Matthew Marshall

Renewable America, a provider of distributed energy resources in California, is providing over 15 MW of solar power coupled with 8 MWh of energy storage to four different community choice aggregators (CCAs).

Through five projects in total, Renewable America is enabling these CCAs to progress toward their state-mandated Resource Adequacy (RA) program in light of the California Independent System Operator’s (CAISO) recent marketplace limitations. All five projects are now fully subscribed and will complete construction by Q1 of 2024.

“We are excited to be working with Renewable America to help us meet our RA obligation as a load serving entity,” says Matthew Marshall, executive director of Redwood Coast Energy Authority. “This community-scale project is on track to be completed in under two years, unlike larger utility-scale projects that can take many years to develop.”

Continue reading

Melissa Seixas

Duke Energy has energized two solar projects in Bay and Levy counties in Florida as a part of the company’s community solar program portfolio, Clean Energy Connection.

The Bay Ranch Renewable Energy Center is built on 650 acres in Bay County. The 74.9 MW facility consists of approximately 220,000 single-axis tracking solar panels.

The Hardeetown Renewable Energy Center is on 750 acres in Levy County. Also 74.9 MW, the development consists of more than 200,000 single-axis tracking solar panels.

The projects employed around 200-300 workers during construction. Along with indirect economic benefits that accompany solar project development, such as increased local spending, the new facilities will also have a positive economic impact on the local community by providing significant tax revenues to the counties they operate in.

“Not only are these new solar sites helping advance Florida’s clean energy transition, but they will also provide real savings to committed program subscribers and additional economic benefits to our communities,” says Melissa Seixas, Duke Energy Florida state president.

Through the Clean Energy Connection program, Duke Energy Florida customers can subscribe to solar power and earn credits toward their electricity bills without having to install or maintain their own equipment.

Continue reading

The signing ceremony for Form Energy’s first gigafactory, announced earlier this year. Image: Office of Governor Jim Justice / State of West Virginia.

Utility Xcel Energy has received a US$20 million grant commitment from VC firm Breakthrough Energy for projects using Form Energy’s iron-air battery, while a sodium ion battery firm has secured bridge financing.

The grant from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, part of Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy, would go towards two 100-hour duration energy storage projects being deployed by Xcel Energy.

Two projects using Form Energy’s iron-air battery, totalling 10MW/1,000MWh each, will receive US$10 million subject to satisfying certain funding conditions.

The projects, announced in January, will be deployed at two retiring coal stations: Sherburne County Generating Station in Becker, Minnesota, and the Comanche Generating Station in Pueblo, Colorado. Xcel is headquartered in Minnesota.

In addition to the grant funding, Xcel intends to use the tax credit incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act to further lower the cost of the iron-air battery projects, which are expected to come online in 2025.

Their total cost has not been revealed but the company has previously claimed its tech can store and dispatch energy up to 10 times more cheaply than lithium-ion, although CEO Mateo Jaramillo has also said it “is not a replacement for lithium-ion”.

Energy-Storage.news has asked Xcel Energy for more details on how much of total project cost the grant will cover, and how the remainder would be financed, and will update this article in due course.

Bob Frenzel, chairman, president and CEO of Xcel Energy, said: “Innovative long-duration energy storage technologies are crucial to achieving 100% carbon-free electricity. This Catalyst grant will accelerate adoption of this promising new technology, which allows us to provide higher percentages of renewable energy while still providing affordable electric service to our customers.”

The projects will allow Xcel to integrate more renewable energy into the grid as it retires all its coal plants by 2030.

Form Energy is investing US$760 million into a plant to produce its battery technology, which oxidises metallic iron to discharge and converts it back into iron to charge.

Sweden-based sodium-ion firm Altris raises US$5 million bridge financing

Sodium-ion technology is often touted as the next battery technology to achieve widespread commercialisation. It is much less energy-dense than lithium-ion but its much cheaper cost of raw materials and its ability to ‘drop in’ to existing lithium-ion manufacturing processes have made it the chemistry of choice for companies across the globe.

Altris has secured 50 million SEK (US$5 million) in bridge financing from its current owners, and appointed a new CEO and CFO in Björn Mårlid and Christer Bergquist, respectively.

The financing will go towards completing its sodium-ion battery manufacturing facility in Uppsala, Sweden, and follows on from a US$10 million Series A in 2022. A Series B is planned for 2023.

Continue reading

Gore Street’s Lower Road battery energy storage system (BESS), which has in the past been one of the top performing assets in the UK market. Image: Gore Street.

Firm Frequency Response (FFR) auction prices in the UK have hit their lowest level since 2019 as market saturation begins to take effect, market analytics platform Modo Energy said.

The firm said the auction during April saw a drop in volume requirements leading to 86% of all bidded volumes, totalling 1.59GW, being rejected in each EFA block (Electricity Forward Agreement) for May delivery.

Perhaps more significantly, the reference price for this month’s tender round is just £5.69/MW/hour, a 16% fall on April and the lowest price since Modo started collecting the data back in January 2020. Prices were above £20/MW/hour from September to November 2022.

“This is the surest sign yet that saturation is really starting to bite,” Modo commercial data analyst Shaniyaa Holness-Mckenzie said.

The smaller volumes meant that small bids did well. The average contract size across all EFA blocks was 12MW and 1MW bids managed to secure the best prices in general, Modo added.

FFR is part a suite of ancillary services in the UK in which batteries make most of their revenues alongside Dynamic Containment (DC) and newer services Dynamic Moderation (DM) and Dynamic Regulation (DR). FFR is due to be retired at the end of October 2023, while the similar Enhanced Frequency Response (EFR) was retired last year.

The saturation of ancillary service markets in the UK and the shift to merchant business models based around trading energy has been expected for some time.

In an interview this time last year, Modo’s Robyn Lucas (chief analytics officer) and Alex Done (head of research) told Energy-Storage.news that they expected UK battery assets to get more of their revenues from merchant in 2022 than in 2021.

However, delays in battery storage projects coming online over 2022 meant this may not have happened as soon as expected. No new grid-scale projects came online in the UK in the four months from April to July 2022 (from Solar Media Market Research’s UK Battery Storage Project Database Report).

The largest player in the market Gresham House revealed in its annual results that trading actually fell as a percentage of revenues, from 11.5% in 2021 to 10.6% in 2022, due to “exceptionally high frequency response markets during the summer” because of said delays. FFR was 27.5% of revenues and DC 48.4%.

A similar question around market saturation of ancillary services is being discussed for the ERCOT, Texas market.

Continue reading

Decom Solar LLC has completed the decommissioning of a 661.96 kW rooftop system for Seyon Management. The solar installation, located atop a warehouse in Watertown, Mass., needed to be removed to facilitate building renovations.

Decom Solar collaborated with Seyon Management to deliver an environmentally friendly, cost-effective and efficient solution for their project. The major construction phase took three weeks, and all significant equipment was repurposed through resale and donation. The company worked with non-profit Let’s Share the Sun Foundation and donated a portion of the equipment, which will supply energy to the Santa Chiara Children’s Center in the Cite Soleil commune in Port au-Prince, Haiti.

“Decom Solar proved to be the perfect partner for us,” says Joe DiRienzo, senior project manager at Seyon Management. “Their expertise in solar decommissioning was evident from our first meeting, and their clear communication and adaptability contributed to one of the smoothest construction projects I’ve ever been a part of.”

To further its commitment to the environment, Decom Solar has partnered with One Tree Planted, a non-profit focused on global reforestation. For this project, Decom Solar donated 1,976 trees to be planted on behalf of Seyon Management.

Continue reading

Construction of an Energy Vault gravity storage project underway in Rudong, China. The company formed a BESS solutions arm a while ago, appointing former Greensmith Energy CEO John Jung to lead it. Image: Energy Vault.

A ‘first of its kind’ microgrid will be installed at a California substation, where it will use a combination of lithium-ion batteries and green hydrogen to provide 48 hours of back up.

Shortly before the end of last month (27 April), the regulatory agency California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved investor-owned utility (IOU) Pacific Gas & Electric’s proposed 8.5MW microgrid project in the state’s famous Napa Valley wine region. It has been described as the first long-term clean energy substation microgrid in PG&E’s service territory.

As regular Energy-Storage.news readers and California energy sector observers will know, the state’s three IOUs sometimes enact public safety power shutoffs (PSPS). In a PSPS event, power lines to communities in areas of high wildfire threat risk are de-energised to prevent them causing or exacerbating a fire situation.

The knock-on effect is that the communities are then without power from the grid, sometimes for days on end or more, rather than a few hours of inconvenience.

One way of mitigating this, which California is exploring, is to put microgrids that can be islanded from the main grid in those communities, typically using solar PV paired with battery storage and some form of diesel or other thermal generation as backup for longer outages.

In this instance, PG&E held a competitive solicitation seeking proposals for a microgrid at its Calistoga substation. The winning bid it picked out came from the battery energy storage system (BESS) arm of Energy Vault, the startup better known for its novel gravity-based energy storage technology.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news at the very beginning of this year as Energy Vault was appointed, the microgrid at Calistoga the firm proposed would be an 8.5MW system capable of discharging 293MWh of energy over 48 hours.

It would do this by pairing a lithium-ion BESS with hydrogen storage tanks and fuel cell technology, with the company dubbing it BH-ESS – battery, hydrogen energy storage system. Energy Vault would own, operate and maintain the long-duration energy storage (LDES) facility over a 10.5-year contract with PG&E, to which the energy storage company would sell dispatchable power from it.

The CPUC noted that this means the microgrid would still require hydrogen fuel to be trucked over to it – it doesn’t feature an electrolyser for creating green hydrogen onsite – which in itself could present safety risks. However, it would certainly reduce the use of a more immediately harmful liquid fuel in the form of diesel, reducing air pollution and improving air quality, the CPUC said.

PG&E already has approval to fund the US$46.3 million cost of the project, while the CPUC’s decision a few days ago includes a requirement for the utility to submit reports on the project detailing costs incurred. PG&E should also inform how the microgrid is performing on a technical level, share lessons learned and also make sure the microgrid’s resources are used during normal conditions on the grid, not just during a PSPS event or other outage.

Some submissions to the CPUC also questioned the use of transporting green hydrogen, rather than electrolysing hydrogen onsite from renewable sources. While the cost is now projected to be lower than original estimates, it will be tied to the cost of liquid hydrogen fuel, the CPUC’s independent Public Advocates Office (PAO) said, which could impact its cost-competitiveness.

PAO said the utility hadn’t proven the microgrid’s technical feasibility but instead passed that responsibility on to Energy Vault, and questioned why the microgrid idea hadn’t been compared to what it called “potential grid hardening alternatives”.  PAO suggested PG&E should be submitting annual reports on the project’s performance too.

Energy supplier Marin Clean Energy, one of California’s community choice aggregators, questioned the use of diesel-burning trucks to bring in the hydrogen, when cleaner alternatives may be available. Marin Clean Energy did however offer its general support for the project overall.

Energy Vault’s energy management system (EMS) will control the microgrid, on which the company hopes to begin construction in the final quarter of 2023, to come online in Q2 2024.   

Continue reading

Left to Right: Dr. Ron Tomer, President of the Manufacturers Association of Israel, Avi Brenmiller, CEO and Chairman of Brenmiller Energy, Benny Biton, Mayor of Dimona, and Dr. Gideon Friedmann, Chief Scientist at the Israel Ministry of Energy inaugurate Brenmiller’s gigafactory in Israel. Image: Business Wire.

Israel-based thermal energy storage firm Brenmiller Energy has inaugurated a factory targeting 4GWh of annual production capacity by the end of 2023, the first such gigafactory anywhere, it claimed.

The company announced the opening of its thermal energy storage gigafactory in Dimona, Israel, yesterday (2 May), saying it will be its primary manufacturing hub. Its production lines are expected to reach full capacity by the end of the year and will be able to produce 4GWh of Brenmiller’s bGen modules annually.

Its bGen solution charges by heating rocks using electrical power, then stores that power at a temperature of 750°C, and discharges by releasing the accumulated heat to heat pressurised water and generate steam, either for electricity or for industrial heating processes.

The gigafactory, which features rooftop solar to power its operations, has been financed through a €7.5 million ($8.2 million) facility agreement with the European Investment Bank (EIB). Thomas Östros, the EIB vice-president responsible for energy, commented:

“The need for energy independence throughout the EU is indisputable. Renewables alone, however, will not solve our energy or climate crisis. Long-duration energy storage is critical to back up renewable intermittency, decarbonise our electric grids and industrial factories, and ensure a secure energy supply. We’re pleased to have provided financing for Brenmiller’s gigafactory, which will manufacture thermal energy storage technologies that help the EU overcome today’s critical energy challenges.”

Avi Brenmiller, founder and CEO at Brenmiller Energy, said: “Unveiling our TES (thermal energy storage) gigafactory marks a pivotal milestone in our company’s history: what started as a family business has grown into a company that can help the global economy’s efforts to decarbonise, and we believe our gigawatt-scale production capacity will allow us to meet growing demand for our solutions from industrial and utility customers.”

The company recently struck a non-binding deal with an unnamed global utility to deploy up to 2GWh of its systems while also deciding to de-list from Israel’s stock exchange and solely retain its Nasdaq listing.

In late 2022, it inaugurated a 24MWh bGen unit at a power plant in Tuscany, Italy, to help the plant reduce start-up times and accelerate load variations, and commissioned a 1MWh unit at a water infrastructure production facility in Brazil a few months earlier.

Continue reading

Taiwan Cement Corporation has awarded more than 400MWh of projects in Taiwan to NHOA. Pictured is a rendering of how one such project could look. Image: NHOA.

Energy storage, e-mobility and infrastructure solutions company NHOA is on the right track to achieve a targeted 10x growth in its business, but will require funds from its parent company to complete the task.

The company, founded in Turin, Italy, in the early years of this century, subsequently owned by French energy major Engie and then acquired by Taiwan Cement Corporation (TCC) in 2021, has just released its unaudited financials for the first quarter of 2023.

Shortly after it changed hands and was rebranded to its new monicker New HOrizons Ahead (NHOA), the company released its ‘10X Masterplan,’ in which it set targets to grow key metrics in its business lines tenfold by 2025.

For its energy storage division, that meant targeting the deployment of 1.7GWh, which is ten times the 170MW the company installed between 2015 and 2021. The NHOA Energy division could grow its revenues almost 20 times over from around €30 million in 2021, to €280 million this year.

Having achieved breakeven EBITDA in 2022, NHOA Energy is on track for €5 million to €10 million EBITDA this year, it said in outlook guidance offered along with Q1 2023 results.

Q1 energy storage sales stood at €33.4 million, a 115% increase from €15.5 million in Q1 2022, with an order backlog worth €252 million, up from €194 million in the same period of last year. However, its order intake for the past 12 months, worth €227 million, was also up a little, from €222 million last year.

NHOA owns and operates assets as well as carrying them out for customers, and currently has 209MW of storage online. Meanwhile a further 1.384GWh of energy storage projects are in construction, with major projects including the 200MW/400MWh Blythe Battery project in Australia for developer Neoen, and a buildout of more than 400MWh in Taiwan for parent company TCC.

It has also grown its pipeline of opportunities to 1.234GWh, an increase of 18% from 1.043GWh at the end of 2022, and is currently shortlisted for five more projects.

Looking back, during 2022, the company had said energy storage accounted for the vast majority of the €165.7 million (US$180 million) revenues it earned, which was a 448% increase from 2021.

However, while the company is therefore largely “outperforming” the Masterplan’s trajectory towards its goals, NHOA – as the company had always said since its acquisition – will require more funding to fuel that growth.

Energy storage business line requires up to €100 million

While NHOA CEO Carlalberto Guglielminotti noted that cash and credit lines are up 44% from the end of last year and are worth in excess of €100 million, TCC also intends to raise €250 million through a five-year Green Convertible Bond issue.

“In light of such financial backing I am thrilled to reiterate, today more than ever, the tireless commitment of NHOA’s teams to accelerate our growth even further towards the outperformance of all 2025 targets set in our Masterplan10x,” Guglielminotti said.

The bond issue would be followed by a Rights Issue in 2028. However, in the event that the TCC board doesn’t approve the issue, a €250 million Rights Issue will instead be held this year.

That said, the funds raised will be shared between NHOA’s different business lines, and Atlante, the company’s fast and ultrafast EV charging network business will require much more of the capital than its energy storage activities.

NHOA said in a presentation to accompany financial results that NHOA Energy needs between €50 million and €100 million to support its continued expansion across the four global continents it is active in.

That includes working capital needs to fulfil its backlog of orders, strengthen its balance sheet and hold equity interest in strategically important projects where NHOA can play a vertically integrated role – parent company TCC owns various other related businesses including battery production in Taiwan.

Atlante on the other hand has a financial need of about €150 million to €200 million to fund its rollout of EV charging solutions in France, Spain and Portugal, on which it is about halfway to reaching its 2025 target, and over 1,000 sites in development, as well as funding working capital to secure equipment for installation in 2024.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 1st Energy Storage Summit Asia, 11-12 July 2023 in Singapore. The event will help give clarity on this nascent, yet quickly growing market, bringing together a community of credible independent generators, policymakers, banks, funds, off-takers and technology providers. For more information, go to the website.

Continue reading

A large-scale solar farm in Israel’s southern Negev Desert region, completed in 2018. Connecting new PV facilities is a challenge, Eitan Parnass said. Image: Belectric.

In an effort to drive the country to deploying more energy storage, the Israeli Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure has announced four large-scale battery storage projects.

The government ministry – renamed from the Ministry of Energy in February to reflect a wider remit – said yesterday (2 May) that it is promoting a programme to construct the four sites in the northern Gilboa mountain range region.

The buildout will total 800MW/3,200MWh, comprising four facilities of 200MW, each with four hours’ storage duration.

Describing it as a “programme of great importance for the energy sector,” the ministry said it represented a first step in planning large-scale energy storage facilities at strategic locations on the grid. Future projects will be built in stages according to the network’s needs, and will leverage different storage technologies.

Israel’s great need for energy storage, is like many other countries’, driven by a requirement to integrate growing shares of renewable energy on the grid. This is exacerbated by Israel’s status as an energy island, despite its small land mass being without interconnection to neighbouring countries and largely needing to be self-sufficient.

As regular readers of Energy-Storage.news will know, Israel’s policy goal of reaching 30% renewable energy by 2030 – roughly equivalent to about 12GW of solar PV, likely to be the go-to renewable energy source in an almost-always sunny part of the world – has been modelled by the national energy regulatory authority, PUA, to need around 2GW/8GWh of energy storage to effectively integrate.

Steps already taken by the country include tenders for large-scale and off-grid solar-plus-storage plants, with a 2020 competitive solicitation leading to awards of contracts for 777MW of solar PV with 3,072MWh of battery storage. A subsequent 2021 round awarded contracts to 609MW of PV and 2.4GWh of energy storage.

More recently, last month the PUA implemented a supplementary tariff for distributed solar PV plants paired with energy storage, aiming to subsidise customers that shift stored solar energy for self-consumption at night-time periods and mitigate grid demand for energy at those times.

The role the 800MW of government-initiated projects in Gilboa will play is somewhat similar, but on a much larger scale. Renewable energy generated in the nearby northern regions of the country will be stored in the battery energy storage system (BESS) facilities, transmitted to urban demand centres at times of peak demand.

The four plants will be built close to an existing national power transmission line, in a region that the ministry said is also close to industrial areas, including some that already exist and others that are in development. There are also plenty of solar PV plants near to the 71 acre site earmarked for the BESS projects.

Energy and infrastructure minister Israel Katz said the projects will be a “first of their kind” for Israel in terms of standalone large-scale storage resources “with a significant capacity,” and represent part of an “overall policy and reform” that the minister is leading in the Knesset.

“Storing the energy in this way will allow us to increase the production of renewable energies, improve the reliability of the electricity supply and stabilize the functioning of the network – steps that will directly contribute to the growth of the economy,” Katz said.

“We are committed to promoting renewable energies and the current move is a significant step towards achieving this goal.”

‘Israel could need 10GWh of storage by 2030’

Commenting on the ongoing push to deploy energy storage to integrate renewables, Eitan Parnass, founder of the Green Energy Association of Israel, said that the requirement is probably more likely closer to 10GWh than 8GWh.

Of the solar PV it needs to arrive at its 30% goal, Israel is still “far away,” Parnass told Energy-Storage.news, with 4.5GW of renewables in total (92% of which is PV), representing 10% of the national energy mix.

Schemes such as the recent PUA tariff for low-voltage distributed PV with storage are aimed at mitigating grid congestion issues which mean it is nearly impossible to connect new rooftop PV systems – excepting residential – Parnass said. Reforms of the grid are also underway but will likely take years to implement, the Green Energy Association director general said.

The ministry is currently also promoting TMA, an outline plan for energy storage facilities, including formulating regulations for planning procedures and permitting. The national outline plan will now be submitted by the National Planning and Construction Council for government approval, the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure said yesterday.

Continue reading

Fred Robinson

BayWa r.e. has secured a $115 million credit facility with global financial services firm Nomura to support the development of utility-scale solar and solar+storage projects in the U.S.

The credit facility will initially support projects totaling 1.1 GW of solar and 188 MWh of battery storage in several states, including North Carolina, Illinois, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Washington.

The projects will be brought online starting in 2024 through 2026.

The credit facility includes a revolving credit facility and letter of credit to provide financing for the expansion of projects across a number of jurisdictions. Nomura was the lead arranger of the credit facility, Skadden acted as counsel for BayWa r.e. in the transaction, and Norton Rose Fulbright represented the lenders.

“We are excited to be partnering with Nomura to deploy clean, reliable energy at a time when there is a critical need for capacity,” says Fred Robinson, CEO at BayWa r.e. Solar Projects LLC. “This credit facility contributes to BayWa r.e.’s strong financial outlook and enables the acceleration of our pipeline growth in key markets supported by the Inflation Reduction Act. We are committed to our ongoing collaboration with like-minded, sustainability-driven partners to develop groundbreaking financing solutions that will accelerate the adoption of clean energy throughout the United States.”

As additional projects are added to the portfolio, the credit facility is expected to be upsized in the coming months.

Continue reading