The Shoals Big Lead Assembly (BLA) product

Shoals Technologies Group Inc. has filed a patent infringement complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) against Hikam America Inc. and Voltage LLC, alleging that the companies engaged in unlawful imports of photovoltaic components that infringe on two patents owned by Shoals relating to improved connectors for solar arrays.

“Shoals has invested millions of dollars over our 27-year history to develop innovative products and technologies to reduce installation costs and improve reliability and safety for the utility scale solar, storage and EV charging markets,” says Jeff Tolnar, interim CEO and president of Shoals. “While we welcome healthy competition – especially that which betters the industry – we take our patents very seriously and will defend them vigorously to protect our intellectual property.

“As a U.S.-based company with design and manufacturing in Tennessee, Alabama and California, we hope the ITC will protect our IP and support domestic manufacturing and job creation by banning the import of what we believe are infringing products from entering the U.S. market,” he adds.

Shoals is requesting that the ITC institute an investigation into the alleged infringement under Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to bar the importation of the alleged infringing products. The complaint requests that the ITC issue a limited exclusion order and a cease and desist order against Hikam, Voltage and related entities to bar the importation of devices, components and products that are alleged to infringe Shoals’ patents.

Invented and manufactured in the United States, Shoals’ patented Big Lead Assembly (BLA) connectors and wire harnesses with in-line fuses are designed to reduce or eliminate the need for combiner boxes, which reduces the amount of wire and other materials needed. The patented connectors are less expensive to manufacture and transport than alternatives, are easy to use and permit a more simplified component configuration in the solar field, Shoals says.

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The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water) has issued a request for interest (RFI) to obtain industry input and feedback for solar energy services.

DC Water intends to enter into an agreement to purchase solar and renewable energy and related services, with one or more service providers to design, build, finance, maintain and/or operate facilities and provide energy agreements or other related services. 

The RFI process will assist DC Water in creating and issuing any forthcoming RFP. Once vendors have responded to the RFI document, DC Water may schedule a meeting with the project management team for any further clarification regarding RFI.

An outreach event for this solicitation will be held on May 13 at 11:00 a.m. in order to clarify any questions regarding how to respond and to obtain information regarding the services required from bidders.

Proposals will be due on August 1.

For more information, click here or email rudy.gonzalez@dcwater.com.

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VPPs that aggregate residential solar and storage can help to reduce the demand for dirty peaker plants in peak demand periods. Image: Sunrun via Twitter.

As distributed energy resources (DER) such as residential solar rooftop increase in the next decade, their aggregation into virtual power plants (VPPs) could save US utilities up to US$35 billion, according to a study from consultancy The Brattle Group.

A key finding of the study – which was prepared for tech giant Google – outlines the net cost for utilities to provide resources from a VPP would be between 40-60% of the cost of alternative options and thus by deploying 60GW of VPP could both meet US resource adequacy and save between US$15-35 billion in the next decade.

The reliability of a VPP leveraged through residential load flexibility is equal to conventional resources and is able to contribute at a similar scale to resource adequacy.

One of the main drivers for the increased deployment of VPPs will be due to the growth of distributed energy resources (DERs) in the US within the next decade, customers allowing a utility or an aggregator to manage it.

Solar residential rooftop is expected to reach a total capacity of 83GW in the US by the end of the decade, up from the current 27GW, while BTM batteries are expected to increase by more than tenfold from 2GW currently to 27GW in 2030, according to Brattle Group.

To read the full version of this story, visit PV Tech.

See more of Energy-Storage.news’ coverage of virtual power plants here.

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Chile, where this project from Mitsubishi Power Americas/Innergex will be located, is the only country in Latin America with a substantial grid-scale market on the near horizon. Image: Salvador Battery Energy Storage (Rendering Credit: Mitsubishi Power) (CNW Group/Innergex Renewable Energy Inc.)

The Inflation Reduction Act could “suck the oxygen out” of the Latin American (LatAm) energy storage market, the CEO of pan-American energy storage firm On.Energy said.

Other than Chile where gigawatts of energy storage co-located with solar PV are being built in light of changes in regulation, the grid-scale energy storage market in LatAm has been very quiet. This is largely down to slower penetration of renewable energy into countries’ generation mix than in other parts of the world, On.Energy CEO Alan Cooper told Energy-Storage.news.

And the US’ federal support for its domestic energy storage sector in the shape of the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) new tax credit incentives could risk clipping the wings of the grid-scale market further south.

“The IRA for at least for the next couple years may have sucked the oxygen out of the room in LatAm in terms of access to capital markets for opportunities, because the returns have now equalised in North America to what you can expect in Latin America in most cases.,” Cooper said.

“So, from a capital markets standpoint, if you can deploy projects with 10% to 15% returns in ERCOT, why take a risk in a market like Colombia or Brazil right? I think that some of that is certainly an obstacle for Latin America moving forward.”

On.Energy is active in five countries across North and Latin America: the US, Peru, Honduras, Colombia and Mexico, but Cooper was keen to emphasise that the big focus going forward is the US.

“We’ve decided to focus on the US market alongside markets we’ve already developed in Mexico, Peru and Chile. The IRA has really validated that strategy,” Cooper said. He described Chile as “the next frontier” for the LatAm market.

For the US, the company has chosen to target the 9.9MW ‘distributed play’ segment in Texas, ERCOT, which developer Available Power told Energy-Storage.news had ‘fewer eyes’ on it than large-scale opportunities. On.Energy raised US$100 million in financing for this in August as the IRA passed.

In Honduras, On.Energy is deploying a 2.5MW BESS hybridised with a renewable generation unit to allow the owner to provide frequency regulation services to the local ISO. In Colombia, On.Energy has deployed a project in partnership with global utility Enel, mainly providing resiliency to a commercial & industrial (C&I) customer.

Its most active market in South America is Peru, On.Energy’s “beachhead market with over 20 installed projects,” Cooper said, plus a big pipeline of upcoming projects. Political challenges and currency issues have slowed the market somewhat but it remains a key focus for the firm going forward, he added.

He explained that Peru uses a similar rate structure to that in Ontario, Canada, where single 15-minute intervals of peak demand can determine 40-50% of a large electricity users’ monthly utility bill. Just as in Ontario, this has created a big opportunity for behind-the-meter C&I-located BESS units combined with intelligent forecasting and dispatching to avoid those high charges.

On.Energy is also very active in the C&I market in Mexico, which country manager at the time David Fernandes talked to Energy-Storage.news about two years ago, since which he has become company CFO. Manufacturing and other electricity intensive industrial activities taking place in the country require good quality and reliable power, which BESS can help provide in the face of a weak grid, Fernandes said.

We also exclusively reported in November 2022 that the firm was deploying BESS units at airports across LatAm totalling 39MWh.

Grid-scale projects are happening in LatAm outside of Chile, just at a much slower rate than the US, Europe or Asia.

At the start of 2023, Energy-Storage.news reported on the latest developments for a 1GW PV, 190MW battery storage project being launched by the government in Mexico. Two months later, investor PASH Global told Energy-Storage.news it was targeting 40MWh of co-located battery storage in Paraguay.

Last year saw the inauguration of Brazil’s largest project to-date, a 30MW/60MWh non-wires alternative for transmission system operator ISO CTEEP, while a 34MWh tender in Guyana was launched at the end of the year too.

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A week after passing in the House, the U.S. Senate has voted to approve H.J.Res.39, a measure that would repeal the Biden administration’s June 2022 two-year moratorium on new solar tariffs.

The vote was 56 to 41, mainly along party lines. Kentucky’s Rand Paul was the only Republican to vote against the measure. Nine Democrats voted in favor.

“The Senate’s approval of the Congressional Review Act resolution to repeal the Biden administration’s solar tariff moratorium poses a threat to the American economy and the clean energy transition,” says Gregory Wetstone, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE).

“The bill seeks to impose retroactive duties that will bring a halt to the booming solar growth in the U.S. and undermine the administration’s climate objectives.”

H.J.Res.39 will now move to President Biden’s desk, where he is expected to veto the measure.

Photo by Harold Mendoza on Unsplash

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A conventional geothermal plant in Iceland. Image: CC.

Geothermal-based energy storage company EarthBridge Energy has secured land rights to deploy its technology in Texas.

The Texas General Land Office issued a geothermal lease to EarthBridge in West Texas, the company announced earlier this week (2 May).

EarthBridge said it now plans to deploy its GeoBattery energy storage technology as part of a new, hybrid energy development combining additional, on-site renewable energy resources.

CEO Derek Adams said: “This marks an important step in EarthBridge’s strategy to deploy geothermal energy storage assets across the US and adds a key project to our portfolio.”

The company’s system will absorb excess electricity from wind and solar farms and store it for 10-1000+ hours, feeding it back to the grid when it is needed.

The system stores heat energy in subsurface reservoirs and converts it back to electricity using a high-efficiency turbine. The technology brings the installed cost of long-duration energy storage (LDES) below $10/kWh and enables the deployment of 100% carbon-free energy at scale, EarthBridge claimed.

To charge, the system draws water from an underground reservoir via a well, which is then simultaneously heated and cooled when at the surface by an electrical heat pump. The heated and chilled water are then stored in different zones of an underground reservoir, or different reservoirs, depicted below (taken from a company overview).

To charge, the system brings the heated and chilled water back to the surface where the heat pump system is reversed and used to drive a power turbine converting the thermal energy back to electricity. The outflow water is directed back to the source well.

The company said its Geobattery doesn’t require hot geothermal sources so can be deployed anywhere where you can drill a well for water. Major sedimentary basins are a sweet spot, it added.

The company intends to mainly monetise its technology using price arbitrage in the wholesale energy market.

It can be deployed front-of-meter like any generating facility, or behind-the-meter through a PPA with a wind or solar farm or as an asset sale with a development fee.

Last month, the company partnered with the US Department of Energy and three national labs – National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory – to explore the potential of underground geothermal energy storage across the US.

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A government minister and executives from renewable energy firm MET Group at the site of a BESS in Hungary in September 2022, the first in the country to use Tesla Megapacks. Image: MET Group.

The Ministry of Energy in Hungary will provide grants for the deployment of energy storage projects, with some 1GWh targeted by 2025.

From June, system operators and distribution companies will be able to apply for subsidies to build energy storage facilities by the summer of 2025 at the latest, the Ministry said. The €155 million (US$171 million) tender amount can be applied for in June 2023 and the winners will be chosen during the summer.

The statement said that the Ministry is aiming for 146MWh of energy storage to be built by May 2025.

However, the statement added that a separate request for proposals was published in March, open to all types of companies. The document of that request indicates a much larger target of 885MWh by May 2025.

The two targets appear to be separate figures, together totaling around 1GWh (1,031MWh to be precise).

That document (available here, in Hungarian) said that a 1MW/2MWh storage unit in the regulation capacity market would be expected to provide 4,000MW of negative aFRR (automatic frequency restoration reserve) and 4,000 MW of positive aFRR regulation capacity per year.

For the same size system in the ‘regulation energy market’, the discharge of 1.6MWh per day would be expected.

“The developments promote the implementation of a low-carbon energy economy, the green and digital transition, and the establishment of Hungary’s energy sovereignty. By installing battery energy storage, the natural power fluctuations of weather-dependent renewables can be partially compensated. The program can therefore make a meaningful contribution to the increased utilisation of clean energy carriers,” the statement from the Ministry said.

A translation of the document indicates part of the funding will come from the Recovery and Resilience Plan, the EU-wide scheme aiming to mitigate the negative economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In April this year, Invinity Energy Systems secured a 1.5MWh order for its vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) from STS Group, for an installation at solar-plus-storage project in central Hungary.

In September last year, the first project in Hungary to use Tesla Megapacks began installation, a 7.68MWh system from MET Group (pictured above).

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Artist’s rendering of Wärtsilä’s Gridsolv Quantum BESS units with EDF Renewables branding. Image: Wärtsilä

Technology group Wärtsilä has signed a repeat order with EDF Renewables UK to deliver a 57MW/114MWh grid-scale energy storage system (ESS) in Bramford, a village in the east of England.

The order, which was booked in the first quarter of 2023 and is scheduled to be delivered in the first quarter of 2024, will be Wärtsilä’s sixth project with EDF and will also boost the company’s energy storage portfolio in the UK to 1GWh.

The storage facility will be connected to the transmission network and will help integrate renewable generation into the grid further supporting efforts to create a decarbonised power system by 2035.

Wärtsilä’s Bramford project will provide balance to the electricity system and also help electrify public transportation in the area. The project will be constructed near a planned solar farm, also being developed by EDF Renewables UK, which is currently awaiting a planning decision from local authorities.

To read the full version of this story visit Solar Power Portal.

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Federal energy minister Chris Bowen speaking at the Smart Energy event, Sydney, New South Wales, 3 May 2023. Image: Smart Energy Council.

Australia will launch its first tenders for large-scale energy storage resources during this year, in a scheme which will roll out across the country, “jurisdiction by jurisdiction”.

Agreements have been reached with state energy ministers on how the competitive solicitations will be held, according to Australia’s Federal energy minister Chris Bowen in a speech yesterday.

Speaking at the national Smart Energy conference in Sydney, at which the minister’s appearances have become something of an annual fixture, the minister recounted some of the climate action and clean energy-friendly policies enacted since his Labor Party took office less than a year ago.

Those included affirmation of commitment to the Paris Agreement, reforms of the Safeguard Mechanism – a scheme to impose caps on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Australia’s largest emitters – a national electric vehicle strategy, and a target of making renewable energy at least 82% of the generation mix in Australia by 2030.

Labor, led by now-prime minister Anthony ‘Albo’ Albanese, ran on a platform that focused strongly on climate which appeared to resonate with voters in the 2022 election. That effectively gave the new administration a mandate to reverse much of the path trodden by the more conservative Liberal-National coalition that ruled for nine years before it.

‘Ensuring necessary investment into energy storage’

As regular readers of Energy-Storage.news will know, probably the two developments among many that will likely have the most immediate and transformative impact on the industry are the AU$20 billion Rewiring the Nation transmission network overhaul and the Capacity Investment Mechanism through which the tenders will be held.

Rewiring the Nation represents an upgrade and extension of transmission lines across the country. Allowing for greater interconnection between states means sharing the benefits of renewables and enabling energy storage to play a wider role in the National Electricity Market (NEM).

It will also directly support Battery of the Nation, a plan for Tasmania, the southeastern island state, to deploy gigawatt-hours of pumped hydro energy storage (PHES), battery energy storage system (BESS) resources and renewable energy, to then be connected via subsea cables to play into the NEM via an interconnection with Victoria.

Meanwhile the Capacity Investment Mechanism is essentially a revenue underwriting scheme for large-scale low carbon and dispatchable energy resources, to be awarded through tenders. State and territorial ministers met late last year to discuss the scheme, reaching an agreement in principle for it to go ahead.

In Bowen’s speech yesterday, the minister said the Capacity Investment Mechanism tenders will be, “in effect, a storage target,” for Australia since energy storage is the main enabler of low carbon energy from renewables to be integrated to the grid.

That matters because as Bowen noted, groups including the national Smart Energy Council trade group – hosting the Sydney conference of the same name this week – and energy economy and policy experts like the Victoria Energy Policy Centre, had long advocated for the introduction of an energy storage target.

“By insisting that investments under the capacity investment scheme will be both renewable and dispatchable – it can’t be one or the other, you’ve got to be both – we are ensuring that the investment occurs in the storage which is so necessary as well as the renewable energy investments,” Chris Bowen said.

Adding that more details will be forthcoming in the next national Budget, due to be announced 9 May, Bowen said he had been having “very productive conversations” with the state and territory-level energy ministers.

Calling them the “first cabs off the rank in terms of the rollout of the Capacity Investment Mechanism,” the Labor minister said that an important component of the scheme is that it will be led and deployment levels determined at the state level. This is something that was applauded by Victoria Energy Policy Centre expert Dr Bruce Mountain in interviews with this site and in fact, Victoria has itself already introduced an energy storage target at state level.

With the tender scheme to be rolled out “jurisdiction by jurisdiction,” agreements have now been made with the states across Australia that will be involved, and how it will work. The first auctions will be beginning later this year, according to the energy minister.

“I look forward to providing further updates, and there will be important measures in the Budget to support that as well. Absolutely essential – unlocking billions of dollars of renewable energy investment and unlocking gigawatts of power,” Chris Bowen said yesterday.

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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Solar PV manufacturer Toledo Solar Inc (TSI) has been awarded $8.8 million in federal funding through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) to continue its work on the commercialization of transparent and semi-transparent solar glass products for architectural windows.

As a part of its award from SETO, TSI and its partners will contribute a cost share of $9 million, bringing the total funding for the project to $17.8 million.

TSI says the development of semi-transparent solar glass will allow markets that utilize traditional glass to incorporate an energy generation solution.

“This award helps Toledo Solar continue to bring domestic solar technology to the evolving landscape of new energy markets, while creating many new next generation clean energy manufacturing jobs,” says CEO Aaron Bates. “In partnership with the University of Toledo and The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, we are accelerating commercialization of our CdTe-based building-integrated photovoltaic windows.”

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