Joe Buckler

Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises Inc. says its subsidiary Babcock & Wilcox Solar Energy Inc. has been awarded contracts totaling more than $15 million by Summit Ridge Energy LLC (SRE), a commercial solar company in the U.S., to engineer, procure and construct five community solar power installations in Illinois.

B&W will also manage subcontractors, site coordination and supervision and the electrical tie-ins to the grid. The projects, totaling approximately 15 MW, are scheduled for completion in 2023.

This is the second set of contracts awarded to B&W by SRE. In August 2022, B&W was awarded contracts totaling more than $20 million to build seven photovoltaic solar farms.

“The market for community solar projects in the U.S. is growing substantially thanks to high demand for affordable, clean energy, as well as state and federal incentives for renewable energy, including for solar power,” says Joe Buckler, B&W senior vice president, clean energy. “In particular, the recently signed U.S. Inflation Reduction Act includes provisions for all types of solar projects, including community solar, that are driving increased interest in development.”

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Manish Nayar

OYA Renewables, an energy transition solutions platform, says it has secured backing from City National Bank (CNB), a wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada – with a $27.1 million long-term loan facility. 

In addition to this, OYA also received funding from Greenprint, the tax equity investor for the four projects, as the projects reached the substantial completion milestone.

“As our community solar project pipeline continues to see significant growth within New York State and beyond, having robust financial backing from CNB allows us to focus our attention squarely on efficient and effective project execution,” says Manish Nayar, chairman and founder of OYA Renewables. 

The funds from CNB and Greenprint were used to complete the term conversion of the four projects.

The 6.7 MW DC solar farm on Robinson Road in Jefferson County, N.Y., is expected to generate approximately 10,490,000 kWh annually, the equivalent of offsetting an estimated 7,400 metric tons of carbon and providing enough clean energy to power over 1,400 households annually.

The 6.8 MW DC solar farm on State Route 122 in Franklin County, N.Y., is expected to generate approximately 10,330,000 kWh annually, the equivalent of offsetting an estimated 7,300 metric tons of carbon and providing enough clean energy to power over 1,400 households annually.

The 4.6 MW DC solar farm in Pulaski, Oswego County, N.Y., is expected to generate approximately 7,626,197 kWh annually, the equivalent of offsetting an estimated 5,400 metric tons of carbon and providing enough clean energy to power over 1,000 households annually.

The 6.7 MW DC solar farm on Wayside in Jefferson County, N.Y., is expected to generate approximately 10,647,000 kWh annually, the equivalent of offsetting an estimated 7,500 metric tons of carbon and providing enough clean energy to power over 1,400 households annually.

OYA has five additional New York community solar projects expected to reach commercial operation by mid-2023, adding to its pipeline that already exceeds 600 MW in the state.

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Key Capture Energy’s 20 MW project KCE NY1, completed in 2019, was the state’s first grid-scale BESS project and has been one of the few to benefit from the original NYSERDA Market Acceleration Bridge Incentive. Image: Key Capture Energy.

The New York Public Service Commission (PSC) has given the state’s Joint Utilities until the end of 2028 to put in place large-scale energy storage resources, extending a previous 2025 deadline.

The PSC said earlier this month that in addition to the extension on the required in-service date, contracts for energy storage procured by the utilities can now have a maximum 15-year term, rather than the 10 years previously set.

Through legislation put in place in 2018, six utilities across the state had been each handed a mandate to procure megawatts of energy storage. New York at that time had in place a 3,000MW by 2030 storage target, which has since been doubled to 6,000MW. That figure correlates to 20% of peak load forecasted for the New York grid by that time, putting energy storage at the heart of the state’s energy transition.

There has been some concern around the energy storage industry and clean energy advocates that utilities had been slow to act on this responsibility, analyst Vanessa Witte at Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables told Energy-Storage.news in a recent interview.

For instance Con Edison, one of those utilities, was handed a 300MW target through the state’s first Energy Storage Roadmap, created by public agencies NYSERDA and the Department of Public Service. It hasn’t fulfilled that procurement yet, and there was “definitely frustration” from developers that it hadn’t been done, Witte said.

“I think there’s like a lot of frustration from the developers that Con Ed in particular and some of the other utilities are not procuring a lot of volumes. There’s definitely frustration over Con Ed not procuring their 300MW and needing an extension. 300MW isn’t an insanely large number,” Witte said.

Although Con Edison has put out some requests for proposals (RFPs), Witte has had feedback from developer sources that “whatever price Con Ed wants to pay is essentially not reflective of market price”. Some sources Energy-Storage.news spoke with at the utility said that their teams were working hard to put that right.

As law firm Foley & Lardner pointed out in a corporate blog post on the recent extension, the 31 December 2025 service date was itself an extension from an April 2021 deadline that had already been pushed out.

Stumbles after Bridge Incentive

The PSC acknowledged that out of the 350MW utilities are expected to have procured by now, just 120MW of contracts have been executed. These have received state investment of half a billion dollars, but at the same time, a US$350 million scheme called the Market Acceleration Bridge Incentive Program introduced in the Roadmap has paid out less than half its allotted funds.

That programme aimed at accelerating development of energy storage in New York at utility-scale, or ‘bulk storage’ facilities of over 5MW as it was defined, non-residential commercial and industrial (C&I) or community-scale (‘retail storage’), and residential.

Its impact on stimulating the bulk segment was limited, but it has set up the retail storage segment nicely, Dr William Acker, executive director of the NY-BEST trade and technology group, said in a recent interview.

The successor Roadmap 2.0, published just before the end of last year, proposed a new solicitation programme, called the Index Storage Credit, to allow NYSERDA to contract for bulk storage through competitive solicitations.

It is designed, Acker said, to guarantee some revenue certainty to developers and investors while also derisking the investment of public money; storage assets are paid the difference between a strike price bid in reverse auctions and a reference price based on expected market revenues set by the state.

That could come into place in around a year’s time pending regulatory approval and any amendments along the way.

Along with growing demand for storage to integrate renewables and clean energy like offshore wind growth and rising demand for electric vehicles in New York, and big picture headwinds like the influence of the Inflation Reduction Act, the state will see a robust grid-scale energy storage market in place by around 2025, according to CEO Jeff Bishop of energy storage developer Key Capture Energy.

Bishop and fellow developer Kelly Sarber of Strategic Management Group were interviewed, along with Acker and Witte, for an article on New York’s energy storage market in the newest edition of our quarterly journal PV Tech Power (vol.34).

The first wave of 2018 procurements had not gone as smoothly or quickly as anyone hoped, and while there were mitigating circumstances to that, not least of all the COVID19 pandemic and supply chain constraints, but Roadmap 2.0’s Index Storage Credit and other frameworks are likely to change that.

On that, all of the interviewees were in agreement. However there was also acknowledgement that in order to arrive at the 2030 target of 6GW in time, the state – and the industry and its stakeholders and partners, not least of all the utilities – must act fast.  

Read the feature article ‘Hunting the ‘missing money’ in New York’s energy storage market’, in PV Tech Power (vol.34), by subscribing to the journal here, or you can read it free as part of a PV Tech Premium subscription. Every edition of PV Tech Power includes ‘Storage & Smart Power’ a dedicated section contributed by the Energy-Storage.news team.

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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A ceiling-based fire sprinkler system. Image: Brandon Leon / WikiCommons

The second high-profile battery storage failure due to a faulty sprinkler system could mark the beginnings of exclusions from insurance policies if certain providers develop a negative track record, a source said.

Sprinkler systems being activated when they shouldn’t have been responsible for battery failures at two major battery storage projects in California recently: Terra-Gen’s Valley Center and Vistra’s Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility, the latter the largest project in the world which was taken out of service for months as a result.

While it’s still early days, a source working in the battery storage insurance sector said that these kind of incidents are likely to come up more and more as deployments grow, and that insurance policies could start to take account of them in future.

“If a certain manufacturer or EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) contractor has developed a negative track record with any part of their equipment – in this case sprinkler systems but we could just easily be talking about blades on wind turbines or inverters at a solar facility – then those will start finding their way into exclusions in insurance policies,” they said.

“You have to disclose all your equipment and who your EPC is, and if someone develops a bad enough track record the insurer will say I don’t think I want to insure this policy. And if I do, I’m putting this specific exclusion in. But those aren’t standard and a client will want to avoid those situations if they can.”

“So I would say that’s not the position at the moment, it’s so far so good, but watch this space. We’re very much at the embryonic stage of mass scale deployment and as more and more projects are deployed, just as with wind and solar, these things will start to crop up.”

As Energy-Storage.news wrote recently, some in the sector say that battery insurance costs are generally falling as insurers better understand the risks involved.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 5th Energy Storage Summit USA next week on 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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Energy-Storage.news proudly presents our webinar with IHI Terrasun, where we hear ‘What experts think you should know about UL9540 codes and standards for battery storage’.

With the growth of energy storage, standards for testing of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) have been evolving also.

The presentation will feature experts in the field who perform testing and certification work at different stages, including in the design of technical standards for testing and in the lab to verify testing.

The webinar covers:

The latest changes to the UL9540 Codes and Standards and how those changes apply to large-scale and distributed generation energy storage projects in the design phase, in testing and for field certification.

How to safeguard battery energy storage systems to ensure they meet the requirements for fire and explosion protection. 

An overview of UL9540A testing.

A discussion on how test results are utilised.

Common issues related to the design of energy storage safety systems.

Speakers in this webinar:

Larry Kane, VP of engineering and projects, IHI Terrasun

Carrie Kaplan, energy storage safety practice lead, DNV

Mark Kellenberger, senior engineer, DNV

Steve Douglas, senior technical codes specialist, QPS

Moderator:

Andy Colthorpe, Editor, Energy-Storage.news

[embedded content]

You can also access the recording for ‘What experts think you should know about UL9540 codes and standards for battery storage’ on-demand on the site and receive presentation slide deck (registration required), at the link here.

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Donkin coal mine, Nova Scotia, which closed in 2020. Image: Morien Resources.

The government of Nova Scotia, Canada, has made amendments to the province’s Electricity Act with the view to accelerating the deployment of energy storage.

The amendments were introduced on Wednesday (22 March) and announced by Nova Scotia’s minister of natural resources and renewables, Tory Rushton. Under the changes, Rushton’s department will be able to direct utilities to hold competitive procurements for energy storage resources.

“We need to accelerate the use of battery storage in Nova Scotia to help us get off coal and meet our renewable electricity targets. These amendments encourage innovation and early adoption of battery technology in the province,” Rushton said.

The province still relies heavily on coal, with about half of its electricity coming from the fossil fuel, and is its single biggest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Its renewable electricity policy target meanwhile is 80% by 2030.

Vertically integrated energy company Nova Scotia Power, which is government-owned, is currently the sole entity permitted to own energy storage solutions like large-scale battery storage, with the amendments to the act enabling the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables to open up requests for proposals (RfPs) to others.

Elsewhere, the provincial government has also changed the Act to allow the department to directly issue contracts for energy storage projects that can be implemented quickly, using those projects to further identify the optimal role for energy storage in Nova Scotia’s electricity system.

Rushton’s amendment, Bill 264, can be viewed here.

Industry groups quick to welcome changes

Trade association Energy Storage Canada said the changes would bring “new momentum” for storage projects, noting that the day after minister Rushton announced them, funding for various clean energy initiatives including the development of a strategy around energy storage procurement and contracting were included in the province’s budget for the fiscal year 2023-2024 as tabled in Legislature.

Energy Storage Canada executive director Justin Rangooni said Nova Scotia’s renewable energy targets and coal phase-out are achievable, “but only if the right amount of energy storage is in place well in advance of this deadline”.

“This new legislation and funding sends the right signal to industry to accelerate investment in their projects and partnerships, and to prepare them for commercial operation,” Rangooni said in a statement sent to Energy-Storage.news.

The energy storage group commissioned a report last year which set out a trajectory for Canada to achieve its target of having a net zero electricity grid by 2035 through leveraging between 8GW and 12GW of energy storage resources. Justin Rangooni blogged for this site about the report a few months ago.

Meanwhile, Canada is expected to soon introduce a tax credit similar to the US’ investment tax credit (ITC) scheme to incentivise investments in energy storage.

The Canadian Renewable Energy Association (CanREA) also welcomed the Nova Scotia legislative changes this week, after having “long advocated for the deployment of energy storage in Nova Scotia to help achieve the province’s net zero targets,” CanREA director for Atlantic Canada, Jean Habel said.

“I am pleased to see the positive steps Nova Scotia is taking toward enacting policies that will attract renewable energy investment to Canada,” Habel said.

“This move will encourage innovation and the early adoption of battery technology in the province and bolster the energy-storage sector, creating job opportunities for Nova Scotians.”

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Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash

Recently, CHINT Astronergy won the bid for a 902 MW Vista Alegre photovoltaic power plant project of Atlas Renewable Energy in Brazil, and will supply 454 MW of ASTRO N modules. 

The ASTRO N series modules are the latest products of CHINT Astronergy’s focus on the development trend of N-type TOPCon cell technology. Since its release in April 2022, the product has left footprints across the globe. The Vista Alegre photovoltaic project is located in the state of Minas Geras in southeastern Brazil, which has the most cities in Brazil and a high energy consumption.

Brazil has an average annual sunshine duration of over 3,000 hours, and 80% of its territory is in tropical regions. The hot climate is highly compatible with the ASTRO N series photovoltaic modules.

The ASTRO N series modules are based on N-type TOPCon cell technology, combining multiple technologies such as N-type large silicon wafers, high-reliability packaging, super non-destructive laser cutting, multi-busbar and half-cell design, and optimized frames and double-layer high-transparency glass with a module efficiency of up to 22%.

In addition to higher efficiency and power, the ASTRO N series modules also have a lower temperature coefficient than other modules. This means that for every degree increase in temperature, compared with conventional PERC modules, the power loss of ASTRO N decreases by 0.06%, which will bring higher power generation efficiency in high-temperature environments.

The Vista Alegre project is the tenth large-scale power station project that CHINT Astronergy has collaborated on with Atlas.

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EDF’s Desert Harvest solar projects, also in Riverside County, started commercial operations in December 2020. Image: EDF Renewables North America.

EDF Renewables North America has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with the Southern California Public Power Authority (SCPPA) for its 117MW solar PV project in Riverside County.

The Sapphire Solar project is set to come online by the end of 2026 and will supply power to the cities of Anaheim, Pasadena and Vernon through their participation in SCPPA. The agreement also contains an option for SCPPA to access a 236MWh battery energy storage system.

“Sapphire Solar will supply 117 MWac of solar capacity and a 59MWac/236 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) to our growing renewable and energy storage resource mix,” said Michael Webster, executive director of SCPPA. “This project will help our Participating SCPPA Members meet and exceed renewable energy and resource adequacy requirements, while at the same time minimising costs and maintaining reliability.”

EDF renewables – a subsidiary of France’s state-owned EDF Group – has developed over 16GW of solar, storage and wind projects in the US. It recently signed a virtual PPA with McDonald’s for its 332MW Texas solar facility.

In California, the company connected a 475MW solar-plus-storage project to the grid last August, located on public land. The Sapphire Solar project will be situated on private land.

Riverside County also hosts EDF Renewables’ Desert Harvest I solar project which became operational in 2020. Solar plays a big role in California’s energy generation and transition framework, and will have to continue being installed at record rates if the state is to meet its targets over the next quarter-century.

This story first appeared on PV Tech.

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Nicola Lanzetta

The Malvezzi Solar Park is now operational in Poggio Renatico, Italy, in the province of Ferrara (Emilia-Romagna), thanks to the online crowdfunding initiative Scelta Rinnovabile (Renewable Choice) promoted by Enel Green Power.

The opening ceremony of the new plant, which will support the country’s energy transition with a capacity of around 17 MW, was attended by Stefano Bonaccini, president of the Emilia-Romagna Regional Government, Nicola Lanzetta, director of Italy at Enel Group, and Daniele Garuti, mayor of Poggio Renatico.

The solar farm consists of more than 30,000 modules. It will produce approximately 25 GWh each year, making it possible to avoid the annual emissions of 11,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and the consumption of 5.4 million cubic meters of gas, replacing it with locally produced renewable energy. 

The system is made up of four contiguous sections and features bifacial modules that absorb energy from both sides of the solar panel, which are mounted on solar trackers that follow the movement of the sun, thereby optimizing energy production.

Launched in October 2021 and aimed at getting local communities involved in developing green energy in the areas where new renewable energy plants are being built, the Scelta Rinnovabile program has attracted massive support, with a large number of residents of Poggio Renatico taking part in the online fundraising campaign. 

Those who participated were initially asked to freely choose how much they wanted to invest, according to their preferences, and benefited from a rate of return on financing plus repayment of invested capital. The fundraising campaign to build the photovoltaic power plant in this municipality in the Emilia-Romagna region was later extended to all citizens across the country and ended successfully as the target was met within just a few hours.

“The increasing use of renewables is a strategic lever for Italy’s independence and energy security, in addition to benefiting the environment and the local areas,” says Nicola Lanzetta, director of Italy at Enel Group. “We have a tangible example of this here in Poggio Renatico, through the Scelta Rinnovabile initiative, citizens had the opportunity to actively contribute to the construction of the new plant and to play a part in the energy transition.”

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Illustration of a solar-plus-storage power plant with LG ES BESS equipment. Image: LG Energy Solution.

LG Energy Solution will build a new battery cell factory in the US with 43GWh annual manufacturing capacity, including 16GWh dedicated to the stationary energy storage market.

The South Korea-headquartered company said this morning that it will invest KRW7.2 trillion (US$5.5 billion) into the production plant in Queen Creek, Arizona.

Scheduled to break ground this year, the complex will feature twin production facilities, one for cylindrical 2170 battery cells targeting the electric vehicle (EV) sector with 27GWh annual production capacity, the other making lithium iron phosphate (LFP) pouch cells for energy storage systems (ESS).

According to LG Energy Solution (LG ES), the LFP production line would be the “first ESS-exclusive battery production facility in the world” and is expected to begin production in 2026, a year after the expected in-service date of the EV battery-making portion of the Arizona factory.

However, at the beginning of this week, another manufacturer, Pomega Energy Storage Technologies broke ground on what it said will be the US’ first dedicated factory for ESS-specific LFP cells, in South Carolina.

Given that that plant is expected to come online next year, it will be ahead of LG ES’ plan in that respect, albeit the Pomega plant’s annual production capacity will be much smaller at 3GWh.

Pomega was established late last year as a subsidiary of Turkish company Kontrolmatik Technologies, a vertically integrated manufacturer of battery cells and battery energy storage system (BESS) solutions.

At the time of its establishment last November, Kontrolmatik said that Pomega expected to receive more than US$900 million in incentives linked to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). While the plant had been planned even before the IRA was passed, when the legislation became law it prompted an increase in the planned annual output by 50% from 2GWh.

What is certainly not disputed is that the IRA appears to have put the rocket boosters onto the US’ ambitions to establish a domestic battery value chain, particularly in battery cell manufacturing.

While not perhaps purely dedicated to the ESS sector, other large-scale production plants that will make LFP cells for battery storage as well as EVs are on the way, with US startups Our Next Energy and American Battery Factory among those with ambitions in that regard, as well as KORE Power, which is a little further ahead in its plans for a 12GWh plant. In fact, KORE and American Battery Factory’s chosen sites are also in Arizona.

LG ES too said that the Inflation Reduction Act was a key factor in its own Arizona plant’s business case, as well as allowing the company to bring production much closer to the expected demand for batteries for mobility and stationary applications and allow it to build closer relationships with end-customers. The ESS portion of the plant represents KRW3 trillion of its planned investment there.

The company also has its own BESS solutions company, LG ES Vertech, and is thought to be pursuing a vertical integration strategy since its acquisition of energy storage system integrator NEC Energy Solutions a while back.

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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