A spokesperson confirmed to Energy-Storage.news that it is the US facility that has been alluded to by executive VP Danny Lu and president Anthony Carroll in separate interviews. The deal won’t be large enough to cover Powin’s near-term US projects, however, due to the size of the company’s pipeline far exceeding it.

The company already produces its products in Mexico through a partnership with Celestica which started last year.

The announcement comes a week after the IRS released its rules for how clean energy projects in the US can benefit from a 10% ‘domestic content’ adder to the investment tax credit (ITC). The spokesperson would not confirm whether the Jabil agreement was dependent on those rules being clarified, but did reveal that the company waited 11 months to announce the deal after signing.

“We actually signed our contract in June 2022 and only announced it now because we were sorting through production details, logistics, etc. Powin had plans to invest in expanding our US capacity because it will help us better serve our customers, markets and support US job growth,” they said.

Stack750E is Powin’s lithium iron phosphate (LFP) modular grid-scale storage unit which the firm assembles into its Centipede platform.

The company has had a busy few weeks in terms of announcements. Last week it enlisted South Korea-based Ace Engineering to produce Stacks for a large project in Australia, while at the end of April it secured a 3GWh battery cell supply deal with Tier 2 OEM Rept Battero.

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Chris Cartwright

TransUnion has secured an 8.5 MW agreement with Constellation to purchase renewable energy equivalent to the annual electricity use of its Chicago headquarters, which will also reduce TransUnion’s emissions associated with purchased electricity (Scope 2 emissions).

Through a 12-year agreement beginning in April 2025, TransUnion will purchase energy and renewable energy certificates (RECs) generated by Swift Current Energy’s Double Black Diamond Solar project in downstate Illinois. Peak construction of the solar project began in March 2023. 

In total, TransUnion will procure approximately 17,000 MW hours of energy per year from Double Black Diamond, which is expected to reduce the company’s carbon emissions associated with its Scope 2 emissions by more than 8,000 metric tons annually compared to a location-based calculation. This is the equivalent emissions of nearly 1,800 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year, according to U.S. EPA greenhouse gas equivalencies.

“TransUnion is committed to continuing to assess, identify and, where feasible, implement options to integrate environmental sustainability into our global business, and procuring renewable energy is an important step toward realizing our enterprise climate strategy,” says Chris Cartwright, company president and CEO. 

TransUnion plans to use the Constellation Offsite Renewables (CORe) product to facilitate its renewable energy transaction. CORe connects customers to the economic and sustainability benefits of large-scale, offsite renewable energy projects and is among Constellation’s suite of retail power products that help customers achieve their carbon-reduction goals.

In 2021, TransUnion set Scope 1 and 2 emissions reduction targets for the first time. Since then, the company has made significant reductions through its real estate consolidation and renewable energy purchases.

Eric Lammers, co-founder and CEO of Swift Current Energy, the developer and long-term owner of Double Black Diamond Solar, says: “By purchasing power from the project, TransUnion is also supporting construction jobs in Illinois, as well as U.S. manufacturing jobs associated with the steel foundations, the tracker systems and the solar modules. Double Black Diamond Solar will also provide long-term tax revenue for communities in the state.”

With an estimated total capacity of 800 MW DC, Double Black Diamond Solar will produce electricity sufficient to power the equivalent of more than 100,000 homes from its location in downstate Sangamon and Morgan counties.

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The introduction of investment tax credits (ITCs) for standalone storage and other measures to support clean energy that came with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) mean many are betting on the industry enjoying an even more stellar trajectory in the coming years.

However, monetising that energy storage effectively is often a series of ever-more complex transactions and trade-offs. Meanwhile the decarbonisation it can enable is also dependent on charging, discharging and dispatching or consuming the stored energy smartly.

That requires increasingly smart software, with a growing number of providers, from system integrators like Tesla, Wartsila and Fluence that have platforms developed in-house to third parties like Peak Power and Financial Machines, touting optimisation and trading products.

In a recent interview, the head of trading at developer Spearmint Energy voiced a degree of “distrust” at what could be called a ‘black box’, or perhaps a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to optimisation.

“Some in the industry suggest that all of this can be handled by algorithms, but in our view some aspects of trading are unknowable. You cannot be proactive about everything; you have to react, you have to make decisions, and that to me is an important aspect of trading,” Nick Dazzo told Energy-Storage.news.

Nonetheless, software can be a fairly high margin business, and in other markets such as the UK, battery assets are increasingly being put in the hands of specialist optimisation providers, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated at what they do.

Peak Power gets Greenbacker’s backing

Ontario, Canada-headquartered Peak Power said last week that it had successfully closed a US$35 million financing deal with sustainable infrastructure investor Greenbacker Capital Management.

The tech company’s platform, called Peak Synergy, optimises battery storage, electrification equipment at commercial and industrial (C&I) buildings and other facilities, and electric vehicles (EVs). It basically does this by predicting when peaks will occur in energy demand and reducing the draw of power from the grid accordingly.

Its emphasis is on the C&I segment, enabling greater consumption of renewable energy and energy bill management through peak shaving. It currently has around 150MWh of EV and battery storage assets under management in Canada and the US.

Peak Power said the fresh financing will enable it to scale up operations and market entry in the US and noted that the IRA’s incentives are a strong driver of that interest. Within that growing energy storage market, C&I has been the smallest segment and the slowest to grow. Wood Mackenzie said earlier this year that while that is expected to continue being the case, it predicted that by 2027 annual C&I installations in the US will rise to about 1.4GW.

The company appears to be pretty good at finding financial backing: in February it closed a US$200 million finance deal with C&I distributed energy development and investment group Madison Energy Investments (MEI).

‘Financial operating system’ for battery storage launched

Financial Machines meanwhile has launched an optimisation platform called BatteryOS aimed more at standalone and co-located BESS assets.

Described by the company as a “financial operating system”, BatteryOS optimises BESS management through revenue forecasting and financial modelling, which Financial Machines claimed is based on its team’s trading and risk management experience.

It claimed that the software can create complex valuations of an asset’s business case over 25 years in just a few minutes, configured to the rules of market participation in the US’ network of regional transmission organisations (RTOs) and independent system operators (ISOs).

In other words, it is aimed at simplifying the complex decision-making process of configuring a BESS or co-located renewable-plus-storage asset, and is designed to cope with complex data sets, with a customisable user visualisation interface.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the Renewable Energy Revenues Summit on 6-7 June 2023 in London. The event will explore PPA structuring, revenue risk management strategies, renewable energy certificates, and much more. For more information, go to the website.

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Bob Frenzel

Xcel Energy has broken ground at the Sherco Solar project near Becker, Minn., which is expected to become the Upper Midwest’s largest solar array serving customers across the region.

The 460 MW Sherco Solar project will provide enough clean energy to power 100,000 homes across the Upper Midwest once complete in 2025. The project will serve as a carbon-free replacement for most of the capacity of the first coal unit retiring at the nearby Sherco plant.

“Sherco Solar is an important milestone on Xcel Energy’s path to nearly triple the amount of solar on our Upper Midwest system by 2028,” says Bob Frenzel, chairman, president and CEO of Xcel Energy. “This is one of the biggest solar projects in the country, and it demonstrates how we’re leading the clean energy transition reliably and affordably for our customers.” 

Sherco Solar will provide the lowest-cost solar on Xcel Energy’s system in Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Michigan. The project represents an investment of about $690 million in clean energy infrastructure. Sherco Solar will qualify for federal tax credits, making construction more affordable and reducing rate impacts to customers by upwards of 30%. The project will be built on two sites near the Sherco plant, allowing Xcel Energy to reuse the facility’s existing grid connections and provide customers with power in the most efficient and cost-effective way.

The project’s first phase, located in Clear Lake Township, will be completed in 2024. The second phase in Becker Township will follow in 2025. 

The project will create 300 well-paying union construction jobs, with an emphasis on hiring women and people of color through Xcel Energy’s Power Up workforce and development program, designed to offer opportunities to people who are underrepresented in the utility industry and building trades. The project will also contribute an estimated $240 million in local economic benefits to the Becker community as the Sherco coal plant is retired in stages by 2030.

Xcel Energy is committed to a smooth transition for its employees at the Sherco plant, who have played a vital role in powering the region for decades. The company has transitioned other Minnesota coal plants without layoffs and expects to accomplish this again at the Sherco facility.

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The new division has 60 employees and its product portfolio will include utility-scale, commercial and industrial (C&I) and battery-integrated EV charging solutions, the company said.

Rimac Energy will produce its pilot systems for selected customers this year with commissioning set for 2024, including a pilot with an unnamed “leading renewable energy company” for battery storage solutions at its solar and wind plants.

“High volume” production of its ESS products will start in 2025 at the Rimac Campus in Croatia, scaling to more than 10GWh of annual production, the company added.

Speaking at the Belgrade Energy Forum 2023 recently, Rimac Energy director Wasim Sarwar Dilov said: “For almost two years, we’ve been working behind the scenes to really develop stationary storage systems that are better than what we see today. The systems that we see today generally are quite expensive. The systems that we see today are not the most efficient, and they require more space than we would like.”

Rimac Group’s existing divisions are 100%-owned subsidiary Rimac Technology, which provides technology solutions to the high-end EV market, and its 55:45% JV with Porsche, Bugatti Rimac, through which it produces its own EV models.

Rimac Automobili’s Nevera model (pictured above) set 23 performance records in a single day, the company announced last week (17 May). Rimac Group is valued at over €2 billion (US$2.15 billion) after a €500 million fundraise last year.

Energy-Storage.news asked a spokesperson for the company to provide more details about its new ESS product and how it planned to compete in the space. The answers provided are below.

Energy-Storage.news: Could you provide us a brief overview of the specs of the ESS products you plan to launch?

Rimac Energy: Later this year, we will disclose the technology and detailed specifications of our products. Currently, we can reveal that our solution is highly scalable, accommodating systems with capacities ranging from 770kWh to multiple GWh. It is designed to be adaptable, catering to the individual requirements of our customers with whom we maintain a close collaborative relationship.

Furthermore, our novel electrical architecture enables our products to reduce efficiency losses by up to 50%, while decreasing the system footprint by 40% compared to state-of-the-art systems. We also anticipate an improvement in system lifetime.

How does Rimac’s background in high-performance sports cars lend itself well to competing in the ESS space?

Through our high-performance automotive projects, we have acquired leading expertise in extracting maximal performance from a given set of battery cells.

We firmly believe that the crucial factor for achieving an efficient Energy Storage System (ESS) lies in designing the system as a fully integrated entity, rather than piecing together off-the-shelf battery modules, BMKS, inverters, and other components.

Leveraging this expertise and design philosophy, we have developed an innovative electrical architecture for stationary ESS, which yields the aforementioned advantages.

Additionally, we capitalise on our in-house developed battery management system (BMS) and advanced analytics, as well as design-to-cost and industrialisation expertise gained from high-volume automotive tier 1 projects.

Could you clarify whether you will produce your own lithium-ion battery cells or whether you procure them from larger OEMs?

We will source our battery cells from established cell manufacturers, prioritising a local and sustainable supply chain. Our selection of battery chemistries is carefully balanced to ensure optimal cost-effectiveness, efficiency, longevity, and a secure supply. Additionally, as our systems are adaptable to various battery cell chemistries, our product portfolio will encompass lithium-free cell options as well.

A render of the company’s ESS product. Image: Rimac Group.

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Maine became the ninth US state to introduce an energy storage deployment target in 2021, after Governor Janet Mills signed it into law. At the time, Vitelli was thanked by the national Energy Storage Association (now part of the American Clean Power Association) for her leadership on the issue.

Incidentally, two other states have since also joined that roster, meaning 11 US states now have a policy goal or aspirational target in place.

In addition to driving forward the enactment of the target, Senator Vitelli had also chaired a commission investigating the value of energy storage for Maine prior to that.

The state is targeting the deployment of 300MW of storage within its state lines by 2025 and then 400MW by 2030. While that’s on the diminutive end of the scale compared to some other states, it represents about 20% of the state’s peak load as recorded in 2021, which in terms of proportion brings it broadly in line with the others.

Unfortunately, Maine’s legislature didn’t make recordings of the committee hearing last week available online, but according to local news outlet Maine Monitor, one of the major questions discussed was the issue of ownership.

With storage classifiable neither as energy generation nor distribution, it falls into a grey area, with utility companies not allowed to own generation assets that fall outside their transmission and distribution (T&D) remit.

This is a fairly common problem faced as battery energy storage, a nascent technology set, proliferates around the world, and Maine Monitor energy and environment reporter Kate Cough quoted Vitelli at the hearing as saying the “conditions under which an investor owned utility may own or may have a financial interest in energy storage systems,” are not clear.

Bill LD1850 aims to order the state’s regulatory Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to clarify that position, but it also seeks to get other important questions answered, and introduce other measures to ensure Maine does attain its targets. As of the beginning of 2022, the state only had 50MW of energy storage on the grid.

How the challenge to reach targets looked as of the beginning of 2022. Source: State of Maine Energy Storage Market Assessment.

Maine could introduce similar procurement process to New York

LD1850 would change the target to “at least” 300MW by 2025 and “at least” 400MW by 2030. Although it retains the provision that the Governor’s office should review progress and the appropriate goals every two years, it calls for these reviews to begin in 2024, not 2031 as the original bill has it.

It also calls for the Energy Office of the Governor to evaluate design and implementation of a programme to procure T&D-connected energy storage systems on a commercial basis. This could include a form of index storage credit mechanism.

This would be a type of credit, somewhat similar to Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) that would be bid for through competitive solicitations.

New York State is currently in the process of rolling out index storage credit-based solicitations for large-scale energy storage.

It appears that like the New York programme’s proposed design, a scheme for Maine would underwrite some of the risk that developers and investors take in energy storage projects, providing a portion of the systems’ revenues through long-term contracts, but leaving the asset owners needing to earn the remainder through merchant market opportunities.

The Energy Office would also have to study the long-duration energy storage (LDES) space, both in terms of evaluating the available and emerging technologies as well as the need for them in Maine and the wider New England ISO service territory. That could be in terms of using several hours storage paired or co-located with generation sources, winter electricity supply reliability or serving as peaking capacity on the grid.

A further public hearing will be held tomorrow, 24 May, with the Energy, Utilities and Technology committee.

Despite the challenges for large-scale storage in particular, being part of the New England ISO service territory means there are likely to be opportunities for storage developers, especially of distributed storage assets, as Energy-Storage.news heard in an interview published yesterday with developer BlueWave. Those opportunities would be based on ISO capacity market and energy trading revenues, according to BlueWave MD of storage development Michael Zimmer.

Senator Vitelli is also leading efforts to pass another bill that will be debated tomorrow, LD1830, for the advancement of Maine’s adoption of renewable energy. Like the storage bill, the legislation would order the PUC to evaluate new resources approvals based on their benefit to the people of the state. Maine is targeting 100% renewables by 2050, and an interim goal of reaching 80% renewable energy on the grid by 2030.

The full bill text for LD1850 can be found here.

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The project is set to reach commercial operation date (COD) in mid-2024.

It is RES (Renewable Energy Solutions) and SCR’s (Scandinavian Capacity Reserve) second BESS project in Sweden, after a 20MW one launched recently for another DNO, Landskrona Energi, also set to come online next year.

The project in Alingsås will be located close to one of the DNO’s substations and will help the operator manage the supply and demand of electricity on the grid.

Magnus Mattsson, Commercial Manager at RES – Nordics commented: “The need for energy storage is heavily increasing in Sweden and projects such as this one in Alingsås and Elektra in Landskrona are game changers for smarter energy systems.”

Rickard Bern, CEO of Alingsås Energi, added: “We are extremely happy to be able to attract this type of investment to Alingsås. We see ourselves as enablers in creating the conditions for the green transition that is underway. A battery storage of this size becomes an important resource in the local grid. It contributes to secure the stability for the residents of Alingsås municipality in terms of energy supply and that is one of our main missions.”

The energy storage market in Sweden has become very active over the past 12 months as developers seek to capitalise on high ancillary services revenues today and future opportunities in energy trading and capacity markets.

Recent project announcements include two early-stage acquisitions from Switzerland-based renewable energy firm Axpo, one of which was the SCR and RES one mentioned earlier and another it acquired from Sustainable Energy Solutions Sweden Holding AB (SENS). Another, in April, saw another DNO Nybro Energi order a 12MW BESS from Soltech Energy Solutions for a COD before the end of 2023.

However, projects which are not directly for a DNO have tended not to give a firm COD in their announcements, including Axpo’s SENS project as well as those from developer Ingrid Capacity, which recently raised US$100 million for its substantial but early-stage pipeline of BESS. Sweden has around 170 DNOs.

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The deliveries will start in the third quarter of 2023 and will see Rept initially deliver 280Ah batteries, followed later by its next-generation Wending Battery. In the deal announcement yesterday (22 May) Rept said the new product is designed for larger capacity and greater life cycle.

Akshay Ladwa, Chief Engineering Officer at Energy Vault, commented: “This partnership combines Rept Battero’s significant technical expertise and leadership in manufacturing safe, reliable and high performance liquid-cooled Li-ion battery packs which Energy Vault plants to use in its proprietary B-Vault BESS platform, one of the most advanced AC block designs in the industry that optimizes cost and maximizes reliability and uptime for our customers.”

At the end of April Rept Battero tied up with battery storage system integrator Powin for a smaller 3GWh deal.

Rept added that the products it is selling to Energy Vault have not only passed the latest version of UL1973, IEC62619, IEC63056 certification, but also successfully undergone full UL9540A testing.

Commenting on yesterday’s announcement, Dr. Cao Hui, Chairman & CEO of Rept Battero, said:

“The Energy Vault team has proven to be the most customer-centric and rapidly growing energy storage company in the industry. We are very excited about this partnership because it will enable the exponential growth that we were aiming for in the stationary energy storage sector.”

“We are confident in Energy Vault’s ability to win the largest projects worldwide, supporting our growth plan. We are pleased to leverage Energy Vault’s expertise to convert our high-quality battery technology to bespoke solutions for the largest customers worldwide.”

Rept is currently ranked as a Tier 2 supplier in Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s widely-cited Tier system. The research firm designates CATL, Envision, BYD, LG Energy Solution, Panasonic, Samsung, SK Innovation and, as of mid-2022, Northvolt and Sunwoda as its Tier 1 suppliers.

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New York has some of the most stringent rules on fire safety for energy storage systems anywhere in the world. This is based around the need to ensure safety of the public, as well as fire service crews and other emergency responders, when installing powerful energy equipment in its densely populated urban areas.

As recounted by a team of experts from Energy Safety Response Group (ESRG) in a 2021 article for our quarterly journal PV Tech Power (Vol.25), FDNY created its own set of requirements for outdoor stationary battery storage systems, in addition to adhering to the same certifications standards as most other jurisdictions like UL1973 for safe installation and operation and UL9540A thermal runaway and propagation test data.

Indoor systems are also effectively banned, except in special circumstances where local authorities exempt that restriction.

Sungrow has received the key TM-2 approval and COA which is needed for its outdoor systems to be allowed to interconnect to the New York grid. It had to prove that Powertitan’s safety features and design prevented thermal runaway fires.

The City of New York Fire Department’s Bureau of Fire Prevention publishes a list of approved equipment and manufacturers. The list currently on display shows that as of 19 July, the last time it appears to have been updated with current approvals, only four products from three manufacturers were featured.

Those were Tesla’s Megapack BESS as well as ELM’s Fieldsight microgrid solution and distributed energy storage products from SimpliPhi Power.

Fire safety of course remains a priority for the industry: while BESS fire incidents are extremely rare, they can shake confidence in a nascent industry, and as ESRG expert and former NYC firefighter Paul Rogers pointed out in a 2022 interview, if they do happen in urban areas, they can be high risk.

Local news reports from around the world also show that when not well-informed, communities can often harbour fears of having a large-scale battery storage installation in their neighbourhood.

For New York, which as a state has a policy target in place of reaching 6GW of energy storage deployments cumulatively by 2030, this aspect of development planning has been one of the reasons the state’s storage market has been slow to take off.

To date much of the large-scale BESS development in the state has been focused on areas such as rural Upstate New York, which has far lower population density, but with most electricity demand concentrated in urban areas, it appears likely more development will need to occur in the city too.

In order to get around restrictions on indoor lithium-ion BESS installations, for example, the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency (NYSERDA) is trialling some new technologies, such as Cadenza Innovation’s lithium ‘Supercell’ product and zinc-based batteries.  

Sungrow representatives presented and discussed the technologies and design features of the Powertitan product in a November 2022 sponsored webinar with sister site PV Tech, which you can access on-demand here (registration required), or watch on PV Tech’s YouTube channel here.

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Gregg Patterson

Origami Solar, developers of a patent-pending steel frame for solar modules that lowers cost, reduces carbon emissions and improves module performance and value, has production samples of its new Gen 2 steel module frame ready for evaluation and certification testing. 

Leveraging the significant investment in U.S. module-production capacity by sourcing domestic steel frames can lower costs, create jobs and tap into domestic content incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also offers an opportunity to end the solar industry’s reliance on imported aluminum. 

“Our Gen 2 frames are lighter, stronger and ideally suited to provide superior support to the new large-format modules coming to market,” says Gregg Patterson, CEO of Origami Solar. “In collaboration with steelmakers and precision roll formers, we have designed the Origami steel module frame to match the fit, form and function of industry-standard frames, making the transition from aluminum to steel seamless for module manufacturing and field installation.”

Adds Thomas Welser of Welser Profile, a manufacturer of roll-formed steel products, “Our goal throughout this process has been to support Origami Solar to ensure that any solar panel producer will be able to rapidly integrate and scale these frames with virtually no changes to their production processes, in both the U.S. and Europe.”

Along with support for increased production of domestically produced recycled steel, Origami Solar frames are expected to reduce production-related greenhouse gases by up to 93%, representing a reduction of 80 kg per module or 200 metric tons per MW.

With performance testing by third-party labs and module manufacturers nearing completion, Gen 2 production-ready frames are now available for evaluation testing by module makers and key partners across the solar value chain.

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