Opis Renewables Training Facility

Opis Renewables (Opis), a Chicago-based provider of operations and maintenance, training and manpower for renewable energy developers and project owners, has launched its turnkey concierge training program. Offering on-site instruction, transportation, housing, and meals, the all-inclusive program provides training and certification for solar, wind and energy storage professionals.

Opis’s comprehensive services are geared to addressing the shortage of trained and qualified wind, solar and battery storage technicians needed for the growing renewable energy industry.

Among the wide range of topics covered:

GWO training for wind sector BST/ART/BTT/CooHE;

Solar training-NABCEP/CooHE;

High-voltage training;

Operational services, support to wind/solar/BESS divisions.

Opis has established a 20,000-square-foot training facility located near the Chicago O’Hare International Airport. Trainees receive transportation to the site and housing, plus use of a fully equipped kitchen, washer/dryer, indoor basketball court, video game consoles, a sauna and weight room.

“Training with Opis is not only a means to certify your technicians. It’s an experience for those who attend,” says Robert Edinger, CEO of Opis. “Our turnkey renewables training and concierge services are designed to provide businesses with the knowledge and resources they need to build a more resilient and sustainable energy infrastructure while offering a peace of mind that trainees will be housed, fed and transported at no cost to our customers.”

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Without giving further details, the company said secured the loan from a group of eligible green energy projects developed by it and the funds that preceded its founding in 2020 by CEO Aaron Zubaaty, backed by asset management group Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).

That means the projects and the loan meet the Green Loan Principles, which were published by three international loans and markets associations in February.

The principles are a framework for green lending ordered around four “core components”, as the Loan Markets Association describes it:

1. Proceeds of loans must be used towards green projects, which include various categories from renewable energy to energy efficiency, pollution control, protections for biodiversity, clean transportation and more. Energy storage is eligible as a “green technology” separate to renewables but in the same category as carbon extraction technologies.

2.  Process for evaluation and selection of projects to receive funding for should be made clear, transparent and well-communicated by borrowers to lenders.

3. Proceeds of the loan must be managed in a transparent and accountable manner.

4. Borrowers must report on how the proceeds are being used on a regular basis until the full loan is drawn down.

Eolian has become a prolific developer of standalone energy storage assets in key US markets, particularly Texas, having acquired the development portfolio of energy storage developer Able Grid.

Earlier this year the investor made headlines as it became the first company to claim it had successfully availed of investment tax credit (ITC) incentives for a 200MW battery energy storage system (BESS) project in Texas. One of its projects in Massachusetts appears to have recently hit the buffers however, due to a zoning row, according to local press.

Following a US$100 million investment commitment from French bank Natixis in 2021, in April 2022, Eolian closed US$925 million financing from investors including Banco Santander, MUFJ and others, making it the biggest single recipient of corporate funding in the battery storage sector in the first half of last year, as noted by market analysis firm Mercom Capital.

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The competitive bidding process would see MITECO provide €150 million in grants for energy storage projects that are either standalone or paired with renewable energy resources, new or existing, including pumped hydro energy storage (PHES). Another €10 million would go towards thermal energy storage projects.

As is normally the case with such tenders in Spain, there are specific budgets for the overseas regions of the Canary Islands (€15 million) and Balearic Islands (€4 million).

MITECO described the programme as one for ‘innovative’ energy storage projects but did not provide more information about the technology or performance criteria other than the above.

Grants will cover 40-65% of the project cost depending on the size of the company applying, while universities can have the whole project cost covered by the non-refundable grant.

Eligible projects will be judged on economic viability, their capability of helping to integrate renewable energy on the grid, and the creation of local employment and business opportunities as part of their development.

MITECO is looking to pick the winning proposals in the final quarter of 2023 and the projects will need to come online before 30 June 2026. Spain is targeting 20GW of new energy storage by 2030.

MITECO also launched a similarly-sized grant scheme specifically for co-located or hybridised energy storage projects, for which proposals were due in March 2023. Enel Green Power submitted two projects during the first quarter which fit the criteria, totalling 60MWh and 38MWh respectively.

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With an installed power rating of 15MW and an energy storage capacity of 9MWh giving a sub-1-hour duration, it is most likely one of the fleet of projects that won awards in the Fast Reserve auction of 2020.

That auction saw five-year contracts handed to some 230MW of battery storage projects for 2023-27 delivery. The first of these came online in March, a 9MW/8MWh project in Liguria from Renantis, formerly Falck Renewables. The auction’s biggest winners were multinational utilities Enel, which is based in Italy, and Engie, headquartered in France.

However, the auction is unlikely to be repeated, and most battery storage projects’ business cases in Italy are being built mainly around capacity markets and energy arbitrage, according to Kilian Leykam, director of Investment Management Battery Storage at Aquila Clean Energy EMEA.

Energy-Storage.news interviewed Aquila and two other developers entering the Italian grid-scale storage market for a special feature in PV Tech Power 35 (Premium access).

The grid-scale battery energy storage market in Italy is set to become one of Europe’s most active in the coming years having been largely non-existent until now.

Enel recently started construction on 1.6GW of projects for 2024 commercial operation dates (COD) recently, mainly for its capacity market contract wins in early 2022. Those wins came at a time when the industry expected continuous downward trajectory in capex costs which did not materialise last year, an executive from UK developer Field, who we also interviewed for the feature, said.

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To prepare for a global market presence, Hithium is currently building out its manufacturing capacity from 15GWh to 70GWh by the end of 2023, and to 135GWh by 2025.

The specialisation advantage

Hithium is one of the largest battery producers to focus solely on BESS, with more than a thousand employees working on research and development across its four distinct research institutes.

Along with safety innovations, achieving “0” loss in the initial 1,000 cycles (i.e. Capacity/Energy fading ≤2%), and extending battery lifespan to 12,000 cycles, the company has also driven the cost down for its high-quality products.

To that end, Hithium has made significant investments in its manufacturing to build one of the most advanced battery cell production lines in the world.

“We’re reducing the cost of high-quality energy storage and aiming to do for stationary batteries what the Chinese solar industry has done for the global solar sector,” says Ziqi Yi, Hithium CTO.

Winfried Wahl joins to launch Hithium Germany

Hithium has secured tech and energy expert Winfried Wahl as senior director for product management for the European market. Wahl has spent over a decade in photovoltaics (PV) and clean energy, as well as introducing top Chinese manufacturers to the European market.

“Hithium is entering the European market as demand for energy storage is set to spike. As Europe moves to renewables, we need energy storage to stabilise the grid and the energy supply,“ Winfried Wahl explained.

“For Germany alone to achieve the energy storage target laid out by Fraunhofer ISE of 100GWh by 2030, we have to increase our capacity by over 45% per year.”

About Hithium

Founded in 2019, Hithium is a leading manufacturer of top quality stationary energy storage products for utility-scale as well as commercial and industrial applications.

Hithium’s innovations include groundbreaking safety improvements to its lithium-ion batteries as well as increases in lifecycle. With many decades of cumulative experience in the field among its founders and senior executives, Hithium leverages its specialisation in BESS to deliver partners and customers unique advances in energy storage.

The company is based in Xiamen, China, with further locations for production, research, or sales in Shenzhen, Beijing, Chongqing, Munich, and California. Hithium has shipped 8GWh of battery capacity to date, 5GWh in 2022 alone.

Visit the company’s website for more information here, or find Hithium at Intersolar Europe in Hall C2, Stand 520.

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EnerVenue chief revenue officer (CRO) Randall Selesky described the company’s technology as “uniquely differentiated” from the typical lithium-ion systems of the type commonly used in battery energy storage system (BESS) installations.

CEO Jorg Heinemann explained more about the technology and how it could be lower cost, more sustainable, and more compact than other storage solutions, in a July 2021 interview with Energy-Storage.news. The technology is adapted from energy storage solutions used in space, at NASA facilities and the International Space Station among others, and made suitable for low-cost mass production by EnerVenue.

Its claimed advantages include a long lifetime – the battery is expected to last 30 years, or 30,000 cycles, with the company recently launching a 20-year, 20,000 cycle warranty – a versatility to stack vessels in series or parallel to create anything from residential to utility-scale systems, and decoupling from the lithium-ion battery supply chain. While the metal in the vessel is nickel, the amount used is very small, Heinemann said.

Customer High Caliber Energy selected the ESV tech after an extensive vetting process, through which it stood out above other options, with EnerVenue’s stats jumping off the page for their “operational efficiency, reliability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness,” High Caliber Energy managing partner Matt Davis said.

Safety was a critical piece of that evaluation, Davis told Energy-Storage.news, but some of its other advantages were also highly enticing.

“EnerVenue’s improved safety was a critical factor for technology selection, as was the Energy Storage Vessels’ long lifespan. The cycling characteristics offered the customer flexibility and EnerVenue’s simple warranty provides assurance,” Davis said.

The 1.2kWh vessels – the ‘cell’ of the company’s storage systems – will be combined into a single installation, with a source close to the company revealing that the undisclosed end customer is a utility co-operative (co-op).

While the source said further details of the project cannot be disclosed at this time, such as how the solar-plus-storage system’s applications will be monetised, EnerVenue did say the Energy Storage Vessels’ primary functions will include load leveling for the electricity supplier and frequency regulation.

7GWh of customer orders and a gigafactory on the way

The ESVs are the second generation of EnerVenue’s storage tech, and High Caliber Energy’s Matt Davis said the fact that they will be made in the US made the EPC “confident about future supply”.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news in March, the manufacturer is building a 1 million square foot ‘gigafactory’ in Shelby County, Kentucky, which CRO Randall Selesky confirmed yesterday is due for opening during 2024.

Representing the next phase of EnerVenue’s growth, as Selesky put it, the factory will have an initial 1GWh production capacity of ESVs, but the company plans to invest more than a billion dollars into it, bringing it up to 20GWh annual production capacity over time.

The company has a claimed 7GWh of committed customer orders, and is already booking orders “for 2025 and beyond,” while it is also working on new product enhancements, Selesky said. EnerVenue only launched out of stealth mode in 2020, securing US$100 million in a Series A funding round a year later.

For the Florida project, storage duration of the EnerVenue system will be in the range of 2-4 hours, and will have the flexibility to perform multiple cycles per day. The project marks a small step forward for the technology provider which hopes its solutions will enable a giant leap for renewable energy integration.

Selesky highlighted that while the Florida project is relatively short duration, ESVs can provide charge/discharge rates of between 2-12 hours, with an ability “to cycle up to three times per day without rest” opening up “completely new business opportunities for customers, which is another reason we have seen so much enthusiasm for the technology”.

“EnerVenue’s metal-hydrogen technology is uniquely differentiated from typical li-ion systems. It’s ultra-long life, fire safety, and flexibility change the narrative around what’s possible with grid-scale battery storage,” Randall Selesky said, adding that: “The batteries’ 30-year lifespan eliminates the need for augmentation”.

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The 4-hour duration project in Ville-sur-Haine, Wallonia, will be comprised of 53 Tesla Megapacks. It will help balance the electricity grid in Belgium, operated by transmission operator Elia, as more renewables come online.

“We are strengthening our renewable energy activities in order to contribute to reducing CO2 emissions. In this regard, energy storage is very important to absorb the fluctuations of renewable energy. This project is an important step for us towards a CO2-neutral energy system in 2035,” said Tine Deheegher, manager Renewable Energy Solutions at Eneco.

The project appears to be getting the go-ahead at a second attempt. Numerous local news reports last year said that Eneco had a 50MW project in Ville-sur-Haine rejected by the local Roeulx commune authority.

It could be the largest project by MWh capacity in Belgium when it comes online, with the two largest operational systems today both 100MWh each. However, energy firm Engie recently sought permits for three projects totalling 380MW, one of which has a 200MW power rating meaning it would almost certainly be larger.

Battery systems in Belgium can provide FCR and aFRR frequency response services but the longer durations being deployed indicate a move towards heavier-cycling activities like energy trading and capacity provision.

Eneco’s media statement announcing the project then went on to call for more from the government in the Netherlands to foster the deployment of energy storage to decarbonise.

“With this project, Eneco is taking a new step towards a fully sustainable energy system in Belgium and fulfilling the One Planet Plan with the ambition of being fully climate neutral by 2035,” it read, before pointing out that the Netherlands needs 10GW of battery storage by 2030 but presently has only 300MW installed.

“We call on the Dutch government to learn from policies in Belgium and Germany so that the Netherlands can actually achieve a climate-neutral electricity supply by 2035.”

Energy-Storage.news wrote at-length about the challenges for battery storage developers in the Dutch market in a recent interview with developer Lion Storage conducted at the Energy Storage Summit EU in London earlier this year.

Eneco has been majority-owned by Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi since 2020. Mitsubishi Power, part of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, is a major battery storage system integrator.

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Cumulatively, the projects add up to 12.4MW of PV generation capacity and 14MW/24.9MWh of battery energy storage system (BESS) technology. Sungrow will provide both PV inverters and BESS, with the company’s integrated energy storage solutions including power conversion system (PCS) as well as the batteries.

Due to come online in the fourth quarter of this year, the projects are the largest of their type in Lebanon to date, but follow Sungrow having already worked on 20 smaller projects of similar scope in the Lebanese market since entering it last September.

The microgrids will be installed at local businesses to power daily operations, with the country’s electricity supply situation in crisis for years, made worse amid economic difficulties caused by factors including the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to various reports, many Lebanese people only get electricity from the grid for up to about three hours a day. Most power comes from fossil fuels, with growing dependence on private generators which are also powered with imported fossil fuels. Inflation of the costs of electricity as well as water and gas hit almost 600% year-over-year in the middle of 2022.

Sungrow’s manager for the Levant region and Yemen, Zaid Al-Helo, said projects such as the microgrids are enabling local businesses and facilities to gain energy independence and decarbonise their operations. Lebanon, with around 300 days of sunshine a year, “is a perfect place to install solar projects,” Al-Helo said.

The solar and batteries will mean recipients of the microgrids can reduce their draw of electricity from the grid at peak times, while also protecting them from the worst impacts of disruptions to the grid and mitigating the electricity supply crisis.

Read further Energy-Storage.news coverage of the off-grid market segment here.

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The Radian solar project, located in Brown County, Texas, recently reached commercial operation. Part of Intersect Power, an Oregon-based developer of clean energy resources, Radian generates 415 MWp/320 MW AC of solar energy, enough to power more than 114,000 homes.

“Renewable energy is a critical piece of the overall American energy production story,” says Intersect Power CEO, Sheldon Kimber. “Investing in clean energy is a smart business decision and Texas continues to lead the way in strong investments, development and production.” 

Radian adds to Intersect Power’s near-term portfolio, totaling 2.2 GW of solar PV and 1.4 GWh of co-located storage. The entire portfolio will be operational by the end of 2023.

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Jason Truesdale

Directional Services Inc. (DSI), a utility-scale solar energy and electrical contractor, has acquired Fortress Fencing (Fortress), a company specializing in solar and commercial fencing solutions. 

“The acquisition of Fortress represents another significant step in our mission to be the leading renewable energy solutions provider in the nation, complementing the continued expansion of our utility-scale solar, electrical and renewable energy capabilities,” says Jeff Bagshaw, DSI’s CEO. “Perimeter security is essential to protecting facility assets and the integrity of our customers’ ongoing operations.”

Founded in 2001 as a two-person company, Fortress offers a broad range of safe, secure fencing solutions for power, commercial and industrial facilities. Fortress brings a skilled team that understands the explicit requirements for secure perimeter fencing to support utility-scale solar and renewable energy production.

“Our new partnership with DSI will provide resources and business scalability solutions that will position our company to support the rapidly growing needs of our clients nationally,” says Jason Truesdale, founder and president of Fortress.

Fortress will continue to operate under its current leadership as a wholly owned subsidiary of DSI, which will integrate fencing as part of the company’s end-to-end portfolio of renewable energy infrastructure and utility-scale solar solutions.

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