A render of the 100MW Kwinana BESS NHOA is nearing completion for Synergy in Western Australia. Image: Synergy/NHOA.

NHOA’s energy storage business accounted for the vast majority of the company’s €165.7 million (US$180 million) reported revenues in 2022, a year-on-year growth of 448%.

Reporting its financial results for last year, the Italy-headquartered company said yesterday that €153.6 million revenue was recognised by its energy storage global business line (GBL), which focuses on utility-scale standalone energy storage and solar-plus-storage projects as well as microgrids.

The revenue figures exceed the upper end of the company’s 2022 guidance, which had been in the range of €140 million to €160 million.

Referring to energy storage as NHOA’s “growth engine” as it has done in previous results announcements, the company reported EBITDA for energy storage at over €2 million, alongside an order intake of €240 million and a backlog of €301 million. The company currently has 1.4GWh of energy storage projects in construction and claimed a €1,043 million pipeline of opportunities.  

NHOA, formerly known as Engie EPS before its acquisition and rebranding by Taiwan Cement Corporation (TCC), is also active in the e-mobility and electric vehicle (EV) fast-charge infrastructure spaces.

With the company seeking to expand its presence and capabilities in all its divisions, costs of doing business were high in 2022, including the hiring of new workers and a 285% rise in operating costs.

Overall, the group’s 2022 EBITDA amounted to a €32.9 million loss in 2022, compared to €13.2 million the previous year. Net result was -€52.2 million by the end of last year, compared to -€28.4 million at the end of 2021. Against its €165.7 million total revenue, cost of sales was €150.6 million.

The company also said its net financial position as of the end of the year when it held €4.2 million versus the €74.3 million it held at the end of 2022 was a reflection of investments into the EV fast charge segment as well as “working capital consumed by the Energy Storage GBL”.   

That money helped NHOA progress to get more than 300MWh of battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity commissioned or close to commissioning by the end of 2022, while its BESS assembly plant in Cosio Valtellino, Italy assembled 230MWh of BESS during the year and has since October been producing 45MWh per month (equivalent to 540MWh annual production capacity).

NHOA also touted BESS project wins that happened during the winter, most notably its award of the 200MW/400MWh supply contract to Blyth Battery in South Australia by developer Neoen, as well as projects for parent company TCC in Taiwan and projects in the US.

Projects it currently has under construction include the Kwinana 100MW/200MWh BESS in Western Australia for integrated utility Synergy nearing its commissioning phase and a 107MWh project in Yingde, China, four US projects totalling 78.8MWh. One of its several large-scale Taiwan projects for TCC went into commercial operation recently, and another 311MWh is in installation and approaching commissioning, NHOA said.

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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Jeffrey Peck

iSun Inc., a solar energy and clean mobility infrastructure company, says it has closed five contracts covering 6.5 MW to provide expanded solar energy capabilities at five industrial sites.

The Vermont projects are valued at $5.1 million. They are scheduled to begin this spring and are expected to be completed this and next year.

“In 2023, we are focused on execution and efficiency, and we appreciate the trust and confidence of our customers in our ability to help them achieve their goals in alternative energy initiatives,” says Jeffrey Peck, chairman and CEO of iSun. “This award demonstrates yet again our strong commitment to accelerating the transition to solar energy for customers in New England.”

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Brian Li

SparkCognition, a provider of artificial intelligence software solutions for business, says it has added generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) capabilities to its Renewable Suite. This new feature will help accelerate time to value by delivering actionable insights for their renewable asset performance management solution.

SparkCognition’s GPT, part of the Generative AI Platform for Industrials, leverages large language models to interpret user inputs and return relevant information in a seamlessly intuitive experience. This capability analyzes the performance of wind, solar and storage assets and provides real-time insights to support key operational decisions.

Renewable Suite users can access SparkCognition GPT anywhere in the suite with simple conversational prompts to look for summaries, specific information or interact with various modules. 

“It will improve our efficiency by being able to perform analysis across multiple modules in a single conversational thread, allow the user to focus more on drawing conclusions and making decisions, and ease troubleshooting by incorporating relevant information from OEM manuals and unstructured maintenance data into the context of a specific event,” says Brian Li, staff engineer at AEP Renewables.

SparkCognition GPT allows operators to perform custom data analysis tasks quickly and efficiently and automate the workflow, enabling insight into their renewable energy assets’ performance. 

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Redflow zinc-bromine flow batteries at an off-grid installation in Australia. Image: Redflow.

US energy efficiency and renewables company Ameresco has entered into a “strategic relationship” with Australian flow battery provider Redflow.

Redflow makes flow batteries based on a zinc-bromine electrolyte, following up deployments in markets including Australia, New Zealand and South Africa with its entry into the US, completing a 2MWh project in 2021 at a California bioenergy power plant and signing a master service agreement (MSA) with EPC services firm Black & Veatch to put Redflow on Black & Veatch’s list of approved suppliers.

Ameresco said yesterday (28 March) that through the non-exclusive deal, it plans to use the technology at project and asset installations for customers in the North American and European markets.

It will target medium to long-duration energy storage (LDES) and daily cycling applications, offering Redflow’s flow batteries as part of an integrated solar-plus-storage offering. Ameresco’s projects in the US are for federal agencies such as the military.

While Ameresco’s energy storage projects to date have been done using lithium-ion battery energy storage systems (BESS), including a 2.1GWh three-project portfolio underway for California utility Southern California Edison (SCE), the company has been evaluating flow batteries for some time.

In a February 2021 interview with Energy-Storage.news, Nicole Bulgarino, the company’s executive VP and general manager for its Federal Solutions division, said that Ameresco had been studying flow batteries for projects that require longer discharge periods, as well as for projects in remote locations.

A study the company conducted around that time with the US Department of Defence’s Environmental Security Technology Certification Program compared flow batteries with lithium-ion BESS.

At that point, after modelling but prior to field deployment and testing, the flow batteries “had potential”, but came up short versus lithium on metrics including cost performance and efficiency, Bulgarino said.

Since then, the steep decline in the cost of lithium batteries which had been experienced for around 10 years has halted due to factors including rising demand from the electric vehicle (EV) sector, while supply chain constraints have affected global deployments, including Ameresco’s projects for SCE.

Redflow and Ameresco are working on a 40kWh commercial demonstration system incorporating the zinc-bromine flow batteries to an Ameresco customer installation. The demonstrator will utilise four of Redflow’s batteries, which are in 10kWh units. Redflow launched its third generation of flow batteries in July last year.

In addition to a smaller-scale system for remote microgrids and commercial and industrial (C&I) sites, the pair are also working on a utility-scale version.

The integrated system was described as fire-safe and sustainable, made with abundant and recyclable raw materials as well as being cost-competitive with lithium-ion. Within the US market, the flow batteries will qualify for incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and could be manufactured domestically, earning further adders under those schemes.

While most flow battery providers are focused on vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) tech, using vanadium solution for the electrolyte, Redflow is among a handful commercialising a different electrolyte chemistry tech. Others include ESS Inc’s iron electrolyte flow battery, while recent product launches from Lockheed Martin and Honeywell use electrolytes with as-yet undisclosed chemical compositions.

Shift to non-lithium technologies ‘happening as we speak’

Non-lithium energy storage technologies are likely to carve out a share of the market sooner rather than later, US Department of Energy (DOE) Loan Programs Office head and clean energy industry financier Jigar Shah said in a recent interview with our journal PV Tech Power (vol.34).

“The amount of innovation in the battery space is so high that it is hard to see any of the existing incumbent technologies in their current form having dominant market share in 7-10 years,” Shah said.

One industry dynamic driving change is that EV companies will continue to be the much bigger offtaker of lithium cells, effectively pricing out the BESS market, triggering “a rapid shift away from lithium-ion in the utility sector towards other chemistries, which is happening as we speak,” Shah said, echoing views Energy-Storage.news has heard from representatives of major players in the BESS space including Fluence and Wärtsilä.

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Sembcorp’s recently completed 200MW BESS on Singapore’s Jurong Island. Image: Sembcorp.

Singapore’s Sembcorp has pulled the plug on a solar project in Indonesia featuring battery storage, just a few months after completing work on Southeast Asia’s biggest battery storage project.

Sembcorp made an announcement and a filing with the Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX) on Monday (27 March) to the effect that its joint development agreement (JDA) for the large-scale integrated solar PV and battery storage project in the Batam, Bintan and Karimum region of Indonesia has been terminated.

The engineering company had signed the agreement in October 2021 with utility company PT PN Batam and renewable energy developer PT Trisurya Mitra Bersama (Suryagen). The project would have included 1GW of solar PV generation capacity with a battery energy storage system (BESS) of as-yet unspecified output and capacity.

According to Sembcorp the parties mutually agreed to the JDA’s termination, which it claimed will have no material impact on Sembcorp’s earnings per share or net tangible assets per share for the financial year ending 31 December 2023.

No explanation was given for the Indonesia project termination in the company’s brief statement and Sembcorp representatives did not elaborate further when invited to comment by Energy-Storage.news.

Sembcorp did say however that it remained committed to supporting the ASEAN region’s energy transition with reliable energy supply solutions, and “continues to develop, and is engaged in a number of initiatives, to import energy from the region”.

The project would have been among various initiatives to generate power from renewables outside the small city-state nation of Singapore and bring it in. Singapore lacks the land and grid infrastructure to meet its demand with domestically generated renewable energy.

As regular readers of Energy-Storage.news will know, shortly before the end of last year Sembcorp brought online a 200MW/285MWh BESS project on Singapore’s Jurong Island, holding an official inauguration event a couple of months ago.

Thought to be just the third BESS of over a megawatt installed in the country so far, the system is the largest BESS in Southeast Asia to date and enabled Singapore’s Energy Market Authority – which awarded Sembcorp the project last May – to reach and exceed the national 200MWh energy storage deployment target for 2025 early. In order to meet strict deadlines, the Jurong Island BESS was brought online in just six months, versus the typical 15-18 month lead time.

In an article published late last year in our quarterly journal PV Tech Power (Vol.33), the Southeast Asia region is seeing a great rise in investment and interest in energy storage, despite various challenges remaining such as a lack of regulatory frameworks.

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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At 300MW/450MWh, the Victorian Big Battery is Australia’s largest BESS project to date. Image: Victoria State government.

Australia’s national science agency CSIRO has said the country needs to invest into multiple different energy storage technologies at massive scale to achieve its transition to renewable energy.

A new roadmap published today by government agency Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) highlighted that a 10-14x increase in energy storage capacity will be needed in the National Electricity Market (NEM) in the years 2025 and 2030. Australia is targeting net zero emissions by 2050.

The 200-page Renewable Energy Storage Roadmap discusses how storage can facilitate the uptake of renewable energy, enhance stability and reliability of the grid, and support industries. To do so at the required scale will mean reliance on diverse technologies beyond the accepted duo of lithium-ion battery storage and pumped hydro, it said.

“Over the long-term storage will accelerate the integration of renewables, enhancing grid stability and reliability, and supporting decarbonisation of industries. There is no silver bullet for reaching net zero so we need multiple shots on goal, like from renewables, batteries, hydrogen, thermal storage, pumped hydro, sustainable aviation fuels and a host of new science-driven technologies,” CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall said today.

Colleague Dietmar Tourbier noted that while battery energy storage system (BESS) technology may be the “best option” for local and short-duration electricity storage, thermal or heat storage such as steam may be a better fit for heat intensive industries, for example.

While both government and industry have realised that storage of energy has a major role to play, there are still “significant knowledge gaps”, while the acceleration of tech commercialisation and scale-up across a “diverse portfolio of energy storage technologies” will require co-investment, Tourbier, CSIRO’s director of energy said.

By 2050, the NEM and Western Australia energy markets will be dominated by utility and distributed solar PV and wind as well as dispatchable energy storage resources, with black and brown coal and event peaking gas plants almost or entirely off the systems.

CSIRO’s roadmap builds on the modelling and assumptions of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which has identified a need for 44-96GW/550-950GWh of dispatchable storage in the NEM and 12-17GW/74-96GWh in Western Australia, the other major connected energy market, by the half-Century mark.

In every scenario modelled, there is no getting away from the requirements for energy storage to greatly increase. However one of the major challenges ahead is the lack of bankable mature energy storage technologies beyond lithium-ion and pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) on the market today.

“Reaching net zero is a wicked challenge, we need a robust pipeline of projects that use diverse technologies supported by industry, government, research and community stakeholders to ensure that no industry and no Australian is left behind,” CSIRO CEO Larry Marshall said.

A February report by the AEMO came to a similar conclusion, identifying the “urgent need” for investment in long-duration energy storage (LDES) technologies as well as into new generation resources and transmission infrastructure

The CSIRO ‘Renewable energy storage roadmap’ can be downloaded here.

AU$16.9 billion opportunity for battery value chain by 2030

Marshall identified that a combination of a long-term view and collaboration across industry and with government will be needed to get there. The roadmap was developed with input from government and more than 50 industry organisations.

It also highlights that the role the energy storage industry can play in reaching net zero is not just a social, technical and economic challenge, but also represents opportunities that can be captured.

That resonates with the thrust of another recently published report, ‘Charging ahead: Australia’s battery powered future,’ which was commissioned by the Future Battery Industries Cooperative Research Centre (FBICRC).

Produced by consultancy Accenture, the report found that there is an opportunity for the Australian battery industry to create AU$16.9 billion (US$11.32 billion) economic value by 2030. This will however require decisive action from the likes of government, industry and academic institutions through the country’s National Battery Strategy, it said.

Another Accenture-prepared report, for the government of Queensland, found that that Australian state’s best opportunities for creating a vertically integrated battery value chain lie in the area of vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) technologies.

With Queensland rich in the metal-based electrolyte’s raw materials, the government has already pushed ahead with supporting companies in that sector and committed to the construction of a VRFB electrolyte production plant – in addition to supporting downstream lithium-ion BESS and PHES developments.

The full FBICRC ‘Charging ahead’ report was published earlier this month and can be found here.

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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Laura Zapata

Silicon Ranch, an independent power producer and a community-focused renewable energy company, the Paris Board of Public Utilities (Paris BPU) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) have completed a 6.75 MW AC solar facility in Puryear, Tenn. This solar facility will generate enough renewable, cost-effective energy to power approximately 1,000 homes annually.

The Paris Solar Farm – Puryear was developed as part of TVA’s Generation Flexibility Program. The program is designed to encourage local power companies to develop distributed generation facilities and provide local solutions to the renewable needs of customers.

“This new solar farm is a testament to how carbon solutions can be used to bring big brands and local power companies together to benefit a community for the long-term at scale,” says Laura Zapata, CEO and co-founder of Clearloop. “Rivian and Paris BPU are setting a clear example for other communities on how mutual partnership can benefit parts of the country that can benefit the most by aligning decarbonization and economic opportunity.” 

Silicon Ranch will generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in new tax revenue for the county over the life of the project which will help support infrastructure and other community-identified priorities, while requiring little to no county services in return.

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Panellists on the ‘What is Currently the Biggest Barrier to Deploying Energy Storage in the US?’ opening panel discussion at the Energy Storage Summit USA today. Image: Solar Media.

Adapting transmission infrastructure and accurately valuing energy storage are the major challenges to deployments in the US today, said panellists on the Keynote discussion at Energy Storage Summit USA today.

The two-day event opened with a positive Keynote talk about the bright future of energy storage, from Andy Berke, administrator of the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), discussing the benefits and drivers of storage today.

The following opening panel session ‘What is Currently the Biggest Barrier to Deploying Energy Storage in the US?’ then brought the tough realities of the sector’s expansion back to the fore.

Energy transmission infrastructure is the biggest barrier to storage deployments according to Ken Webre, COO of solar and storage EPC solutions firm SunGrid. “It’s growing 2% and storage is growing 100 times that,” he said.

That was concurred by Aubrey Johnson, VP for System Planning & Competitive Transmission, at grid operator MISO, and Erika Bierschbach, VP of Energy Market Operations & Resource Planning at utility Austin Energy.

MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator) is responsible for overseeing the electrical grid and associated wholesale markets across 15 US states and the Canadian province of Manitoba.

Batteries can help mitigate some of the issues around bringing new resources but they do add load too, which is a challenge, Johnson added. MISO has around 600MW of storage across its system today, and 32GW standalone and 15/16GW of co-located storage in its interconnection queue, he said.

Kevin Lynn, Director of Grid Modernization, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office at the US Department of Energy, said that making sure all stakeholders recognised the full suite of services that storage can provide is a challenge.

Later in the discussion Bierschbach then said it was hard to justify the cost of battery storage given the value it is providing right now. This is particularly true for smaller projects distributed across its network, she added, and particularly when thinking about long-term value, considering how quickly the sector is evolving.

Regarding value, it will be more and more determined by location-specific benefits, and the timeshifting, capacity and transmission infrastructure investment deferral storage provides, said Will McNamara, Senior Policy Analyst for Energy Storage at Sandia National Laboratories.

The concept of standardisation came up a few times. However, standardisation does not mean one solution fits all, but is more about consistency about how we value storage and around policy, said McNamara. Using the example of mandated energy storage procurement targets, he pointed out that not all states needed to use this route.

The panel was moderated by Helen Kou, Senior Associate, Energy Storage, BloombergNEF.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media is hosting the 5th Energy Storage Summit USA, 28-29 March 2023 in Austin, Texas. Featuring a packed programme of panels, presentations and fireside chats from industry leaders focusing on accelerating the market for energy storage across the country. For more information, go to the website.

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EnerVenue’s energy storage system solution. Image: EnerVenue.

Metal-hydrogen battery company EnerVenue will open a manufacturing factory with a 1GWh annual capacity in Kentucky expected to begin production by the end of the year.

The company expects to invest upwards of US$1 billion to expand to more than 20GWh of annual manufacturing capacity across its domestic manufacturing sites in subsequent phases.

Located in Shelby County, the one-million-square-foot facility will be manufacturing the company’s ‘Energy Storage Vessels’ – for which it recently launched its second generation – with all aspects of design and process validation, manufacturing and testing performed onsite.

The company continues to increase its customer orders and currently has 7GWh of commitments, up from the 5GWh the company announced in July 2022. Among its customers are Pine Gate Renewables, a 250MWh supply deal with Nicon Industries’ Green Energy Renewable Solutions over the next three years, and Sonnell Power Solutions.

As noted in previous coverage on this site, the technology’s advantages include the ability to operate in ambient temperatures from -40°C to 60°C for a 30-year lifespan or roughly 30,000 cycles without degradation and at charge and discharge rates from C/10+ to 5C. It can also cost-effectively provide storage durations between 2 and 12 hours, EnerVenue claims.

“As customer interest in EnerVenue’s storage technology soars, we’re excited to significantly scale battery production with our new state-of-the-art gigafactory in Shelby County,” said Jorg Heinemann, CEO, EnerVenue.

“Following a nationwide vetting process, Kentucky emerged as the ideal fit to build our new facility. The state and county governments were committed to bringing manufacturing and clean energy jobs to the region, and we look forward to working with them as we build out operations.”

The technology for which the company is building a 1GWh factory in Kentucky was originally developed for use in space and brought down to earth and readied for mass production. Last year, EnerVenue’s CEO Jorg Heinemann positioned its nickel-hydrogen batteries as a simpler, safer and more versatile alternative to lithium-ion in a recent interview with Energy-Storage.news.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 5th Energy Storage Summit USA, 28-29 March 2023 in Austin, Texas. Featuring a packed programme of panels, presentations and fireside chats from industry leaders focusing on accelerating the market for energy storage across the country. For more information, go to the website.

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Bryen Alperin

Summit Ridge Energy (SRE), a commercial solar company, says it has secured a $67 million tax equity commitment from Foss & Company, an institutional investment fund sponsor. The partnership will fund more than 50 MW DC of community solar projects in Maine and Illinois.

The funding will support a development pipeline of 13 projects to provide residential and commercial subscribers with clean energy and an opportunity to support the local renewable economy.

This latest funding builds on the relationships between SRE and Foss & Company. Together, they have closed $122 million in tax equity commitments in two years. SRE first partnered with Foss & Company in April 2021, securing a $55 million tax equity commitment that funded 73 MW of solar projects that achieved commercial operations in late 2021.

This investment utilizes the Inflation Reduction Act’s Qualified Advanced Energy Project Credit program. Once the rulemaking for low and moderate Income community incentives and domestic content requirements program is finalized, the firms expect to expand their partnership and make renewable energy more accessible, both in underserved and traditional energy communities. 

“In addition to targeting robust cash flow and economic returns for our investors, this portfolio is expected to increase access to low-cost clean energy for thousands of families and small businesses in Illinois and Maine,” says Bryen Alperin, managing director, Foss & Company. “This investment will allow us to continue building upon our current partnership with SRE, as well as advance our long-term mission of supporting a renewable energy future for all.”

SRE started construction on the portfolio in early 2023 and expects the projects to achieve commercial operations in 2024. Once operational, the projects will generate clean power and energy savings for residential and commercial customers across six utility service territories. Commercial customers include small, medium and large businesses who will remotely subscribe to the community solar projects.

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