Vishal Lala

Polar Racking, a North American supplier and manufacturer of solar mounting solutions, has added two U.S. manufacturing facilities to produce solar mounting solutions.

Located in Michigan and Florida, the facilities will help Polar Racking meet the growing demand for U.S. manufactured solar mounting solutions, reduce lead times and help build the domestic solar industry market.

“Expanding our manufacturing capacity to the U.S. demonstrates Polar Racking’s steadfast commitment to operational agility and excellence,” says Pals Saddyappan, director of supply chain and global manufacturing at Polar Racking. “Our new U.S. facilities mitigate shipping lead time risks for our customers and give us additional control over the entire supply chain.”

Vishal Lala, managing director of Polar Racking, adds: “The expansion of [our] manufacturing operations is in response to our customers’ needs to meet the Inflation Reduction Act domestic content requirements. [The company] supports the government’s initiative to re-shore the PV supply chain to create local jobs and bolster the local economy.” 

Polar Racking has a pipeline of 3.4 GW of solar mounting and racking across North America and the Caribbean and supports the accelerating growth of solar development across North America.

Polar Racking Expands U.S. Manufacturing Capacity with Two New Facilities

Polar Racking, a North American supplier and manufacturer of solar mounting solutions, has added two U.S. manufacturing facilities to produce solar mounting solutions.

Located in Michigan and Florida, the facilities will help Polar Racking meet the growing demand for U.S. manufactured solar mounting solutions, reduce lead times and help build the domestic solar industry market.

“Expanding our manufacturing capacity to the U.S. demonstrates Polar Racking’s steadfast commitment to operational agility and excellence,” says Pals Saddyappan, director of supply chain and global manufacturing at Polar Racking. “Our new U.S. facilities mitigate shipping lead time risks for our customers and give us additional control over the entire supply chain.”

Vishal Lala, managing director of Polar Racking, adds: “The expansion of [our] manufacturing operations is in response to our customers’ needs to meet the Inflation Reduction Act domestic content requirements. [The company] supports the government’s initiative to re-shore the PV supply chain to create local jobs and bolster the local economy.” 

Polar Racking has a pipeline of 3.4 GW of solar mounting and racking across North America and the Caribbean and supports the accelerating growth of solar development across North America.

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Jan Pepper

Peninsula Clean Energy, a Community Choice Aggregation agency, has reached a 15-year deal to exclusively receive 45 MW of battery storage from a four-hour lithium-ion battery project that Terra-Gen will develop near Barstow in San Bernardino County, Calif.

The energy storage facility is a part of a larger redevelopment of the existing SEGS VIII solar thermal project, which is expected to be operational in June 2024. The storage facility will tap into existing interconnection facilities.

This initiative is Peninsula Clean Energy’s second standalone battery storage project deal signed this year. The first was for 50 MW of four-hour lithium-ion storage from the Nova III facility in Riverside County beginning in August 2024.

The storage projects give Peninsula Clean Energy tools for reaching the agency’s goal of providing 24/7 renewable energy by helping to shift plentiful solar-powered energy into evening and overnight hours.

“Our priority is securing sufficient, low-cost, clean sources of power, while also ensuring reliability for our customers,” Peninsula Clean Energy CEO Jan Pepper says. “Battery storage is a critical component of our strategy and allows us to take the lead among all utilities in demonstrating it is possible to provide hourly renewable energy in a cost-effective way.”

“The SEGS VIII project has a long history supporting California’s journey towards clean and reliable power generation. The redevelopment of the project will expand that effort through the deployment of new large-scale renewables and energy storage,” adds Terra-Gen CEO Jim Pagano.

Peninsula Clean Energy says it has aggressively pursued additional renewable and storage resources while maintaining a 5% discount compared to what the agency’s customers in San Mateo County and the City of Los Banos would be paying for generation services through PG&E.

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Urvi Parekh

rPlus Energies has signed a long-term power purchase agreement with Idaho Power for a new 200 MW facility in Ada County, Idaho, called Pleasant Valley Solar. It is currently the largest contracted solar facility in Idaho Power’s system.

The project was awarded a PPA through a negotiated process with Meta and Idaho Power, who developed a special energy services agreement that will allow Meta access to renewables to support its local operations – specifically, Meta’s new data center in Kuna, Idaho.

“Meta is committed to minimizing our environmental footprint in the communities where we live and work, and central to this goal is creating, building and running energy-efficient data centers supported by renewable energy,” says Urvi Parekh, head of renewable energy at Meta. “One of the core factors in selecting Idaho for our new data center location in 2022 was access to renewable energy, and Meta is proud to partner with Idaho Power and rPlus Energies to help bring even more renewable energy to the Treasure Valley grid.”

rPlus Energies has selected Sundt Renewables to provide engineering, procurement and construction services. Sundt has significant experience in the region, including the rPlus-developed 80 MW Graphite Solar project in Carbon County, Utah, which reached commercial operation in June 2022, as well as the 200 MW Appaloosa Solar 1 project currently under construction in Iron County, Utah.

Pleasant Valley Solar is expected to start construction later this year.

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Ojjo, a provider of solar foundations, has expanded the compatibility of its patented Earth Truss System to include racking, mounting and tracking solutions from GameChange Solar.

GameChange Solar joins existing Ojjo tracker partners Array Technologies and Nextracker.

Ojjo’s novel design typically requires significantly less steel volume and labor as compared to conventional piles, delivering value to utility-scale projects that contain subsurface risk, predrill requirements or significant grading. Explicitly engineered with mating hardware designed for each tracker manufacturers’ bearing componentry, Ojjo foundations seamlessly integrate for a supplier-agnostic approach with no modifications to any tracker systems required, the company says.

Ojjo says its foundations have been deployed on nearly 2 GW of large-scale projects utilizing both Nextracker and Array Technologies systems. Nextracker took early-adopter advantage and was first to market with an Ojjo UL 2703 listed solution, selected for initial projects including 105 MW of the Titan and Aragorn projects in Texas, as well as the 175 MW Yellow Pine 1 solar project in Nevada.

Following the release of Ojjo’s compatible solution with Array Technologies, both companies were chosen for the 967 MW Gemini Solar Project, the nation’s largest standalone solar and storage project. Ojjo has several additional projects underway with both Array Technologies and Nextracker and is seeing strong demand for GameChange Solar trackers across anticipated projects.

“Since our inception, we have worked closely with the innovative leaders at Nextracker and Array Technologies to provide a cost-effective and streamlined offering, and we are grateful for their respective teams’ ongoing support and collaboration,” says Mike Miskovsky, chairman and CEO of Ojjo. “We are proud to also announce our compatibility with GameChange Solar and appreciate the continuing efforts of all these industry leaders to help Ojjo execute across our 10 GW active project pipeline.”

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CDE Lightband, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and Silicon Ranch have broken ground on two solar farms in Clarksville, Tenn.: the 2 MW Solar Band – Red Array and the 4.75 MW Solar Band – Orange Array.

Both projects are expected to be operational and delivering energy to the Clarksville community in December.

“These solar farms will help us improve the resiliency of our services without increasing costs, all while helping Clarksville attract additional businesses to the area,” says CDE Lightband General Manager Brian Taylor. “I am proud of this partnership with TVA and Silicon Ranch and the collaboration from each organization to make this possible.”

“Solar Band demonstrates what is possible when we come together with a shared vision to use low-cost, reliable, renewable energy to power our growing economy,” adds TVA’s Doug Perry. “Together with our partners, we are building the nation’s most advanced energy system to help us meet our decarbonization and energy security goals.”

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For a roundup of its PV results, the bulk of the business, see coverage from our sister site PV Tech here.

It has started the year slowly, with only 18MWh of shipments in the first quarter and no guidance for the current (second) quarter. It has, however, grown its contracted revenues for storage from US$1 billion at the start of the year to US$1.3 billion today, and the slow start to 2023 has been expected.

“As we previously communicated, the first half of 2023 is expected to be a relatively small contributor to our utility scale (energy storage) project deliveries as we transition from a white label third party product to our own manufactured proprietary battery storage product,” said Yan Zhuang, president of CSI Solar, its main division.

“From a development and execution standpoint, our team is preparing for a busy second half of the year led by deliveries of our SolBank product. The fact that lithium carbonite prices have fallen by over 60% since the peak in Q4 of last year is also a demand driver.”

This week, it secured a second large order for a US BESS project from developer Aypa Power.

The firm’s long-term pipeline of energy storage projects remains around 47GWh, with no significant change from how this figures breaks down when comparing to the full-year 2022 results covered here.

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The company announced this week it had signed a deal with the mine’s owner, Imerys, another France-headquartered multinational. The project comprises a 15MWdc ground mount solar PV array, featuring single axis trackers and bi-facial PV modules, paired with a 7.5MWh battery energy storage system (BESS).

It will be installed at Imery’s facility in Lompoc, Santa Barbara County. Diatomite is a soft sedimentary rock that is used in various commercial applications, most commonly for filtration of liquids or as a filler in substances like paint.

TotalEnergies will finance and install the project, as well as provide operations and maintenance (O&M) with the deal structured as a 25-year power purchase and services agreement (PPSA). The new system and its accompanying long-term energy services contract will cover around 50% of the Lompoc site’s electricity demand.

TotalEnergies is the owner of Saft, the French battery manufacturer and BESS system integrator-manufacturer, with the two working together on many of the parent company’s energy storage projects, although the equipment provider for the mine project has not yet been disclosed.

Generac Grid Services platform enables automated demand response for Iberdrola VPP

Iberdrola is using an energy management and aggregation platform from Generac Grid Services at a virtual power plant (VPP) in Spain.

The Spanish energy company has selected Concerto, the distributed energy resources management (DERM) software platform that US-based standby and backup power specialist Generac acquired when it bought out the company making it, Enbala. In acquiring the company and platform, Generac launched its Generac Grid Services division.

Concerto is enabling Iberdrola’s VPP to provide Active Demand Response Services (SRAD) to the Spanish grid through an automated dispatch process, rather than being more manually coordinated previously. The platform was picked by Iberdrola through a competitive tender process held in 2021.

The VPP serves the network of Spanish system operator Red Eléctrica de España, helping it stabilise grid frequency through aggregation of distributed energy resources (DERs) at homes and businesses across the country.

The two companies plan to expand the collaboration further, adding capabilities like electric vehicle (EV) charging aggregation and bidding into a wider number of markets for flexibility services. Similar deals Generac Grid Services has in place with other utilities include tie-ups in the US with Dominion Energy Virginia and Arizona Public Service.

Ex-FERC chair Richard Glick joins advanced compressed air player Hydrostor

Former chair of the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Richard Glick, has joined the board of directors at advanced compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) company Hydrostor.

Hydrostor said on Wednesday (17 May) that Glick had been appointed as a special advisor to the board of the company, which has developed a proprietary compressed air technology that it claims is much higher efficient than existing compressed air plants.

That claim is made partly on the basis that the technology is more of a closed loop for heat and therefore doesn’t require the burning of fossil fuels to power compressors, which also has environmental benefits.

In addition to holding the IP for the A-CAES technology, Ontario, Canada-headquartered Hydrostor also acts as developer, with some very large plants exceeding the gigawatt-hour scale in development in Australia and California. The company got an investment commitment worth up to US$250 million from Goldman Sachs in 2022, placing it among the top recipients in the energy storage industry of VC funding for that year.

Glick served as chairman of FERC for two years after being appointed by US president Joe Biden, standing down after his term ended in January this year. Another ex-FERC chair, Neil Chatterjee, recently joined energy storage developer and solutions provider Convergent Energy and Power’s board of directors.   

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As such, AEMO Services is playing a key role in implementing the state of New South Wales’s Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap, the state’s plan to facilitate transition to renewable energy and from its current overwhelming dependency on coal.

About ¾ of NSW’s generation is coal-fired and replacing it with cleaner sources presents the challenges of maintaining reliability of supply and keeping costs as low as possible. Like other Australian states, NSW is developing very large Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) developments which will host a mix of renewable energy assets, storage and transmission infrastructure.

The tender launching next week is AEMO Services’ is part of an ongoing, 10-year series of ‘rolling competitive tenders’ on behalf of the state in its role as Consumer Trustee.

The organisation said this morning in a release sent to media including Energy-Storage.news that the round will seek to procure around 950MW of generation as well as just over half-a-gigawatt of long-duration energy storage.

AEMO Services will host a webinar 30 May in which more details will be revealed.

In addition to generation and LDES tenders, AEMO Services is also tendering presently for firming resources that can dispatch their capacity over two hours or more, with energy storage also eligible for participation in that.

Agreements will underwrite a portion of LDES project revenues

In the previous round of generation and long-duration energy storage tenders, one LDES project was successful, a battery energy storage system (BESS) project proposed by RWE with 8-hours’ duration, alongside three generation projects, as reported by Energy-Storage.news earlier this month.

As with the prior round, the tenders will comprise a two-stage process:

Stage 1: Project bids are assessed under non-financial criteria, which include community benefit, and local employment opportunities they will provide.

Stage 2: Financial assessment of projects shortlisted via Stage 1 and their long-term economic impacts for NSW’s electricity customers.

Successful LDES and generation projects will enter into long-term energy service agreements (LTESAs) with the state, which can have terms of up to 20 years. That will establish much-needed revenue certainty for developers, owners and investors of participating assets.

This reduction of investment risk will be paired with the potential upside of revenues that can be earned from other sources, such as corporate power purchase agreements (PPAs) and spot market trading. This is starting to become a prevalent way for large-scale storage procurements to be held in markets around the world, from Germany to New York, to Canada and elsewhere: government contracts underwrite some of the overall risk, but developers still have to take some merchant risks themselves to make bigger profits.

A similar approach looks set to be taken in Australia at a national level when tenders begin under the recently-confirmed Capacity Investment scheme, which will comprise competitive solicitations for dispatchable low carbon energy.

Energy storage will be an essential component of those tenders, leading Australia’s energy minister Chris Bowen to recently describe the scheme as a de facto energy storage strategy for the country, to be coordinated and implemented at state and territory level.

One other interesting aspect of the NSW tenders that should be noted is that targeted procurement amounts are indicative. Therefore, AEMO Services has “discretion to award more or less if it is in the long-term financial interest of NSW consumers to do so,” AEMO Services acting general manager Graeme Edie said.

The idea of hosting rolling tenders is that bidders can take what they’ve learned from unsuccessful bids and perhaps come up with stronger non-financial or financial metrics to show AEMO Services in subsequent rounds.

The previous tender round had resulted in striker prices 40% below the levelised cost of electricity and an equivalent Contract for Difference, Edie said, adding that this demonstrated that “the market understands the advantages and value of the LTESA contract”.

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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Dan Shugar

Nextracker Inc., a provider of utility-scale solar trackers, and MSS Steel Tubes USA – a joint venture of Portuguese industrial company Metalogalva and Brazilian steelmaker Soufer – have commissioned a new factory to manufacture low-carbon steel components for Nextracker’s solar tracking systems. Based in Memphis, Tenn., the facility will manufacture Nextracker steel torque tubes, creating 129 jobs and generating millions of dollars in local economic investment.

“We chose Memphis for our first U.S. plant to support Nextracker’s utility-scale solar demand across the Southeast,” says António Pedro Antunes, CEO of Metalogalva Group. “Memphis has the transportation, infrastructure and capable workforce necessary to support a solar manufacturing program like this.”

Nextracker’s dedicated tube mill will feed projects in Kentucky, South Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi and Georgia. Tennessee-based Silicon Ranch is developing many of those projects, having signed a supply agreement for 1.5 GW with Nextracker last year and a 3 GW supply agreement recently.

“Nextracker’s new Tennessee tube mill … enables us to support additional investments in American manufacturing while lowering carbon production processes of our supply chain and reducing volatility and logistics risks – all from our home state,” says Reagan Farr, Silicon Ranch co-founder and CEO.

Adds Dan Shugar, founder and CEO of Nextracker, “This is what energy security looks like: New U.S. manufacturing jobs using American-made steel to produce affordable clean energy. Customers want domestic, low-carbon technologies like solar power.” 

Nextracker’s collaboration with MSS Steel Tubes USA underscores the Tennessee Valley’s growth as a regional manufacturing hub for the Southeast. As more companies seek to locate their manufacturing capacity in the U.S., Nextracker has already delivered gigawatts of U.S.-made products to solar developers.

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Lars Norell

Altus Power Inc., an independent developer, owner and operator of commercial-scale solar facilities, has completed the development and construction of a 1.5 MW car canopy solar array in Mount Laurel, N.J. Altus Power will provide clean energy to a non-profit corporation that provides programs and services to individuals with mental and physical disabilities. This array adds to Altus Power’s 119 MW portfolio across New Jersey and is part of the expected 40 MWs to be completed by year-end 2023 in the state.

“Altus Power … welcomes this addition to our customer base,” says Lars Norell, co-CEO of Altus Power. “Our development and construction teams are working hard towards meeting our goals for 2023 and their continued progress is a big differentiator for our company.” 

The asset is expected to produce approximately 1,800,000 kilowatt hours per year which is the equivalent of 1,276 metric tons of carbon dioxide avoided annually.

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