SEG Solar’s PV module manufacturing plant in Texas

SEG Solar says it has closed on the acquisition of a Houston manufacturing facility capable of producing more than 2 GW of photovoltaic modules.

The plant consists of approximately 145,000 square feet of manufacturing and warehouse space and 16,000 square feet of office space. The facility will be equipped with three production lines that will allow SEG to produce both TOPCON and high-efficiency N-type PV modules with 182 mm or 210 mm solar cells. SEG intends to source some components for the modules produced at the factory from local suppliers.

Production at the facility is expected to begin in Q1 2024.

SEG’s aggregate total investment in the facility is expected to reach over $60 million, including equipment and facility improvements. SEG will begin to move its global headquarters and administrative support functions to the facility before the end of 2023. The plant is expected to create as many as 500 new jobs in the Houston area.

“SEG is excited to establish a manufacturing base in Texas and is looking forward to serving the U.S. market with more domestic production,” says Michael Eden, SEG’s vice president and CLO. “This facility will help to sustain low-carbon, ecocentric energy independence in the U.S. for future generations. “

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The Department of Energy Loan Programs Office director Jigar Shah. Image: Miljøstiftelsen Zero/CC.

The US is now taking the stance on climate change its European counterparts have been demanding for years, the Department of Energy’s Jigar Shah told Energy-Storage.news in a wide-ranging interview.

The Inflation Reduction Act and its US$369 billion package of support and incentives for the US’ cleanenergy industry has already had a huge impact on the market just six months on from its passing.

As director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) with responsibility for up to US$100 billion in loans and more in other forms of support, Shah is one of the senior figures in enabling the US’ scale-up of its clean energy technology sectors.

This is an extract of an interview article with Shah which appeared in Vol.34 of PV Tech Power, Solar Media’s quarterly technical journal for the downstream solar industry. Every edition includes ‘Storage & Smart Power,’ a dedicated section contributed by the team at Energy-Storage.news.

Response to European policymakers’ complaints

In light of the Inflation Reduction Act and the uptick in US investment it has spurred, senior European policymakers called in late 2022 for immediate action to prevent an outflow of investment from its battery ecosystem, with some saying it should have gone as far as filing a complaint about the Act with the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Those calls resulted in Europe’s response, its Green Industrial Plan, revealed in February 2023.

Shah’s view on this minor war of words is clear: “Several years ago the European Union was demanding that the US get in the game and be more aggressive on climate change. Now that we’re being more aggressive, people might not be used to that.”

“The US has been in the innovation business on climate change for years but now it’s firmly in the commercialisation business, and that is only a good thing.”

US$100 billion-plus in loan requests

The LPO, which Shah has headed up since March 2021, had at last count US$120 billion in loan requests covering all energy sectors with ‘Advanced Vehicles & Components’ (including battery production) the the biggest single sector at US$20-30 billion, based on LPO infographics.

This shows how much emphasis is being placed on the battery sector and the EV market that is driving it. Shah says that the country is already on track to achieve its stated goals here.

“It’s now a foregone conclusion that we will achieve this administration’s goal of 50% of vehicles being EVs by 2030. We’ve counted at least 800GWh of battery manufacturing being announced which ishow much you need to hit that target. The trends started before my time in office but have certainly ramped up in the last few years,” he said.

When it comes to circularity of the lithium-ion supply chain, recycling appears to be much further ahead than re-use, i.e. second life, from the standpoint of coming to the LPO for loans to commercialise. Although Shah is keen to emphasise the department has no preference.

“Battery recycling is represented in our loan requests. The vast majority of second life companies that we’ve talked to are still in the beta testing phase, and coming to us is really the last step of commercialisation,” he said.

“What’s important to highlight is that the US government, unlike other governments, does not favour any particular technology. We want both sectors to give it a go as long as they can raise privatecapital. The LPO is government-enabled but private sector-led.”

Lithium-ion’s dominance of the market

The vast majority of even new gigafactories are set to build lithium-ion batteries to serve the EV and, to a lesser extent, ESS markets, which is largely reflected in the DOE’s financial support given out to-date. Shah is nonetheless confident that the technology’s dominance will start to wane in the downstream grid-scale ESS market.

“Lithium-ion NMC batteries will not dominate forever. 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 havingdominant market share in 7-10 years. It could be sodium-ion, it could be solid-state technologies, I don’t know who’s going to win,” he says.

“But I do think that the automotive industry will price out the utility-scale industry in lithium-ion, so you will see a rapid shift away from lithium-ion in the utility sector towards other chemistries, which is happening as we speak.”

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 5th Energy Storage Summit USA next week, on the 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. Energy-Storage.news reporter Cameron Murray will be attending.

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Jeff Keebler

Madison Gas and Electric (MGE), in partnership with We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service (WPS), subsidiaries of WEC Energy Group, has received approval from the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin to purchase solar energy and battery storage from the Koshkonong Solar Energy Center.MGE will own 30 MW of solar energy and 16.5 MW of battery storage from the facility located in the towns of Christiana and Deerfield in Dane County.

“The Koshkonong Solar Energy Center continues the progress we’ve already made reducing carbon emissions, increasing cost-effective renewable energy and advancing new technologies to benefit all our customers,” says Jeff Keebler, MGE chairman, president and CEO. “We are working aggressively to reduce our carbon emissions at least 80% from 2005 levels by the end of this decade and achieve net-zero carbon electricity by 2050.”

The project will include a 300-MW solar array and a 165-MW battery storage system. It is expected to generate enough clean energy to power about 90,000 households. MGE’s share of the output will power about 9,000 households.

We Energies and WPS will own the remaining 270 MW of the output and 148.5 MW of battery storage from the project. Invenergy LLC is the project developer. The Koshkonong Solar Energy Center is estimated to begin serving customers in late 2025.

The Koshkonong Solar Energy Center is one of three announced investments by MGE in large-scale solar energy and battery storage. MGE also will own a 10% share of the Paris Solar-Battery Park and the Darien Solar Energy Center, both of which are under construction.

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Philip May

Entergy Louisiana has filed a request with its regulator, the Louisiana Public Service Commission, for approval to add an additional three gigawatts of solar power to its generation portfolio. 

This is on top of the nearly 225 MW of solar power the company requested earlier this month. In that regulatory filing, Entergy Louisiana sought approval for approximately 175 MW from a facility in Iberville Parish and approximately 49 MW from what would become the Sterlington Solar Facility in Ouachita Parish.

Collectively, 3,225 MW of solar power are in the approval queue for potential construction, development and placement on the grid through agreements with Entergy Louisiana.

“Like never before, our state has the opportunity to retain businesses, support expansion projects, and attract new companies on a global scale, but it’s going to take meeting their operational and sustainability needs,” says Phillip May, Entergy Louisiana president and CEO. “Our latest request for up to three gigawatts of renewable power, the largest such expansion request in state history, shows we’re serious about not only protecting the environment by reducing our carbon footprint, but also continuing to be a major driver of economic development.”The individual resources that make up the three-gigawatt proposal would be constructed in Louisiana, meaning local communities and economies would benefit from job creation and additional tax revenues generated during construction of the facilities. In addition, further diversifying the company’s generation portfolio will help protect all customers from the volatility of natural gas prices and other factors outside of Entergy’s control.

Currently, Entergy Louisiana has approximately 280 MW of renewable resources, including the Capital Region Solar facility, which began delivering power to the grid in October 2020. Along with nuclear generation, nearly 25% of the company’s portfolio comes from carbon-free resources.

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Edison Power and Gotion executives sign the deal. Image: Gotion High-Tech.

Chinese battery manufacturer Gotion High-Tech has continued recent moves into new markets across Asia, signing a deal with Japan’s Edison Power.

The two companies will target growing demand in the Japanese market for large-scale stationary battery energy storage systems (BESS), as well as developing a joint offering on battery recycling.

Renewable energy solutions company Edison Power will “introduce Gotion’s batteries into the Japanese market,” according to a press release, with an initial 1GWh planned sales target over the first year of cooperation, set to rise to 2GWh in the second year and expected to continue growing from there.

This comes following changes of Japanese energy market regulations in mid-2022 via the country’s Electricity Business Act, which now allows large-scale BESS assets to be categorised within the electricity generation business and apply for grid connection points.

While that has brought numerous entrants into the Japanese industry including private investors, according to various sources it is expected to take a year or two to stimulate market demand – the latter a stated aim of the government as it targets a national ‘Green Transformation’ (dubbed ‘GX’) and increase its share of renewable energy on the country’s grid network.

Japan wants more than half of its electricity to come from low carbon sources by the 2030 financial year, with 20% to 22% to come from nuclear, and between 36-38% from renewables.

Headquartered in Heifei, Anhui Province, Gotion is relatively new among the Tier 1 lithium battery makers in China being founded in 2006, but in 2015 became the first among them to go publicly listed.

It manufactures batteries for a range of applications that includes electric vehicles (EVs), stationary battery energy storage systems (BESS) and electric power transmission and distribution (T&D) equipment. That includes holding patents for battery cell materials and cell structural designs as well as battery management system (BMS), testing and evaluation, recycling technologies and more.

Gotion will supply battery cells, modules, BMS and other components, while Edison Power, a provider of renewable energy solutions since 1991, will look after customers, carry out engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) duties, operation and maintenance (O&M) and provide other various “market-side services”.

Edison Power’s website already features the company’s containerised BESS solution, including the legend ‘Powered by Gotion’. The system, which is being advertised as available from this year, uses Gotion lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells, with 2.7MWh energy capacity per 20ft container.

Energy management system (EMS) and BMS are integrated into the containers. Edison Power lists two smaller-scale reference projects it has deployed in Japan, one of 300kWh and the other of 780kWh, as well as a 8MW/16MWh project in Singapore and a 10MW/10MWh project in the US, so far.

Electricity Business Act reforms set to open up Japanese market

The revision of electricity law, which is partly aimed at increasing liquidity in the Japanese energy sector and reducing voltality of spot prices, effectively lifts a “ban” on market transactions for BESS, Edison Power said on its website, opening up “a new energy business that has never existed before” in the country.

The two partners will also work to commercialise a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery recycling business.

In an article published in the most recent edition of our quarterly technical journal, PV Tech Power (Vol.34), analyst Chris Wilkinson at Rystad Energy looked at the present status of the solar PV market in Japan.

Solar PV will “undoubtedly” play a prominent role in addressing Japan’s energy security, energy supply and decarbonisation concerns, Wilkinson wrote. However, the scale-up of renewables faces several major challenges, and opening up the market to battery storage will be an important step to achieving those aims, Wilkinson wrote, along with other regulatory changes like a new ‘Feed-in Premium’ successor to the Feed-in Tariff, paying higher prices for energy inputted from renewables to the grid network during peak times.

“As a country with some of the most densely populated cities in the world and a firm commitment on supplying electricity from renewable sources, the solar industry in Japan has large potential,” Rystad’s Chris Wilkinson wrote.

“To fulfil this potential and in order to significantly reduce its current reliance on foreign fossil fuel imports, a fully developed BESS industry will be necessary to provide developers the flexibility they require to avoid curtailment, earn revenue and further promote development of not only solar but all renewables.”

Gotion meanwhile recently broke ground on Vietnam’s first-ever LFP cell factory, and is in a joint venture (JV) to explore building out production facilities in Thailand. In the US, the company signed a battery storage supply deal with US renewables platform Borrego last September.

Subscribe to PV Tech Power 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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A map of the proposed solar-plus-storage project from AES’ environmental impact assessment (EIA). Image: AES Chile / Typsa.

The Chile arm of global energy firm AES Corporation is looking to build another large co-located battery energy storage system (BESS), this time with a capacity of 2,710MWh.

AES Chile filed an environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the Cristales Photovoltaic Park project with the country’s EIA authority at the start of the month (2 March).

The project in Antofagasta, part of the Atacama desert region, would pair a 379MW solar PV park with a BESS unit of 542MW power and five-hours of discharge duration. That makes the potential total energy storage capacity stand at 2,710MWh or 2.71GWh.

The project would require the construction of a 220kV high-voltage line to take the energy to the Monte Mina substation, where it would then be injected into the National Electric System, the country’s grid.

If approved, construction could start on 10 January, 2024, and the project could be online by the first quarter of 2028 according to AES’ EIA submission. The company is pegging the investment needed at US$710 million.

In a comment on why it chose the location, the EIA submission said: “The site has a high potential for solar use for the exploitation of photovoltaic solar parks, given that with the information available in the Solar Explorer of the Ministry of Energy, the daily average horizontal global irradiation is 7.47kWh/m2/day, with a minimum of 4.74kWh/m2/day and a maximum of 9.81kWh/m2/day as a monthly average.”

It is the second project of this scale that AES Chile has submitted an EIA for in the space of a month. In February, as reported by Energy-Storage.news, it proposed a solar, wind and BESS hybrid project with an energy storage capacity of over 3,000MWh.

Chile has seen a raft of large-scale energy storage projects paired with renewables proposed in the last year, a trend which has accelerated since it passed a bill to incentivise the deployment of energy storage and EV take-up in October 2022.

In the same month as AES’s 3,000MWh-plus hybrid project, developers Fotowatio Renewable Ventures and oEnergy submitted EIAs for projects with a combined 500MW of battery storage. At the end of 2022, Engie Chile ordered a 638MWh BESS from Sungrow for a solar-plus-storage project also in Antofagasta while a few weeks earlier utility Colbun inaugurated the first of 800MW of battery storage projects.

Read all Energy-Storage.news coverage of the energy storage market in Chile here.

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Lars Christian Bacher of Morrow and Jon Anders Hammersmark of Eldrift shaking on the deal. Image: Morrow / Eldrift / Mynewsdesk.

Norwegian firms Morrow Batteries and Eldrift have announced a non-binding offtake agreement for 1.5GWh of Morrow’s lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries.

The agreement sees Eldrift, a new battery storage system solutions firm, commit to buying 1.5GWh of Morrow’s batteries starting in 2024 when the latter’s gigafactory starts production.

Morrow Batteries is building a LFP battery cell production facility in Arendal, Norway, which will have a 1GWh annual production capacity in its first phase. In its second phase, Morrow plans to increase that to 43GWh, by 2028.

“We are excited to partner with a battery energy storage company on the rise as we continue to develop our unique battery technology,” said Lars Christian Bacher, CEO of Morrow Batteries, who took the helm in November last year after previous incumbent Terje Andersen stepped down in May.

In the past the firm has indicated it was targeting the EV market rather than energy storage systems, although this is its first announced offtake partner that Energy-Storage.news is aware of.

Fellow Norway-based firm Freyr Battery has also ended up targeting the ESS sector in a big way. In an interview last year, CEO Tom Jensen told Energy-Storage.news that half of its eventual production could go to the ESS market, since which it has announced even more offtake deals with energy storage system integrators like Powin and Nidec.

In August 2022 Morrow signed a deal with the Industrial Development Corporation of Norway (SIVA) to kickstart construction of the site while in February that year it got a NOK25 million grant (US$2.3 million) from the government of Norway for the project.

It is also working with North American lithium-ion battery recycling firm Li-Cycle to set up a lithium-ion battery recycling plant in Norway.

Eldrift is a recently-formed company, part of NMI Holding, which offers mobile charging solutions for EVs and industrial processes, as well as behind-the-meter ESS systems.

A render of Morrow’s gigafactory in Arendal, Norway. Image: Morrow Batteries.

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Melissa Seixas

Duke Energy Florida says its first floating solar array pilot will begin construction later this month in Polk County.

The almost 1-MW floating solar array will feature more than 1,800 floating solar modules and occupy approximately 2 acres of water surface on an existing cooling pond at the Duke Energy Hines Energy Complex in Bartow.

“We’re excited to get hands-on experience with Duke Energy Florida’s first floating solar project at one of our own power plant sites,” says Melissa Seixas, Duke Energy Florida state president. “Unique pilots like floating solar are helping us better understand the capabilities of innovative clean energy technologies that can benefit our Florida customers and communities now and in the future.”

Crews will construct and assemble the module floating system on land in segments before securing it with anchors in the water. The project will take approximately five to six months.

The pilot is part of Duke Energy’s Vision Florida program, which is designed to test innovative projects such as microgrids and battery energy storage, among others, to prepare the power grid for a clean energy future.

Duke Energy Florida, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, owns 10,500 MW of energy capacity, supplying electricity to 1.9 million residential, commercial and industrial customers across a 13,000-square-mile service area in Florida.

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Electriq Power’s Power Pod2 as it would look in a customer’s garage. Image: Electriq Power.

Electriq Power, a US provider of battery storage solutions for residential and small business customers, has secured a deal that could be worth more than US$300 million.

The company designs and manufactures a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) lithium-ion battery storage system, Power Pod 2, which in addition to storing onsite generated solar energy and providing backup power, can participate in automated demand response (ADR) programmes in Electriq Power’s home state of California.

Last September, Electriq Power said that its fleet of battery systems played a role in helping keep lights on during heatwaves as California’s CAISO grid strained to deal with high peak demand.

The fresh funding has come from an unnamed “major US clean energy company” which has a platform for solar PV and energy storage design, proposal, and financing across the country, backed by what Electriq Power said is a major player in clean energy financing.

The value given for the 30-month deal is estimated at more than US$300 million, based on the terms of the agreement that cover a large number of customer installations as well as a 25-year joint operations partnership. The deal could encompass a grid services offering.

The announcement comes as Electriq Power prepares to go publicly listed, through a business combination with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) TLG Acquisition One Corp.

That merger was agreed in November last year and is expected to close in the first half of this year. The battery storage company said then that it expects it to get a valuation close to US$500 million and provide up to US$125 million in cash proceeds.

As well as producing Power Pod 2, Electriq Power offers full turnkey solar PV and storage solutions at no upfront cost. The packages include solar PV and battery equipment, software, project development, financing, installation and enrolment in grid services where applicable.

Along with the expected uplift to the US clean energy market as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives, Electriq Power said its business case will be boosted by the introduction of California’s Net Energy Metering (NEM) 3.0 regulations.

NEM 3.0, which has been controversial for many in the solar industry, is California’s latest iteration of the net metering programme, which has seen customers paid an above-market rate for selling electricity to the grid. NEM 3.0 instead cuts that rate down severely and aims to incentivise homeowners to store their energy in batteries and use it themselves or sell to the grid at peak times when it’s most needed.  

 Various residential battery storage companies have said they expect NEM 3.0 to stimulate demand for batteries, with one provider, Sunnova, saying this week it will offer some eligible customers a free system worth US$8,000 when they purchase and install a solar PV system at the same time.

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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Onslow Dam at Lake Onslow, New Zealand. A PHES plant at the site was conceptualised by Associate Professor Earl Bardsley from the University of Waikato in 2004. Image: Mohammed Majeed.

The government of New Zealand is considering the viability of pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) among its options to plug energy deficits of between 3TWh and 5TWh.

As the country increases it share of renewable energy on the grid, along with solar PV and wind, hydroelectric power (hydropower) will play a major role in the energy mix.

However, in ‘dry years’, which the government said are hard to predict coming but have occurred roughly twice per decade in the last 20 years, can cause that energy deficit, equivalent to about 10% of New Zealand’s annual energy needs.

That finding comes from NZ Battery Project, which the government set up in 2020 to help tackle that problem and overcome the shortfall issue without the use of fossil fuels.

Minister Megan Woods, who has a portfolio that includes energy and resources as well as infrastructure, said yesterday that NZ Battery Project has been progressed to its next stage, which is to explore the feasibility of pumped hydro energy storage as an option along with what was described as “an alternative, multi-technology approach”.

“Until we address the dry year problem, we will continue to rely on burning expensive and polluting fossil fuels to produce our electricity. That’s bad for the climate and our power bills. Pumped hydro is an ingenious way of storing energy in a big reservoir, which is released into a lower reservoir when more power is needed, like a giant battery,” Woods said.

One PHES project being considered is at Lake Onslow, a large man-made lake in the Otago region of New Zealand’s South Island.

Estimates put the cost of the project, which would take roughly seven years to build, at NZ$15.7 billion (US$9.81 billion), following geotechnical investigation and other work carried out by Te Rōpū Matatau, an engineering consortium headed by Mott MacDonald and appointed by NZ Battery Project.

PHES scheme could cover full 5TWh shortfall

Some media outlets jumped on that cited cost announcement – while minister Megan Woods had acknowledged the capital cost had risen from an earlier estimate of NZ$13.5 billion, albeit with a higher operating cost included – both figures were significantly higher than the NZ$4 billion quoted in a 2006 study.

That study however, was described as a “desktop study” developed by the government’s Interim Climate Change Commission, and the scheme currently being explored would be considerably larger than the 2006 plan.

In fact the NZ$15.7 billion estimate would be against a reference case in which the Lake Onslow scheme could provide the entire 5TWh upper range figure, meeting the entire 10% shortfall from one single project.

“We always knew that any dry year battery storage solution will require significant investment, that’s why it’s important we thoroughly test these scenarios and get it right,” Woods said.

“Now some more detailed work has been done we have a much clearer picture of the projected costs which differ significantly from the 2006 high level costings. The next phase will be to dig even further before we look at spending such a huge amount of money, but one thing we do know is that doing nothing to plan for climate change is not an option.”

The Te Rōpū Matatau studies represent part of Phase 1 of the NZ Battery Project, with Phase 2 set to look at funding and financing models, should the Lake Onslow option continue to progress through the required stages.

Other options being considered for New Zealand, according to Woods, are biomass, flexible geothermal and hydrogen, along the possibility of a smaller PHES scheme.

While PHES could be a solution for long-duration energy storage (LDES) for New Zealand’s energy networks, in terms of shorter duration facilities New Zealand currently only has two grid-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) projects in operation so far, both of a megawatt output each with around 2-hour duration.

Meanwhile a much larger BESS, at 100MW/200MWh is currently under construction through state-owned utility Meridian Energy. Saft is supplying the BESS equipment for that project, Ruakākā Battery Energy Storage System. Construction was cleared to proceed late last year, as reported by Energy-Storage.news.

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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