Construction is beginning at the TransWest Express (TWE) Transmission Project – a high-voltage interregional transmission system adding capacity to deliver renewable energy across the Western United States power grid. Federal, state and local officials, including Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, recently participated in a groundbreaking ceremony

The event took place on the Overland Trail Ranch, a working cattle ranch south of Rawlins, Wyo., where the TWE Project’s northern HVDC terminal is sited.

The 732-mile HVDC and HVAC TWE Project will provide important new bulk transmission capacity to benefit the entire West. It will interconnect with the PacifiCorp system in Wyoming, with the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power and Intermountain Power systems in Utah, with the NV Energy system in Nevada and with the California Independent System Operator.

“The groundbreaking event for the TransWest Express demonstrates yet another example of how Wyoming is continuing its energy leadership,” says Gov. Gordon. We are glad to be able to provide energy to primarily California and Nevada consumers, who want what Wyoming has to offer.”

TWE’s primary construction partners are Siemens Energy Inc. for the HVDC terminal technology and Barnard Wilson Joint Venture for the transmission line and AC substations. TransWest also is partnering with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and International Union of Operating Engineers.

The TWE Project will be the Western power grid’s largest transmission addition in decades. It will connect three planning regions in the West, while adding 3,000 MW of high-voltage capacity from Wyoming to Utah and 1,500 MW of high-voltage capacity from Utah to the Desert Southwest (Nevada, California, Arizona). The project also will provide the West with new access to wind-generated electricity from Carbon County.

Adds Secretary Granholm: “The TransWest Express Project will play a major role in our nation’s energy security, ensuring that home-grown clean energy can form the backbone of our electric grid as we rebuild a stronger, more resilient transmission system.

The TWE Project is expected to come online in 2027.

Continue reading

That came after a US$350 million equity investment from CarVal Investors in mid-2022 to build a national solar and storage footprint, with the emphasis on storage, president & CEO Barrett Bilotta said.

Seeing as it has taken its focus on the smaller-scale opportunities to a completely new market, Energy-Storage.news asked Bilotta why this was its segment of choice.

“We look at these assets being very active in terms revenue management, how the market dynamics shift and change, and being able to go ahead and live and roll with that market. So from our standpoint it doesn’t make sense to build a 200MWh four-hour system at this point in time. There’s not necessarily clear economic signals, in terms of how the power markets operate, for that,” Bilotta said.

“So by going ahead and placing a multitude of smaller bets, we feel like we’re in a better position to go ahead and capture that upside and and minimise our downside.”

Another developer with a similar strategy, Available Power, told Energy-Storage.news whilst at Energy Storage Summit USA in March that there are also ‘fewer eyes’ on the 9.9MW-or-less opportunities in ERCOT, which Bilotta agreed with. He added that the difference between a 10MW and a 100MW project in terms of getting grid connection could be as much as two years.

Projects in ERCOT which are under 10MW are a good example, benefitting from a much faster interconnection process.

It should be noted that Available Power sells projects at notice-to-proceed (NTP) while Agilitas Energy is a long-term owner and operator, which also does its own EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) and asset management.

While Agilitas is employing the distributed approach in both the Northeast and Texas markets, the two are very different revenue opportunities for storage. In the ISO New England market energy storage is all about connecting to a solar array and shifting that renewable load into the evening peak demand period. In ERCOT, it is a merchant model based around energy trading and bidding into ancillary service markets.

In Massachusetts, for example (part of ISO New England), energy storage has to pay fees like any other consumer to draw power from the grid, denting the business case of revenue applications requiring charging from the grid (like energy trading or regulation-down ancillary services).

Bilotta contributed to our most recent round of end-of-year reviews of the energy storage market with a Q&A interview, which you can read here.

Continue reading

The projects, in the towns of Georgia and Springfield, have now entered commercial operation and will provide peak shaving services to an unnamed customer, enabling it to avoid pulling power from the grid at peak demand times.

They will also allow Strata to participate in the ISO New England (ISO-NE) wholesale power market. ISO-NE covers Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

The first installments of the ITC financing were closed in March, which Strata claimed made these among the first standalone storage projects to be financed using the new ITC for the technology brought in under the Inflation Reduction Act in January. Another developer Eolian made the same claim about a project which it financed in February this year.

“Our Capital Markets team, alongside our partners at Enhanced Capital and United Community Bank,demonstrated unwavering commitment in effectively navigating the investment tax credits associatedwith the IRA,” said Josh Rogol, President of Strata Clean Energy.

Rogol added that Strata would look at using the ITC to finance its comparatively larger 1GWh project in Arizona, Scatter Wash, for which it recently signed a 20-year tolling agreement with local utility APS.

The new ITC for standalone energy storage should start playing a larger role in financing projects following the IRS’ recently-released guidance on transferability, direct pay and a ‘domestic content’ 10% adder. However, most sources have told Energy-Storage.news they expect financial institutions to take a while to become familiar and comfortable with energy storage, which is relatively new compared to solar or wind.

The Georgia and Springfield projects are also the first commercial deployments from system integrator LS Energy Solutions using the ‘Energy’ line of its AiON-ESS grid-scale platform, launched in September 2021. The Energy iteration offers 2-6 hours of discharge duration while the 1-hour ‘Power’ version was first deployed one year ago, in New Jersey.

Speaking to Energy-Storage.news at the Energy Storage Summit USA in March, LS Energy’s director of strategy and market analytics Ravi Manghani said the AiON-ESS is “as close to plug-and-play as it gets”.

“What we bring to the market is basically a platform that’s based off of our string inverter architecture. They are rack mountable string inverters that we package in the same container as you put the batteries in. So three quarters of the container or so would have the battery racks in them, the DC side of the equation, and then about a quarter of the container volume would be filled with string inverters, which are parallel, both on the AC and DC side. So that gives us some unique sort of attributes to a product that it’s very flexible, very modular,” he said.

Continue reading

Hungary is aiming to support the installation of at least 800MW/1,600MWh of new energy storage projects through the scheme. The projects will help to integrate new renewable energy resources in its electricity system. The funding is equivalent to HUF 436 billion.

The money is available for companies active in Hungary’s energy sector, except financial institutions, and will also be available for projects outside its borders which can provide the power through cross-border transmission capacity. All energy storage technologies are eligible, although lithium-ion remains the technology of choice for the vast majority of large-scale projects today.

The projects will be selected through a competitive bidding process and grants will be awarded before the end of 2025. They will take the form of an investment grant during the construction phase and a two-way contract for difference (“CfD”) mechanism to be paid annually during the 10 first years of the operations phase of the supported projects. CfDs usually involve a cap and floor mechanism, essentially guaranteeing a minimum and maximum revenue range.

Projects will have to be built and operational within three years (36 months) of the signing of the contract.

The investment grant will be partly funded by Hungary’s portion of the Recovery and Resilience Facility, and partly by a Modernisation Fund, while the 10-year annual support will be financed through a levy. Other countries to have used EU funding, including Recovery and Resilience, for storage include Greece, Romania, Finland, Croatia, Estonia and, as reported last week, Slovenia.

System integrators Tesla and Wärtsilä have deployed large-scale BESS projects in Hungary previously.

As Energy-Storage.news reported at the time, the first grid-scale BESS project in Hungary was completed in 2022.

Continue reading

The bond will support TagEnergy’s renewable energy portfolio of wind, battery energy storage systems (BESS) and solar PV assets across the UK, Europe and Australia, it said.

€270 million will go towards the 1.3GW Golden Plains Wind Farm onshore wind project in Victoria, Australia, while the remaining €300 million will go across the wider porftolio. The company recently achieved financial close on a portion of Golden Plains as well as 169MW of BESS projects in the UK.

The latter includes two 49MW/98MWh units in Scotland announced in January with financing from Santander, covered by sister site Solar Power Portal here and here. The company then brought online a similarly sized system near Luton in May, also with some financing from Santander.

For the green bond issuance, Akereos Capital was bookrunner, structurer and exclusive debt advisor to TagEnergy which was also advised by White & Case and Garrigues, while CIP and GIC were advised by Linklaters and Allens.

“This green bond again demonstrates TagEnergy’s innovative investment approach in a rapidly growing renewable energy industry. It comes on the back of TagEnergy achieving financial close on a range of projects including Australia’s Golden Plains Wind Farm East without the need for Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs),” TagEnergy CEO Franck Woitiez said.

CIP is also set to invest in the development of one of the largest BESS projects in Europe, a 500MW/1,000MWh project in Scotland which was granted planning permission this week.

Continue reading

To overcome these challenges, battery storage operators must stay ahead of the curve and implement innovative technologies.

Cloud-based battery analytics have the potential to ease the way battery storage systems are managed. By providing actionable insights into battery performance and enabling predictive maintenance, cloud-based battery analytics can significantly reduce costs and improve the overall efficiency of battery storage systems.

In this webinar PowerUp expert speakers showcase real-world examples of how this innovative technology can boost your bottom line and provide a competitive edge in today’s dynamic energy market. We were also priveleged to also be joined by an energy management system (EMS) specialist from renewable power producer Akuo, who discusses the topic from an end-user perspective.

Presentations from the speakers are followed by a panel discussion moderated by Energy-Storage.news editor Andy Colthorpe, and a live Q&A session with the audience was also held.

Speakers in this webinar:

Dr Arnaud DeLaille, chief science and innovation officer, PowerUp

Philippe de la Fortelle, chief revenue officer, PowerUp

Aurélie Moine, head of EMS, Akuo

[embedded content]

You can also access the recording of this webinar “The economic benefits of cloud-based battery analytics for energy storage assets,” as well as many others on-demand at the site and receive presentation slides (registration required), at the site here.

You can read more about cloud-based battery analytics in the newest edition of our quarterly journal, PV Tech Power (Vol.35), included in the Energy-Storage.news Premium subscription. Each edition of PV Tech Power features ‘Storage & Smart Power’, a dedicated mini-journal contributed by the Energy-Storage.news team. Learn more about PV Tech Power here, or about ESN Premium here.

Continue reading

Its latest project in Western Australia’s Collie, a region with long historic ties to the coal industry, was proposed in September last year as a potential gigawatt-scale, 4-hour duration resource. However, whether it reaches that total capacity is dependent on the evolving business case for it.

The initial phase of the Collie Battery, as it has been dubbed, would represent 200MW output and 800MWh storage capacity, the company said at the time describing the Shire of Collie as an “ideal location” for battery storage.

Now determined at 219MW/877MWh, end-to-end engineering company UGL said yesterday that it has been appointed to the project. Its role includes installing the Collie Battery’s Tesla Megapack XL units, the next generation BESS solution from the US-headquartered EV, energy storage – and occasionally solar PV – company.

It will also install balance of plant (BOP) infrastructure, carry out design, construction, testing and commissioning of the Collie Battery’s 33/330kV substation, and civil works including a bridge replacement and building an access track. UGL is a subsidiary of major Australian construction company CIMIC Group, which serves a broad range of industries.

CIMIC’s executive chairman Juan Santamaria said UGL has to date delivered “17 major renewables generation and storage projects” in its role as designer and constructor”.

“The Collie Battery will be UGL’s sixth BESS project in recent years, and our third for Neoen following the successful design and construction of the Victorian Big Battery and the Western Downs Battery which is currently under construction. We look forward to continuing our relationship with Neoen and Tesla through the Collie Battery project,” Santamaria said.

Indeed, the 200MW/400MWh Western Downs project, co-located with a solar PV power plant in Queensland began construction just before the end of 2022, as reported by Energy-Storage.news.

In May, the site also reported that UGL had been appointed by utility company Alinta Energy to design, test and commission a 35MW/35MWh BESS paired with 45MW of solar PV at the site of an Alinta fossil fuel plant. That project is aimed at helping decarbonise and reduce reliance on thermal generation at one of the world’s largest iron ore ports.

Collie Battery will be connected to Western Australia’s main electricity network, the South West Interconnected System (SWIS) via a substation of network provider Western Energy. It is expected to be commissioned in late 2024.

For the state, it’s the latest move to embrace battery storage. Western Australia’s biggest project to date, a 100MW/200MWh system in the Kwinana region south of state capital Perth, is currently in its commissioning phase. The Kwinana BESS is considered a flagship project of the state government. It has been developed by government-owned utility Synergy and delivered by BESS solutions company NHOA.

In addition to Kwinana, the Western Australia government has pledged funding and support to two other projects that will be among the largest of their kind in the country: another BESS at Kwinana of 200MW/800MWh and an even bigger 500MW/2,000MWh project, which will be built in the same Shire of Collie region as Neoen’s Collie Battery.

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.

Continue reading

The United States Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently published new proposed rules governing leasing and rental rates for renewable energy projects on public lands. The new leasing rules adopt many of the Solar Energy Industries Association’s (SEIA) suggestions and will help to speed renewable energy deployment on public lands and put BLM’s renewable energy goals in reach.  

“The new rules will reduce rents and fees for renewable energy projects through 2035 and eliminate duplicative payments for renewable energy developers, helping to lower overall project costs, says Ben Norris, senior director of regulatory affairs at SEIA. “The rules also extend lease terms for renewable projects to 50 years, include a new category for standalone storage and remove competitive leasing requirements in priority areas — all positive developments for the solar and storage industry. “Taken together, these new rules will create much needed business certainty and help to deliver more reliable and affordable clean energy to consumers,” Norris notes. “We commend BLM for working with the solar and storage industry and issuing thoughtful rules that will help us fight the climate crisis.”

Continue reading

Lehigh University will welcome a 2.61 MW solar project on its campus soon as part of its goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040. Standard Solar recently acquired the Lehigh Valley project from developer EDF Renewables North America, furthering the company’s pledge to advance solar energy in Pennsylvania and educational institutions nationwide.

“This adds to Standard Solar’s impressive track record of successfully bringing solar solutions to schools, empowering them with clean and sustainable energy sources,” says Eric Partyka, director of business development, Standard Solar. “

Upon completion, the project is anticipated to fully power the Murray H. Goodman Campus, home to the majority of the university’s athletic facilities. This solar installation is expected to meet 100% of the campus’s electricity demands while offsetting 8% of the university’s overall grid electricity consumption.

The single-axis tracker system is estimated to generate approximately 5,224 MWh of clean energy yearly, enough to power about 285 houses for one year. This latest acquisition adds to Standard Solar’s growing project portfolio in Pennsylvania. The company currently owns and operates several projects in the state.

The Lehigh Valley project is part of Standard Solar’s rapidly expanding portfolio in the education sector. The company currently owns and operates more than 35 MW of solar projects serving educational institutions, encompassing both K-12 schools and higher education establishments.

Says Audrey McSain, sustainability director at Lehigh University: “We look forward to producing clean energy onsite for our community and environment.”

Continue reading

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs this week vetoed legislation she said would have a “deep chilling effect on renewable energy deployment” in the state.

In a letter to Speaker of the House, Ben Toma, Hobbs explained that HB 2618 not only “encourages an inconsistent statewide patchwork of regulations for renewable energy projects,” it also “creates additional regulatory confusion for businesses.”

HB 2618 would have amended state statutes regarding solar and wind generating power plants by imposing a series of complicated new regulations. Among them: exacting zoning standards, site-specific conditions and permitting requirements for cities, towns and counties to adopt; maintaining a form of “financial assurance,” most likely a bond, just in case the plant owner goes bankrupt or abandons the project; and requiring plant owners to submit a decommissioning and site restoration plan before a land use or permit application would be approved. 

The end result of the bill, wrote the governor, would be “negatively impacting Arizona’s ability to attract, retain and grow a renewable energy ecosystem in our state and create good-paying jobs.”

The Sierra Club and the Interwest Energy Alliance, a group of renewable energy project developers and manufacturers, also opposed the bill, in agreement with the governor, who closed her letter with an invitation to the legislature to collaborate with her on “identifying consistent and predictable solutions” to the bill’s renewable energy issues.

Continue reading