts to provide the service awarded to 250MW of battery systems, for the years 2023-2027. The auction’s biggest winners were Enel and France-headquartered utility Engie.  

However, the fast reserve auction does not look set to be repeated, Leykam adds. Most future business cases for energy storage in Italy are now being structured around the capacity market plus energy arbitrage, unlike most of Europe where ancillary services are the main share.  

Batteries won substantial contracts in the February 2022 capacity market auctions by Terna, which gave 15-year contracts for 2024 as the delivery year. Enel alone won over 1 GW of battery storage projects through this, 93% of the total storage capacity awarded, which it has started building in Q2 2023 as mentioned previously. Of the total, 500MW is in Sardinia.   

Taibi says this quantity of battery storage winning capacity market contracts came as a bit of a surprise to everyone, and was driven by the impressive capex reduction the technology had achieved in the years leading up to it.   

The almost immediate upturn in capex costs in the sector afterwards might have caused “a bit of an issue”, he adds, although it did trigger a commitment to deploying a significant amount of energy storage in the country by the government, regulator and the TSO.  

Geographical differences and Italy ‘skipping a step’ in storage durations

All interviewed agreed that battery storage projects located in the South, where the bulk of Italy’s solar PV pipeline is located, would focus on time shifting, while the North might be more focused on grid services.  

Bigolin says battery storage projects will have five or six different revenue streams and these will depend not only on the region, but the node at which the project is connected.  

With a different revenue stack, Italy looks set to move to medium discharge durations of four-eight hours much faster than the UK or German markets did at a comparable point of development.  

Terna is envisioning an average discharge duration for energy storage on the grid of eight hours by 2030, weighted between battery energy storage and pumped hydro.

The role of BESS providers, EPCs and optimisers

Despite the quicker move to medium or longer discharge durations, all interviewees say that initial projects would use lithium-ion technology.  

Girolami highlights Fluence, the largest battery storage system integrator in the world, as a potential big player in providing BESS technology for projects in Italy. The firm is deploying one of the projects which Enel will use to service its fast reserve auction wins. Girolami also highlights the China-based BESS providers Sungrow, Huawei and CATL.

Last year, competitor Nidec ASI announced orders from Italy of 1.35GW/5.4GWh by an unnamed company. Interestingly, the details and timeline closely match up with the projects being deployed by Enel. Spain-based energy conversion equipment specialist Ingeteam is deploying a 70MW/340MWh project for, again, an unnamed company, set to come online in 2023. 

Conclusion

It’s an exciting time for those looking to gain exposure to Italy’s grid-scale market which has, until now, been virtually non-existent as some interviewees say. Battery storage projects have a wealth of opportunities to target, from ancillary services to capacity markets to energy trading, and developers are now positioning projects to best take advantage of these.  

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Being featured, nominated, winning or otherwise being involved will be a strong boost to your company’s standing among its peers and help you stand out against competitors.

Many of you are mission-driven to further the vital role of energy storage as a tool of decarbonisation and reliable energy access, and others are drawn to it because of the exciting technologies.

Whichever you are (or perhaps a bit of both), it’s fair to say you’ve all worked enormously hard over the past few years to get energy storage to where it is: a multi-gigawatt global market continuing to grow.

Therefore, we think it’s the right time for the Energy Storage Awards 2023.

Let’s take a moment to celebrate the incredible efforts of the industry, learn from its leading lights and innovators, and recognise excellence where we see it.

Who should enter the Energy Storage Awards, and why?

Good question! Basically, the Awards are open to a very broad range of entrants, because we want to include as many types of companies, technologies, projects and of course people, as we can.

There are 12 categories, and while our coverage on Energy-Storage.news naturally tends to skew towards the utility-scale segment, we certainly do not want to exclude more distributed scales of energy storage.

The same goes for technologies. While the industry of course is today largely lithium battery-based, that’s not to say that’s all we want to see.

We’ve made the entry criteria as broad as possible and kept the entry process simple because we want to hear from you all!  

At the end of the day, our panel of incredible expert judges (more on them later), will assess entries based on merit, without bias to technologies or particular companies.

One thing to remember though, is that the Energy Storage Awards 2023 will be judging activities and projects based in Europe, so please do bear that in mind.

Your company does not have to be European, or Europe-headquartered, but we are looking for Europe-based project execution, product development etc. Perhaps we will revisit this in future years to go more ‘global’, as well as adding further specific tech-based categories.

Who will be judging the awards?

This is perhaps the aspect that I, as editor of Energy-Storage.news, am most excited about when it comes to this year’s inaugural awards.

Our team was asked who we’d like to see on the judging panel, and then the fantastic event production team at Solar Media approached our list of top names…

Incredibly – and perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, but I was – we got them all!

Take a look at the ‘Judges’ page on the event website: we think we’ve done a pretty good job of selecting a truly stellar expert panel, with some familiar names from industry, and highly-respected names from academia.

Battery expert and guru Billy Wu from Imperial College London, analysts from BloombergNEF, S&P Global and Clean Horizon, key decision-makers from LightsourceBP and Eku Energy join the likes of European Association for Storage of Energy (EASE) secretary general Patrick Clerens and noted financier-turned-podcast host Gerard Reid of Alexa Capital and other industry leaders on the judging panel this year.

Rest assured judges are required to declare conflicts of interest and recuse themselves from any categories it would not be appropriate for them to assess, and the judging process, taking place this summer, will be fair and transparent.

I’m really looking forward to hearing what our judges have to say about the nominations, even if some of it will have to stay off-the-record!

Thanks and we look forward to receiving your nominations,

Learn more about the Energy Storage Awards at the official website here, or send enquiries to: storageawards@solarmedia.co.uk

Andy Colthorpe

Editor

Energy-Storage.news

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Construction began in September last year, with both projects quickly completed to start commercial operation earlier this month. One is in the north-east of Japan, in Shiroishi, a ward of Sapporo City on the island of Hokkaido.

The other is at the opposite end of the country’s main archipelago, in the south-east, in Itoshima City, Fukuoka prefecture, on the island of Kyushu.

In 2021, they were among the first projects in the country to have been selected for a government subsidy programme, designed to support the introduction of renewable energy around the country by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI).

Japan is targeting reaching a 36% to 38% share of renewable energy on its electricity network by 2030, and METI has identified BESS as a key technology to enable that. Along with the subsidy scheme, which helps fund equipment costs, regulations have been changed to allow standalone battery storage facilities like Pacifico’s to participate in power markets.

However, Pacifico Energy’s head of battery storage told Energy-Storage.news, the two new BESS projects’ origination pre-dates the subsidy scheme, which was rolled out a few months into their development.

With over a gigawatt of completed solar PV projects under its belt, Tokyo-headquartered Pacifico is ranked as Japan’s most prolific developer, as shown in the chart below from Rystad Energy. Founded in 2012, the company set up its battery storage arm in 2021 to capitalise on the technology’s potential for the domestic market, Mahdi Behrangrad told Energy-Storage.news.

Ranking of solar PV asset developers in Japan by Rystad Energy puts Pacifico at the top. Image: Rystad Energy.

BESS is now one of the “three pillars” of Pacifico’s business, together with solar PV and offshore wind, with opportunities in the latter pursued in a joint venture (JV) with the UK’s SSE Renewables.

“We started [the energy storage business] because Pacifico believes in this market, and we believe that we can be a pioneer in bringing our international experience and knowhow to the Japanese market – and we believe that it’s going to be a win-win business model for everyone: for the broader energy industry and for ourself as a developer,” Behrangrad, who joined the company in 2021 to set up that third pillar business division, said.

While that makes Japan a late starter compared to more mature markets such as California or the UK, it meant the developer was able to learn from some of them. Whether that be taking the successful aspects, or ensuring similar mistakes would not be repeated, Pacifico assimilated them into its own, Japan-focused approach.

The developer is certainly not alone in spotting this potential opportunity. Earlier this month, Energy-Storage.news reported that major Japanese conglomerate Itochu and utility Osaka Gas have partnered to develop a grid-connected 11MW/23MWh BESS in Osaka, Japan’s second largest city.

Meanwhile other major energy and renewables industry players in the country like developer Eurus Energy, financial services group Orix and conglomerates Toyota Tsusho and Mitsubishi Corporation among others known to be developing or constructing grid-scale BESS, in many cases for the first time in the country (albeit several players have prior experience working with battery storage from those other more mature markets).

In a Guest Blog for this site, published yesterday, Hendrik Bohne, head of asset management & business development at Aquila Clean Energy Asia Pacific (ACE APAC) identified Japan, along with Australia, as one of the leading early adopter markets for battery storage as an instrument of decarbonisation in the Asia-Pacific region.

‘We don’t hunt for subsidies’

Getting the government subsidy is not, and should not be, central to the “win-win business model” for BESS, according to Behrangrad. The subsidy programme was rolled out several months after development work began and in fact meant the projects both had to be effectively put on hold for several months as they underwent assessments for eligibility to receive them.

“We don’t hunt for subsidies,” Behrangrad said.

“It’s very critical that from early stage of the business, you have a business strategy that doesn’t rely on any subsidy. Otherwise, your growth and your margin is always decided [for you]; it’s something that you have no control over and it makes it very difficult to make a financeable project, or a scalable project, both of which are critical in order to do this kind of business.”

What the subsidy is useful for, is in proving developers of BESS assets can be a trusted partner in Japan’s efforts to support and kickstart its industry. In fact, a big motivating factor to apply for them was for Pacifico Energy to demonstrate that it could simultaneously develop two grid-connected storage systems within the tight timeline required for the scheme.

With an expectation that if successful, the BESS projects will be followed by many more, and likely many more that will be larger in scale than the modest 2MW/8MWh initial installations, the two systems perform a range of applications.

Those include ancillary services, participation in the capacity market, and energy arbitrage. Being able to revenue stack i.e., earn income from multiple revenue streams from different services and applications, is absolutely central to Pacifico’s projections for a “win-win business case,” Behrangrad said.

A full interview with Mahdi Behrangrad, head of energy storage at Pacifico Energy will be published on this site for Energy-Storage.news Premium subscribers in the coming days.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 1st Energy Storage Summit Asia, 11-12 July 2023 in Singapore. The event will help give clarity on this nascent, yet quickly growing market, bringing together a community of credible independent generators, policymakers, banks, funds, off-takers and technology providers. For more information, go to the website.

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Winston Chen

CleanCapital, a clean energy company based in the U.S. and focused on middle-market solar and storage, has closed its second tax equity partnership with Nelnet Inc. This new partnership covers five solar projects in Alaska, Maine and New York totaling 36 MW.

The current partnership covers five new construction projects: three community solar projects in New York, one community solar project in Maine and an 8.5 MW solar project in Alaska, which will be the largest in the state when it’s completed. These sites are anticipated to commence operations by the end of this year and will generate around 50 GWh of clean energy every year once fully operational. Collectively, the projects are expected to generate approximately $25.5 million in tax credits.

“We are pleased to announce this tax equity investment and the expansion of our partnership with Nelnet,” says Winston Chen, senior director, capital markets at CleanCapital. “Tax equity investment is a critical element in the financing of clean energy projects and represents a major opportunity for corporations to invest in the future of energy in the U.S.”

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