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More wind and pumped hydro’s limitations driving battery storage market in Finland

Finland is bringing on substantial amounts of wind capacity to decarbonise its energy sector. Image: CWP Renewables via Twitter.

Huge wind power deployments and the limitations of the existing fleet of pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) are driving the battery storage market in Finland, a local system integrator said.

That’s according to executives from Merus Power speaking to Energy-Storage.news at Energy Storage Summit last week. The firm provides turnkey battery energy storage solutions including system integration, long-term operation and management (O&M) and optimisation through its energy management system (EMS).

“The big driver for energy storage here is wind power. We have around 4GW online, covering some 30% of the current load, and that is set to double every year in the coming years to around 50/60GW,” said Mikko Marttala director project development & financing.

Battery storage projects in Finland are mainly focused on an ancillary services market of around 400MW, with around 100MW of operational batteries playing in the market today. Pumped hydro has in the past dominated this market but, as is happening in Sweden, this is starting to change.

Marttala: “Historically the ancillary service market has been dominated by pumped hydro power but with more wind you need faster response and hydro cant do that – that is creating a new need for batteries.”

What’s more, pumped hydro operators are actually looking to bring in batteries to their operations for this very reason, as sales manager for Central and Southern Europe Jaakko Poutamo explained.

“The pumped hydro facilities are also interested in battery storage themselves to complement their units. They want to use batteries for the initial, rapid response and then use PHES for the rest once it’s warmed up,” he said.

Merus Power is providing a 30MW/36MWh standalone battery energy storage system to developer Taaleri Energia, the country’s largest by energy capacity, for an April 2024 delivery date. French renewable independent power producer Neoen has deployed a 30MW/30MWh system first announced in 2020.

Marttala and Poutamo do expect to see more wind power projects to be colocated with battery storage although point out that they don’t need to share the same site to be linked in that way.

“Finland is moving to this 15-minute settlement period which will increase the balancing cost of the wind companies so we expect to see more combined wind-battery projects in Finland,” Marttala said. Energy-Storage.news recently reported on a project pairing both wind and solar with battery storage.

While grid and electricity market reform were a huge talking point at the two-day event in London, Marttala was relatively sanguine on the need for substantial changes.

“Fingrid (the country’s transmission system operator or TSO) is one of the most accommodating TSOs we have come across. They understand they have a huge need for fast reserves so they are pushing to get these ESS projects online, they’re very helpful.”

“The market is at a very good point. The rules are such that if you understand them you can make feasible projects. What we need is for investors to understand how the battery markets have developed over time, and who are willing to take the risk. I don’t believe in things like TSO giving us long-term revenues, the market-based approach is fair to everyone. If you know how to develop it and be cost-effective, you will succeed. What you need is an investor to take that risk.”

Merus will deploy around 100MW of battery storage a year over the next three years, the pair said. Alongside the 100MW of batteries online participating in frequency markets today, another 100MW is sited at nuclear power plants as backup power.

Whether a new 530MWh pumped hydro energy storage unit going online at the end of 2025 will affect the battery storage market remains to be seen.

CleanCapital Acquires Four Solar Projects in New Jersey

Solar panels over parking spots at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, N.J. Photo courtesy of Six Flags Great Adventure

CleanCapital, a renewables investor focused on the middle-market solar and storage industry, has acquired a 34.5 MW portfolio of operating solar assets in New Jersey.

The projects, each of which commenced operations in 2019, serve various commercial and industrial off-takers, including Six Flags theme park, a manufacturing facility, the CentraState medical system, and the Borough of Carlstadt.

This acquisition is the latest in a series of investments made since CleanCapital announced a $300 million commitment from Manulife in April 2021. The New Jersey portfolio comprises four projects ranging in size from 1.6 MW to 23.4 MW – bringing CleanCapital’s investments in clean energy projects to more than 400 MW.

“The C&I sector is increasingly turning to solar to decarbonize. It’s also good business,” says Julia Bell, chief commercial officer at CleanCapital. “Renewables are the most reliable and affordable way to power infrastructure, and American companies are installing record levels of solar to power their operations.”

CleanCapital engaged Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP as buyer’s counsel on this transaction.

Nippon Koei, Aquila bring online 25MW/100MWh battery project in Belgium

Yuso and Nippon Koei team members, pictured in 2022. Image: Yuso via Twitter.

One of the largest battery energy storage system (BESS) projects so far in Belgium has been brought online at the site of a former coal power plant.

The European subsidiary of Japanese engineering consultancy Nippon Koei announced the news today, together with its development partner on the project, Aquila Clean Energy EMEA.

The 25MW/100MWh project is in the town of Ruien, East Flanders, on the site of what was an 800MW coal-fired power station. As with other projects of its type around the world, the BESS plant was able to leverage the thermal power plant site’s existing infrastructure, including the connection point to the Belgian high voltage grid.

This meant the project was able to leapfrog the challenges of connecting to an already congested grid – something that has been a barrier to rapid energy storage, and other new energy resource, deployment in many parts of the world, including the neighbouring Netherlands.

An exact date for when commissioning took place was not given but a release sent to media including this site noted that the Ruien BESS is already participating in short-term grid-balancing flexibility markets.

As noted by Energy-Storage.news when the project achieved financial close in November 2021, shortly after netting a long-term Capacity Remuneration Mechanism (CRM) contract, it had been originally scheduled to go into operation in Q4 2022. The CRM was newly introduced in 2021 and the contract for Ruien was won in the inaugural September 2021 auction.

At that time of financial close, Nippon Koei Energy Europe said it was working with Belgian renewable energy company Yuso on the project, with the engineering company acting as lead developer. Nippon Koei acquired a 29% stake in Yuso back in 2019.

Yuso originated the project’s planning in 2018, and will serve as the optimiser for its route-to-market activities over a 10-year period using its YusoFlex platform.

Meanwhile Aquila Clean Energy EMEA is the development arm of sustainable infrastructure investor Aquila Capital, partnering with Nippon Koei on financing, procurement, development and the BESS’ operation.

Other parties working on the project included technology provider Wärtsilä and independent energy and communications engineering services company SPIE, while Nippon Koei Energy Europe delivered the project through a fully-wrapped EPC contract. Nippon Koei Energy Europe and Aquila Capital are the shared owners of the project.

It is the same size as another BESS project currently underway in Belgium by Nala Renewables – a joint venture (JV) of commodity trader Trafigura and IFM Investors. That one is being built on the site of a zinc smelting plant in the municipality of Balen, and construction began last spring.

Both are rare early examples of four-hour duration large-scale lithium-ion battery storage projects in Europe. As for Belgium, the country’s largest project to date by megawatts, although equal in energy capacity to Ruien and Balen, is a 50MW/100MWh system brought online near the end of 2022 in the Wallonia region, inaugurated by developer Corsica Sole. Belgium’s largest operational BESS project prior to that was the 10MW/20MWh EStor-Lux project, brought online in April last year.

OYA Renewables Obtains Financing for Solar Projects in New York

Manish Nayar

OYA Renewables says it has secured $216 million in financial backing for the construction of 15 community solar projects throughout New York.

Of the total financing, $145 million has been secured as a construction-to-term loan. CIT Power and Energy acted as lead, coordinating a syndicate of participating banks comprising Amalgamated Bank, Siemens Financial Services Inc., Comerica Bank and Cadence Bank.

OYA secured an additional $71 million in project funding with Monarch Private Capital (MPC) in the form of a tax equity investment. The investment will see MPC participate in the funding of OYA’s slate of 2023 projects via their ESG-oriented impact funds. As a result, MPC’s investors will receive a federal tax credit through its funds in proportion to their level of ownership and see potential positive cashflow when the solar projects are up and running. Several of the projects located within low-income communities will qualify for additional tax credits of up to 20%, taking the total potential credits from 30% to as high as 50%.

“The level of financial backing we’ve secured via these commitments is another major milestone for OYA. Not only does it significantly increase our asset base, it also advances our transition from being a developer to an independent power producer,” says Manish Nayar, chairman and founder of OYA Renewables. “These types of investments from highly progressive banking partners are critical to the financing of renewable energy projects. Without them, we wouldn’t be the major force we are in the NY community solar market and the US energy transition could not have generated the incredible momentum it’s seeing now.”

The group of projects being funded by the combined transactions is expected to generate almost 100 MW DC of renewable energy.

Battery storage sector prepares for first wave of large-scale project augmentations

A two-hour duration battery energy storage project recently commissioned by Wartsila. Image: Wartsila.

The battery storage sector is about to enter its first ever phase of large-scale augmentations of systems as they reach 3-5 year degradation points and there are questions over how this will pan out, a representative of Burns & McDonnell told Energy-Storage.news.

“Most battery storage projects will add or replace battery capacity within the first three to five years as those existing batteries degrade, typically by 5-15% in that period. There are a lot of questions as we hit this first round of augmentations because we really haven’t seen augmentations executed in a major way yet,” said Jason Barmann, Energy Storage Technology Manager for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firm.

Barmann agreed that since the big ramp-up in utility-scale battery storage deployments has been over 2020-2022, the coming few years will be the first big wave of augmentations.

Over 2020, 2021 and 2022 the UK deployed 300MWh, 600MWh and 800MWh respectively, each a record-breaking figure, while the US did 9.5GWh and 12GWh in the last two years respectively (UK figures from Solar Media’s Market Research team and US figures from the American Clean Power Association).

“Sometimes integrators will provide all of the controls along with a system so there is a question around how you get that upgraded. Companies will also ask themselves if they had a pleasant experience with their integrator or if they might be looking to somebody else to provide the augmentation? Sometimes that augmentation is a contracted capacity for the system integrator, sometimes it isn’t,” he said.

“What happens if their battery price goes up faster because they don’t have an agreement in place, then the next company (that comes in for the augmentation) will be asking how does that all work?”

“The chemistries used for the initial project might be different to the ones used for the augment. And so they’ll have different profiles, different control methodologies, different performance, different energy density, everything will just be marginally different.”

He also said there is an issue with how fast companies doing system integration are scaling up and it’s becoming harder to take learnings from one job to the next as jobs are done sequentially rather than one after the other. There could also be a dilemma over where to focus resources on the part of the system integrator, he added.

“I think people are much more interested in building new big large projects than augmenting smaller ones. So where’s the focus going to go from the core members of their team?”

“And some manufacturers have products that are easily adaptable for augmentation. Others have concepts but they don’t have a product out there that you go look at, so it’s more conceptual in nature.”

Batteries can sometimes be decommissioned even earlier than three to five years for a variety of reasons. Just this week, Energy-Storage.news reported on a theft incident at a large-scale project in California owned by Terra-Gen. The company revealed to Energy-Storage.news that 1.5MWh of stolen battery packs were in fact decommissioned and awaiting transportation, just one year after the project was energised.

Burns & McDonnell has deployed over 40GWh of battery storage projects to-date. Executives from the firm recently contributed to an end-of-year Q&A for 2022.

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.

Powin ‘very close’ to US gigafactory reveal, eyeing 1GWh UK BESS pipeline

Powin’s stand at last year’s InterSolar Europe event, where the company took its first exploratory steps into the European market. Image: Solar Media.

Powin Energy is “very close” to announcing its first US battery storage factory, while the company is working to extend its reach into new markets including the UK.

Danny Lu, executive VP at the Oregon-headquartered battery storage system integrator and manufacturer, spoke with Energy-Storage.news at last week’s Energy Storage Summit EU in London, hosted by our publisher Solar Media.

“We started exploring Europe last year at the Intersolar conference, we’ve made some relationships with UK developers and IPPs,” Lu said.

“We’ve been actively bidding in the UK market and have had some early success, been shortlisted on a few projects, have been in exclusive negotiations on a few projects.”

While the company hasn’t built any UK projects yet, it is seeing a pipeline of more than a gigawatt-hour of grid-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) contracts that would be for delivery in the late 2023-2024 timeframe.

Though Lu characterised the company’s UK business development activities as initially successful in bringing its value proposition and cost structure, there are some barriers to entry into the booming market over the pond.

Having delivered more than 3GWh of US projects, Powin has a pretty good track record since bringing its first utility-scale BESS online in 2016, but UK customers want to know about UK experience.

Another thing is that from the company’s point of view, it considers its lithium iron phosphate (LFP) technology to be better suited for 2-hour durations, rather than the 1-hour projects that have been typical of the UK. This appears to be changing, with analyst Mollie McCorkindale of Solar Media Market Research writing in a recent Guest Blog for this site that the market in Great Britain is now trending towards longer durations than an hour.

Something else that sets the UK apart from the US is that UK developers and other customers want to see contracts come fully-wrapped including engineering, procurement and construction (EPC). Whereas the US, for the most part, moved away from wraps roughly five years ago.

“In the US, since five years-plus ago, we were always doing side-by-side contracts, where developer would contract with us to provide the integrated storage solution, hardware and software. Then the EPC would just strictly provide the construction, civil works, high voltage, and those would be contracted separately,” Lu said.

“What we’re realising in the UK is that a lot of developers are requesting one company to wrap the construction, the integration, hardware, software, and all the long-term performance guarantees, which then adds a lot of perceived risk onto the EPC. How they mitigate that risk, is to charge a higher markup.”

In the US, risk is therefore lowered on the EPC side, and put more onto the developer for long-term performance, but it also puts some of the risk onto the system integrator. That change in contracting structure can lower costs by around 10% alone, Lu claimed.

While Powin has done those type of wrap deals in the past, working with Honeywell and Mitsubishi Power, for example, the integrator realised that that “adds huge layers of costs on top and it also adds a bit of a communication barrier, where we cannot communicate directly with the customer in many cases”.

From the UK customers’ perspective, the wrap offers a degree of comfort in the shared risk. In cases where Powin suggested eliminating the wrap solution, customers instead asked for other structures such as bonding or extra insurance. “a lot of different bankability levers,” as the executive VP called them.

Why expand when US market is set for an IRA-driven boom?

Powin is working on Australia’s biggest battery project to date, the Waratah Super Battery, which took some steps forward last week, as reported by Energy-Storage.news. There are also two other big Australia projects the company and its partners have secured grid connections for.

The integrator is also active in other markets like Taiwan and India, and has a strong demand base in the US which is only set to grow its addressable market hugely as the Inflation Reduction Act’s investment tax credit (ITC) incentives kick in.

So why target continued international expansion at this inflection point in its home market?

“The US is like a baseload market for us, in a sense,” Lu said.

“Without the US, our demand would be very ‘lumpy’, and lumpy demand makes supply chain a bit harder to manage. Having a very steady base load allows us to keep production happening, always consistently, never stopping.”

It helps too that the US market has seen high levels of competition, bringing down prices considerably, whereas in less mature markets, higher margins are still to be found.

With that international expansion comes a ramp up of its manufacturing scale too. Powin’s strategy is to “set up as many contract manufacturing facilities around the world,” as it can and “increase our capacity to always meet the maximum demand that we potentially see year-over-year,” Danny Lu said.

“The manufacturing side of things is really about finding strategic locations around the world that can support local markets that we can eliminate transport costs. The volatility of transport costs over COVID, I think that’s levelling out now, but we’ve realised that transport can actually make a big portion of the costs or erosion of your own margin.”

Powin started off with one wholly owned factory in China, before setting up a plant in Taiwan. Then more recently it began contract manufacturing with OEM Celestica at a site in Mexico, where mass production began around two months ago.

In addition to a factory in Vietnam close to opening up, and another on the way in China, Powin has one factory in US that it is very close to announcing, Lu said, where the company’s Stack modular solutions, combined into multi-megawatt scale on Powin Centipede platform, will be built.

“All of these factories will be multi gigawatt-hour per year scale, and each will have the ability to expand by adding another shift on the line, there’s space in each of these facilities to add another line when needed,” Danny Lu said.

Iron flow battery firm ESS Inc ends 2022 with 800MWh production capacity

ESS Inc recently landed a pilot project at Schipol Airport, Amsterdam, which could become a much larger rollout. Image: ESS Inc.

ESS Inc ended 2022 with nearly 800MWh of annual production capacity for its iron flow battery, although had a relatively poor last financial quarter with just US$15,000 in revenue.

Full-year revenue was US$894,000, the first year in which the firm has booked revenues. Operating expenses meanwhile were US$106.4 million meaning a full-year operating loss of US$105.5 million, which falls to a net loss of US$78 million once ‘other income’ totaling US$27.5 million is accounted for.

More noteworthy perhaps is that ESS Inc completed the installation of its automated manufacturing line at its plant in Wilsonville, Oregon. That means it has can build nearly 800MWh of its flow batteries that use an all-iron and saltwater electrolyte, annually. Scaling up is one of the biggest challenges for the non-lithium battery sector.

Deals struck in the final quarter of the year include a 75kw/500kWh Energy Warehouse order – its commercial and industrial (C&I) product – with Burbank Water and Power (BWP) in California and a project at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. The latter is replacing diesel generation for its ground operations.

The Airport has hundreds of megawatts of power needs and the project could be part of a larger rollout of ESS Inc’s technology there, Ronald Richardson, European business development for the company told Energy-Storage.news in an interview at Energy Storage Summit last week.

Its deployment there, a 6-8 system, is part of the pan-European, part EU-funded TULIPS project aimed at decarbonising airports over the coming four years. ESS Inc’s technology generally offers a duration of 6-12 hours.

The EU also wants to decarbonise ports and harbours by making sure that ships use shore power when docked rather than fossil fuels, Richardson said. Flow batteries can win these contracts thanks to their longer duration but also their better fire safety specifications. Although lithium-ion has won some deals in this space as reported by Energy-Storage.news last year.

He said that ESS Inc’s focus on the C&I sector so far has been driven by the market rather than the company’s limited production capacity (compared with lithium-ion battery storage solution providers).

“Businesses have sustainability on their agenda and projects like these show the commercial viability of our product,” he said.

See more Energy-Storage.news coverage of ESS Inc here.

RWE Completes Acquisition of Con Edison’s Renewables Business

Markus Krebber

RWE AG has closed its acquisition of Con Edison Clean Energy Businesses Inc., making RWE the number-four renewable energy company in the U.S. and the country’s second largest solar owner and operator, the company says.

The newly created company is called RWE Clean Energy LLC (RWE Clean Energy). The company operates a portfolio of 8 GW of renewable energy projects and has a development platform of more than 24 GW, one of the largest in the U.S. With more than 15 years of experience in the renewable energy business and a track record in developing, constructing and operating renewable energy facilities, the RWE team in the U.S. – about 1,500 employees – is “fully committed to forging ahead with the clean energy transition,” the company says.

Mark Noyes has been appointed CEO of RWE Clean Energy. The executive management team includes Ingmar Ritzenhofen (CFO), Andrew Flanagan as (chief development officer) and Akshaya Bhargava (COO).

“From today forward, RWE is a top tier company for renewable energy in the United States,” says Markus Krebber, CEO of RWE AG. “With the creation of RWE Clean Energy, we are significantly stepping up RWE’s presence in the U.S., one of the most attractive and fastest growing markets for renewable energy in the world. With bringing together two strong teams and combining onshore wind with solar projects, we are setting the path to significantly grow our portfolio.”

RWE Clean Energy’s portfolio comprises about 60% onshore wind and 40% solar. Expansion will come in the onshore wind, solar, battery storage and offshore wind sectors.

Ameresco to get 2.1GWh BESS project for Southern California Edison to ‘substantial completion by summer’

An Ameresco solar PV plant project. Image: Ameresco.

Renewable energy and energy efficiency company Ameresco has nearly completed its three-site, 2.1GWh battery energy storage system (BESS) project for utility Southern California Edison (SCE).

In announcing its most recent quarterly financial results, the company offered an update to what is considered one of the largest utility-led BESS construction contracts seen in the US to date.

System integrator FlexGen has been hired to work on the project including inverter and software integration, although not battery storage supply.

Having said last August that both Ameresco and SCE’s teams were “working round the clock” to get those projects done, by the end of 2022, they were about 95% completed, chief financial officer (CFO) Doran Hole said in an earnings conference call.

Now undergoing their final steps including grid integration activities, the projects should get to “substantial completion by the summer,” Hole said.

As is well documented, summer is when California’s CAISO grid needs flexibility and balancing resources like battery storage most acutely.

However, the project, which totals 537.5MW power output and 2,150MWh energy storage capacity across three sites in SCE’s service area, had been originally scheduled to come online by the summer of last year.

In fact, the ability to get them online quickly to deal with the summer’s peaks in energy demand on the grid had been one of the key reasons for SCE originating the project and selecting Ameresco in late 2021, but construction had run into some difficulties around its supply chain.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news back in April last year, delays were caused by a confluence of factors cited by Ameresco which included COVID-19 lockdowns in China affecting the supply of BESS equipment. These were compounded by new Chinese laws regarding the safe transport of lithium batteries, as well as weather-related delays.

Ameresco had sought to invoke force majeure on its contracts. The company said yesterday that “discussions regarding the applicability and scope of any force majeure relief” are continuing. It enjoys a “cooperative” relationship with SCE, according to Ameresco.

The company has other energy storage projects underway, including a 42MW/168MWh BESS for a 42MW solar PV plant in Hawaii with developer Bright Canyon Energy, on which it began construction in October last year.

CEO George Sakellaridis had said previously that the SCE contracts, combined with Ameresco’s track record with other projects, made it likely the company would become attractive to other customers seeking large-scale battery solutions.

CFO Hole said in yesterday’s earnings call that BESS project proposals are coming in, both “large and small,” with Ameresco well placed to win “a good number of them” despite it being a competitive market.

These would be a mix of balance sheet projects as well as construction-only contracts like the SCE deal and others it has been awarded by utilities and other types of asset owners.

“…from a sizing perspective, maybe we don’t see any single one that’s quite the size of SoCal Ed, but when you add them all up together, they’re certainly in excess of SoCal Ed when you look at the proposal activity,” Hole said.

Battery storage retrofit at another California peaker plant

In other news from California’s energy storage market, energy supplier MCE is equipping a gas peaker plant with battery storage.

MCE is one of California’s Community Choice Aggregator (CCA) suppliers, set up to allow customers to choose the mix of resources their electricity comes from, while still benefitting from the use of the grid networks of major investor-owned utilities (IOUs) like SCE.

In 2019, MCE entered into a resource adequacy (RA) contract with energy generator Wellhead Power Exchange for 48MW of capacity each month, to be provided by its “traditional” natural gas peaker plant in Fresno.

RA is the mechanism by which California load-serving entities must keep enough resources in reserve to maintain reliability of supply, and to date has led to a rapid increase in the amount of four-hour duration BESS projects – such as SCE-Ameresco’s – on the CAISO grid.

The peaker plant’s operation will be hybridised with the addition of a lithium-ion BESS with 16MW rated power output. MCE claimed that this retrofit will enable as much as a 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from the plant, as well as a 78% improvement in local air quality.

Incidentally, Ameresco’s SCE project integrator FlexGen was recently awarded a similar project in California, by independent power producer (IPP) Middle River Power, involving 420MW/420MWh of BESS retrofits at existing peakers.

FlexGen COO Yann Brandt explained to Energy-Storage.news that this form of hybridisation allows peaker plant operators to run the thermal plant portion of their asset much less frequently. For short durations, batteries with durations much shorter than four hours, charged up during times of abundant solar PV generation on the grid, can fill in the gaps.

This not only has a decarbonisation benefit but also enhances the site economics of the peaker plant itself too, Brandt said.

Available Power and Hitachi Energy’s JV entity target 1GW deployments in Texas market

Linxon was founded as a JV between the two companies to focus on substations. Last year it completed this one in India. Image: Linxon.

Developer Available Power and Linxon, a joint venture between engineering firm SNC-Lavalin and Hitachi Energy, are targeting 1GW of battery storage projects in the ERCOT, Texas market.

Linxon has already secured the necessary equipment supply to deliver on the first tranche of the 1,000MW-plus of battery storage projects, it said. The projects will be front-of-meter systems within the market managed by grid operator ERCOT.

Ben Gregory, President of Available Power said: “Battery energy storage is transforming and strengthening how power grids operate. We’re proud to pair Available Power’s development experience with Linxon’s leading EPC credentials.”

Nicolas Sanloup, President and Managing Director of Linxon Americas added: “We focus on innovation, portfolio transition, and sustainability, which guides us in all our activities, and we see battery energy storage systems (BESS) as a key asset class.

Available Power is a Texas-focused energy storage developer founded in 2020 by ex-Shell executives. It has announced one major project prior to this announcement, a 100MW/200MWh battery storage system at a net-zero technology campus and airport near Austin, Texas.

Linxon meanwhile was founded in 2018 as a joint venture between Canadian engineering firm SNC-Lavalin and Hitachi Energy, part of the large Japanese conglomerate, to mainly focus on solutions centred around electricity substations.

Hitachi Energy has been deploying its own energy storage technology solutions in the past few years, including most recently turbine technology at a pumped hydro plant in Austria and a two-hour battery storage system in Switzerland. The company was formed through the acquisition of ABB’s power grids business by Hitachi.

As of the end of 2022 there was around 2.7GW of utility-scale battery storage online and operational in Texas, while the interconnection queue is in the high double-digit gigawatts. Battery storage projects in the state garner revenues from a mix of ancillary services RRS (regulation reserve service) and RRS-FFR (fast frequency response) and energy trading around the most congested nodes of the grid.