Second life EV batteries stored at Element Energy’s Kentucky warehouse. The firm has secured 2.5GWh of modules. Image: Element Energy.

California-based firm Element Energy has raised a US$28 million Series B to accelerate its proprietary BMS-enhanced second life energy storage solution, with 2.5GWh of modules secured already.

The firm has completed the first close of a US$28 million fundraising round, led by technology-focused venture capital (VC) firm Cohort Ventures. The round also saw participation from existing backers including utility Edison International, LG Technology Ventures, the investment arm of the South Korean electronics giant, and VC firms Prelude Ventures and Radar Partners.

Founded in 2019, Element Energy has created what it calls an ‘adaptive’ battery management system (BMS) to provide monitoring, diagnostics, predictive intelligence and distributed control of large-scale battery systems, reducing in improved performance, safety and cost competitiveness.

Its precedent IP is a decade and US$30-40 million of investment in the making, CEO Tony Stratakos said.

“Our BMS distributes control down to the module level versus conventional BMS which is highly centralised. This means we can seamlessly combine modules of different chemistries and states of health with no negative impact on performance from limitations of weaker modules on stronger modules in the same system,” he told Energy-Storage.news.

“We’re a broad-based technology supplier with second life energy storage being one of three focuses – ‘conventional’ first life storage and EVs being the others – but second life is obviously an area we can capitalise on thanks to our BMS.”

The funding will be used to continue investments in its asset, logistics and infrastructure for upcoming utility-scale deployments using second life EV batteries. The company has procured over 2.5GWh of second life EV batteries of which a third to half is already sitting in its warehouse in Kentucky (pictured above), Stratakos said, though he wouldn’t give details on which OEMs the modules are from.

The figure eclipses that of any other second life firm Energy-Storage.news has interviewed and the projects it is deploying are larger than any we’ve come across outside China. The firm is delivering a 50MWh project for NextEra at a wind farm, for which it received US$7.9 million from the Department of Energy, and Stratakos said that it will deploy 100-400MWh systems at a time, starting next year.

The firm’s energy storage solution. Image: Element Energy.

Matt Murphy, president and CEO of the US$40 billion market cap, Nasdaq-listed semiconductor technology company Marvell, has also joined Element’s board of directors.

“Element Energy has created the battery management hardware and software needed to enable efficient battery reuse at scale, and provide affordable, clean electricity for a broad range of energy storage and EV applications,” Murphy said.

Our sister site PV Tech Power published a special feature looking at the second life energy storage sector in the latest edition of PV Tech Power, its quarterly downstream-focused journal. Read all of Energy-Storage.news‘ recent coverage of developments in the sector here.

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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JC Sandberg

In just the last three months, over $40 billion of new grid-scale clean energy investments have been announced, a new report shows – the same amount as the total investment estimated for all clean energy projects installed in 2021. The Clean Energy Investing in America report, released today by the American Clean Power Association (ACP), is an analysis of the new U.S. clean energy landscape. 

Alongside significant private investment, 20 new grid-scale clean energy manufacturing facilities have been announced in the U.S., bringing with them an expected 7,000 new American jobs. 

“As a new era dawns in clean energy, America is laying the foundation to become a manufacturing powerhouse,” says ACP Interim CEO and Chief Advocacy Officer JC Sandberg. “This growing sector will create thousands of good paying jobs in communities across the U.S. and will help reduce dependence on foreign energy sources to meet our domestic needs.”   

The new report also revealed expected consumer savings of over $2.5 billion announced by utility companies that provide electricity to over 15 million Americans. Companies explicitly tied these savings to federal incentives that make new project investment less expensive, meaning utilities can rely less on customer rate increases in order to fund projects. 

“It is crystal clear that federal support for clean energy is already having a positive impact on the American economy and on the American people,” continues Sandberg.  

The report also demonstrates that incentives approved by Congress earlier this year are being felt across the country. From Wisconsin to Texas, and Alabama to Colorado, the clean energy industry is building utility scale projects and manufacturing facilities that put America on a path to a clean energy future.  

“To ensure the full potential of these investments and facilities, we urge the Administration and Congress to continue improving trade policies, enacting common sense permitting reform, and finalizing effective tax implementation,” concludes Sandberg. 

Twenty new clean energy manufacturing facilities have been publicly announced, including 12 new solar manufacturing facilities, an over 300% increase in solar module manufacturing capacity, 22 GW in new solar module or cell manufacturing capacity, six new grid-scale battery storage manufacturing facilities, one reopening and one expansion of wind power manufacturing facilities, and 6,850 new jobs publicly announced.

States that will see new or expanded facilities include Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas, while other locations remain undetermined. Over $40 billion in capital investment has been announced, split evenly between utilities and independent power producers. There has been $2.5 billion in consumer savings announced with 15 million Americans serviced by utilities who announced consumer savings. Over 13 GW of new clean energy capacity has been released.

Read ACP’s Clean Energy Investing in America report here.

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The 190MW/380MWh project in Texas, US. Image: Qcells USA.

Spain-based renewable energy firm Acciona Energia has acquired a two-hour energy storage system in ERCOT, Texas, from Qcells.

The two companies have closed the sale of the Cunningham Energy Storage project in Hunt County, claiming it will be the largest project in the state’s market, operated by ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas), when it is commissioned in early 2023.

The 190MW/380MWh system, pictured above, will connect to the grid within the service territory of Rayburn County Electric Cooperative, according to Qcells’ announcement of the project’s acquisition in 2018. Rayburn is one of around 75 non-profit electric cooperatives active in the state.

Qcells USA is the solar and storage engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) arm of Qcells, the integrated solar PV and smart energy system firm headquartered in South Korea under Hanwha Group’s ownership but with its main technology and innovation facility in Thalheim, Germany where it was founded, and with offices globally.

The transaction with Acciona also includes six additional projects at an ‘advanced development stage’ but the companies gave no details about these.

Acciona’s acquisition of Cunningham comes three months after Qcells secured US$150 million in financing for the project (and a few others) from European banks BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole CIB, as reported by Energy-Storage.news.

Rafael Mateo, CEO of Acciona Energía, said: “This transaction is an important milestone, as it includes the biggest BESS utility scale project in one of the world’s most developed BESS markets. With 1,214MW renewable capacity operating and under construction in Texas, this deal is a good opportunity for ACCIONA Energía to strengthen our presence and optimise the risk profile of our portfolio.”

Texas is the second-largest energy storage market in the US after California, with around 4GW of battery storage with ERCOT interconnection agreements and at least 1.2GW of that already online (as per figures from March this year).

Battery storage projects have historically made most of their revenues from ancillary services RRS (regulation reserve service) and RRS-FFR (fast frequency response) but are increasingly now trading energy, particularly around ERCOT’s most congested nodes.

Projects are therefore moving up to two-hour durations (and in some cases beyond) to increase their ability to capitalise on this, with Cunningham the largest example of that. Texas’ main renewable source is wind which is a substantially more volatile and intermittent energy source than solar (as opposed to California where solar is much larger).

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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A delegation from the European Commission on a recent site visit to one of Fluence’s Lithuania projects. Image: Energy Cells via LinkedIn.

Fluence executives said the company is on track to grow its revenues by almost a third on a “multi-year” basis, leading it to break even on an EBITDA basis in 2024.

The global energy storage system integrator and manufacturer hosted an earnings call webcast yesterday to explain financial results for its Q4 and full-year 2022, which ended on 30 September. It also separately made a couple of fresh announcements regarding its manufacturing and international expansion plans.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news, Fluence has just achieved its first profitable quarter, recorded US$1.2 billion revenues for the full year, and offered revenue guidance between US$1.4 billion and US$1.7 billion for its FY2023.

While that also demonstrates considerable growth in revenues and expectations from Fluence’s US$681 million revenues in 2021, CEO Julian Nebreda and CFO Manavendra Sial said growth would be continued, but at a steadier pace. About 30% growth in revenues annually is expected over an unspecified “multi-year” period.

The company’s forecast for achieving EBITDA breakeven will be based in part on reducing operating expenses (OpEx). CFO Sial said that in 2022, operating expense represented 15.5% of revenues. While its dollar spend on OpEx is going to increase, it will only go up at about half the rate of revenue growth, according to Sial.

Ending the year with US$540 million in cash and equivalents, the majority of cash usage was driven by negative Adjusted EBIDTA, and the CFO said that trend would continue into 2023.

From headwinds to tailwinds

After a period of well-documented headwinds that have affected Fluence and other industry players significantly, from shipping and supply chain issues caused by COVID-19 to soaring lithium battery materials prices, the emphasis in the call was largely on coming tailwinds instead.

Chief among those is the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the executives quoted BloombergNEF’s estimate that the act’s US$369 billion of climate mitigation and grid strengthening incentives will provide a US$35 billion uplift to the energy storage industry. The total addressable market has increased overnight by 100GWh, BloombergNEF predicted.

That means market growth of around 40% to 50% each year, far more than the already very healthy 30% increase the US market’s size currently sees on a yearly basis.

The investment tax credit (ITC), which will now apply to standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) projects as well as to solar PV and solar-plus-storage, will have an immediate impact on downstream demand.

But Fluence said it will also reap the benefits of the production tax credit (PTC), which is applicable to domestically sourced and made products.

Having earlier this year opened its own contract manufacturing facility in Utah, US, which currently customises and finishes Fluence’s Cube BESS units manufactured in Vietnam, the company now wants to vertically integrate further.

The company will also start making battery packs at the Utah factory from 2024, according to a press release issued yesterday. It will continue to source cells from multiple vendors, but modules and packs will be made by Fluence, as well as the battery management system (BMS) technology that drives them.

CEO Nebreda said the Utah factory will have close to 6GWh annual production capacity for Cubes. Making its own modules within the US means Fluence expects to qualify for the full uncapped, direct-pay PTC at US$10/kWh.

That said, the prime motivations for manufacturing more of its customers’ projects itself are not limited to the PTC incentive. Chief product officer (CPO) and SVP Rebecca Boll said the manufacturing programme is the “next pivotal step for Fluence’s supply chain flexibility”.

Integration with Fluence’s own BMS also means it will be simpler to connect projects with the company’s suite of digital products, the bidding platform Mosaic, and the optimisation software from recent acquisition target Nispera.

“One of the key benefits to the Fluence Battery Pack is that it is easier to incorporate new cells and diversify our cell supplier base, creating competition at a cell level,” CEO Nebreda said in yesterday’s earnings webcast.

“Our Battery Pack makes it easier to swap packs in and out of new product variants. It also allows us to incorporate our own BMS technology with more granular data access system control. And it expands Fluence’s battery intelligence capabilities.”

>US$500 million Ørsted contract, transmission segment product and MoU with Thai energy authority

In other product news from the company, Fluence will also start making a BESS solution aimed at the storage-as-transmission market segment. It’s a segment Fluence has been bullish on the potential of, having been awarded a 250MW ‘Grid Booster’ transmission BESS contract in Germany, and delivering 200MW of BESS for a similar purpose in Lithuania.

The company believes the transmission segment will grow from a market of 450MW worldwide in 2022, to encompass 6GW of opportunities by 2025 and 17GW by 2030. Fluence claimed the new product, called UltraStack, will be a high-performance solution with enhanced cybersecurity, faster response time, higher technical performance and equipped with advanced controls.

As alluded to in our coverage yesterday, Fluence also mentioned a major project deal with European power company Ørsted worth more than half a billion US Dollars, had been recently contracted for.

Company leadership gave a few more details in their presentation, noting that the project is a 300MW/1,200MWh BESS in the US. The deal was signed in November for delivery and commissioning battery storage at an undisclosed location in 2023 and 2024.

Finally, this morning Fluence made yet another announcement: the company has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT).

The energy storage company and government entity will work together to develop the market for battery-based energy storage in Thailand, to help the country increase its share of renewable energy. That follows the recent signing of an MoU by another energy storage integrator-maker, Sungrow, with Thailand’s Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA) to explore possibilities for energy storage and green hydrogen in the Southeast Asian country.   

Thailand has some oil and gas resources, but these are forecast to be depleted by the end of the 2020s, while the government recently upped the national target for sourcing energy from non-hydropower renewable sources to 30% by 2036, an increase of 10% from previous goals. Longer term, it is targeting carbon neutrality by 2050 and net zero emissions by 2065.

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GE Hydro Solutions turbines at the Jinzhai project. Image: GE Renewable Energy.

The hydropower subsidiary of General Electric’s renewables business has installed the first pair of 300MW turbines at a pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) site in China.

GE Renewable Energy’s GE Hydro Solutions said last week that the turbines are in place at the project in Jinzhai County, Anhui Province.

The company is supplying four turbines, generator-motors, and balance of plant (BOP) equipment to the 1,200MW long-duration energy storage (LDES) resource. Duration of the storage was not disclosed by GE in a press release, but PHES plants typically have between about 6 to 20 hours duration.

GE Hydro Solutions was awarded the project by state-owned entity State Grid Xinyuan’s pumped hydro division, Anhui Jinzhai Pumped Storage Power Co. State Grid Xinyuan is a member of the International Hydropower Association, and its owners are State Grid Corporation of China and China Three Gorges Corporation, which hold 70% and 30% stakes respectively.

China’s national energy strategy includes a commitment to building more than 200 PHES plants around the country, adding up to 270GW, by 2025.

With GE having delivered 8.2GW of pumped hydro in China already, the US company claimed it is responsible for about a quarter of China’s existing PHES, as well as its equipment being used in just under a third of all PHES plants worldwide.

GE’s first two 300MW turbines at the Jinzhai site have passed a period of trial operation successfully and are now connected to the grid.

“Once the project is fully commissioned, the giant 1.2GW hydro battery will offer a high level of flexibility and reliability to the local power grid,” GE Hydro Solutions president and CEO Pascal Radue said.

Like other PHES plants the world over, the storage system will help bring flexibility to the grid network. It will ‘charge’ with energy during off-peak periods and times when renewable energy production is abundant, outputting to the grid its stored energy when demand peaks. GE Renewable Energy talked up its ability to reduce reliance on coal in the area.

Global energy transition prompting pumped hydro revival

Energy-Storage.news has reported on numerous pumped hydro developments in the past few months.

Australia’s first new PHES plants since the mid-1980s are currently under construction amid plans for more, while in Switzerland a 20GWh plant was inaugurated in June and a 40GWh PHES commissioned a few weeks later in Portugal.

Elsewhere in Europe, plans have been announced for new PHES plants in Estonia, the UK and Finland within the last couple of months, while earlier this week the site reported that in India, an energy storage tender hosted by state-owned power group NTPC’s renewables subsidiary was won by a bid for a 500MW/3,000MWh PHES plant proposed by renewable power producer Greenko.

Other projects in development include a 7GWh project in Malawi, Africa, and a 500MWh project in the Philippines.

Those are among the projects covered, but you can see more of our pumped hydro energy storage coverage here.

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Michelle Davis

The U.S. added 4.6 GW of new solar capacity in Q3 2022, a 17% decrease from the same quarter last year, as trade barriers and ongoing supply chain constraints continued to slow America’s clean energy progress.

These disruptions will cause a 23% decline in solar installations this year compared to 2021, according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight Q4 2022 report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie.

Wood Mackenzie said detainments under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) are depressing near-term solar installation forecasts and delaying the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The U.S. Department of Commerce’s recent decision to apply anti-circumvention tariffs on solar products from Southeast Asia presents downside risk to future solar deployment.

“America’s clean energy economy is being hindered by its own trade actions,” says SEIA president and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper. “The solar and storage industry is acting decisively to build an ethical supply chain, but unnecessary supply bottlenecks and trade restrictions are preventing manufacturers from getting the equipment they need to invest in U.S. facilities. In the aftermath of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), we cannot afford to waste time tinkering with trade laws as the climate threat looms.”

As a result of supply constraints, the utility-scale, commercial and community solar markets all experienced quarter-over-quarter declines in Q3. The residential solar segment is less directly impacted by existing trade issues and saw 1.57 GW of new installations, marking a 43% increase over Q3 2021.

“Installations this year were significantly depressed due to supply chain constraints” states Michelle Davis, principal analyst and lead author of the report. “It has proven more difficult and time-consuming to provide the proper evidence to comply with the UFLPA, further delaying equipment delivery to the U.S.”

Forecasts from Wood Mackenzie find that the UFLPA will limit solar deployment through 2023 and mute the impact of the IRA in the near term. The report forecasts the utility-scale solar market to add 10.3 GW of new capacity in 2022, representing a 40% drop from 2021 volumes. By 2024, IRA-fueled growth will begin in earnest, with annual solar growth averaging 21% between 2023-2027.

Even as supply chain constraints slowed the market, solar accounted for 45% of all new electric generating capacity additions through Q3 2022, the most of any electricity source.

Read the full report here.

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Image: Brittany Conrad, NREL

Standing among solar arrays and power grid equipment at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), you might hear a faint, distorted melody buzzing from somewhere. You are not hallucinating – that gray box really is singing the Star Wars Theme, or the ice cream truck song, or Chopin’s Waltz in A minor. Power system engineers are just having some fun with an NREL capability that prevents stability problems on the electrical grid.

Usually, the engineers send another kind of waveform through the inverters and load banks: megawatts of power and voltage vibrations at many frequencies. The purpose of their research is to see how energy devices and the grid interact – to get them “in tune” and prevent dangerous electrical oscillations that show up like screechy feedback or a booming sub-bass.

The engineers can do this analysis at high fidelity with NREL hardware using the lab’s advanced impedance measurement system, and they have also produced a commercially available software called the Grid Impedance Scan Tool or GIST that can do the same with simulated power on device models, allowing any manufacturer or grid operator to certify grid stability with renewable energy resources.

“These unique capabilities can excite wind turbines, PV inverters and all this new equipment at different frequencies to understand whether they will be friendly with the grid or there will be some disruptions,” says Shahil Shah, project lead and developer of GIST.

Like music, electricity is made of waves that interact to create harmonies and distortions. While music spans around 10 octaves, 20 octaves are used by electric power systems with equipment like wind energy and solar power plants. This leaves plenty of room for signals to overlap, resonate and amplify, which does happen occasionally on electrical systems and appears to be happening more as spinning generators are displaced by power electronics like wind and solar inverters. When rogue oscillations do occur, they can damage components or cause full-on power system failures.

“Solar and wind create a lot of oscillations just like mechanical structures, but we don’t see them. This can create disruptive behavior, and it has happened all over the world in power systems with high levels of renewables,” Shah explains.

Stability is tricky because grid designs are different from one system to the next, such that adding a new wind energy or solar power plant is like placing a new musician in a live group without providing them sheet music – they might be off-note no matter how skilled.

For industry partners, NREL provides exactly that capability: to place a device into its true grid environment and see how it “sounds.” NREL’s high-power infrastructure can emulate any electrical grid for partner technologies and can closely measure the technology’s response.

“We develop tools that allow us to quickly switch between frequencies that we are injecting into the grid,” says Przemek Koralewicz, a co-developer of GIST. “And to generate music, we use exactly the same tools.”

Like the singing inverters, a partner’s solar panels, wind turbines or batteries will perform to the frequencies of the grid. Within this megawatt symphony, engineers can identify and correct where the system is vibrating dangerously.

As more grid operators now insist on preliminary stability assessments for new device connections, real-power demonstrations are becoming more important. But not every grid operator or device manufacturer can visit NREL’s advanced research environment for energy systems to validate their interconnection. An alternative might be to model the systems, but such high-fidelity models are generally not available in an open, transparent format – not for devices nor the grid.

Instead, NREL engineers invented a workaround to check stability with nothing more than desktop software and commonly available black-box models that do not disclose intellectual property of wind and PV vendors.

NREL’s GIST software shows that detailed device models are not actually needed; the black-box variety will work just fine. GIST only measures the combined stability of interacting devices, and for that, any model that captures device behavior at its terminals will do. This flexibility allows users to test a far greater range of devices, overcoming all barriers to stability assessments.

Since grid stability is a collective outcome – a harmony of devices and the grid – it must be assessed at junctions where the two meet. GIST does this by interfacing between device and grid models: devices on one side, electrical grid on the other. The software then injects the combined model with frequencies to see how the system responds. This is called an impedance scan.

A GIST scan could take between a few minutes and several hours, depending on the size of the system and the number of power electronic devices, and it can evaluate multiple devices in parallel. In practice, a user would scan at a variety of points throughout the network to gain a complete view of dynamic stability. Currently GIST is available by license and is being applied in several research partnerships. 

The software is especially useful for validating grid-forming controls, which allow renewable energy resources to provide stability in the same way that spinning generators traditionally have. Finding the right mix of grid-forming and grid-following devices will soon preoccupy utilities and system operators everywhere, and GIST can help determine whether a given mix is truly stable. GIST will also complement NREL’s widely collaborative effort to develop grid-forming controls via the UNIFI consortium by providing a tool for researchers to quickly evaluate new technologies and system architectures.

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Mike Streams

Microsoft, Nike and Common Energy have partnered to subscribe Standard Solar’s first community solar project in Oregon. The Skyward Community Solar project, located in Clackamas County, Ore., will generate 3.6 million kWh of clean energy each year, which will be fed into the broader electrical grid.

According to the provisions of Oregon’s Community Solar Program, Microsoft will make up the commercial allocation. Approximately 100 Nike employees have subscribed the residential portion of the project. All subscribers will receive a contracted discount on their electric bills each month and Renewable Energy Credits (REC) proportional to their share of the project’s energy generation.

In addition, 10% of the Skyward generation has been allocated to qualified low- and moderate-income households, who in turn will receive a substantial discount on their electric bills.

“At Microsoft, part of our vision for a sustainable future is advocating for innovative technology that empowers and benefits everyone,” says Katie Ross, Microsoft’s global sustainability program manager. “We are proud to be a lead partner in this initiative that helps achieve environmental goals while also supporting low-income residences with clean, affordable energy. We are excited to partner on this project and be part of bringing a greener grid to the entire Clackamas County community.”

“Nike and our employees are proud to support this new and innovative way to lower carbon emissions and reduce the cost of energy in our backyard,” comments Seana Hannah, Nike’s vice president of sustainable innovation. “We’re also excited that a portion of the project’s savings will be directed to households in our community who need these benefits most.”

“We’re excited that our first completed project in Oregon, a state that requires 50 percent of electricity come from renewable sources by 2040, not only serves the residents of Clackamas County, but also some of the large corporations that employ them,” states Mike Streams, chief development officer at Standard Solar. “More companies are turning to solar to boost their bottom line with a cleaner and more secure form of energy. Standard Solar looks forward to supporting many more solar projects in the state.”

“We are proud and excited to bring more world class partners into the community solar sector,” says Richard Keiser, founder and CEO of Common Energy. “We hope that Microsoft and Nike’s leadership on climate solutions will inspire other businesses and non-profits to support community solar projects across the country.”

Common Energy would like to thank the leadership of the Energy Trust of Oregon, the Oregon Public Utilities Commission, the Community Energy Project, the Oregon Solar and Storage Industries Association (OSSIA), and the Pacific Gas and Electric Company for their respective efforts to bring the project to fruition.

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From left: Mathieu Ablard, Managing Director GBU Renewables for Engie Chile; Gonzalo Feito, regional director Andes for Sungrow Power Supply; Rosaline Corinthien, CEO Engie Chile; César Sáenz, Latam Utility & ESS Manager for Sungrow Power Supply.

Sungrow will provide a 638MWh liquid-cooled battery energy storage system (BESS) to Engie for a solar-plus-storage project in Chile.

The China-based solar PV inverter and energy storage system manufacturer announced the order with the Chile arm of the France-headquartered multinational utility Engie today (13 December).

Sungrow will supply 638MWh of its DC-coupled liquid cooled energy storage product to adjoin the 181.25MWac Coya Solar PV Plant in the northern Antofagasta region. Construction will start this month and the BESS will be fully commissioned by the first trimester of 2024.

Sungrow only recently launched its liquid-cooled BESS product and spoke to Energy-Storage.news about it in a recent webinar, which you can see here.

The BESS the company is providing to Engie, comprised of 232 units, is a five-hour system, meaning a power rating of around 127MW. Sungrow said its solution cuts cost thanks to its pre-assembled and easy installation design, while its cell working environment decreases capacity loss rate.

It claims the new cluster controller can charge and discharge battery racks individually and increase the overall system performance and doesn’t need an additional power conversion system (PCS) or medium-voltage station, thanks to its DC-coupled design.

“Engie continues to advance in our decarbonisation plan. The construction of the BESS Coya will allow us to deliver clean solar energy to the network during the night, increasing the flexibility of the dispatch of the solar plants to the National Electric System, making it more efficient and bringing more security,” said Rosaline Corinthien, CEO of Engie Chile.

Chile is aiming for 70% renewable electricity by 2030 and numerous large-scale solar-plus-storage projects are being developed to help it get there, and the Coya project is not the only one Engie is delivering. Two months ago, it received regulatory approval to add a 180MW/900MWh BESS to its Pampa Camarones solar PV plant, which it is expanding from 6MW today to 300MW.

The country has substantial solar PV facilities already online but less than 100MW of BESS operational today. Utility Colbun claimed to commission the first solar-plus-storage facility in the Atacama desert – widely thought to be the sunniest place in the world – last month.

The government in October passed a major piece of legislation which will allow BESS units to make money in the country’s electricity market without being attached to a solar PV plant, in an effort to incentivise the widespread deployment of the technology.

Read all previous Energy-Storage.news coverage of Sungrow and Engie here and all developments in Chile here.

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More recent rendering of the Energy Vault gravity storage system’s design. Image: Energy Vault.

Berkshire Hathaway-owned NV Energy has been revealed as the ‘large western utility’ that has ordered a 220MW/440MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) from Energy Vault.

Energy Vault will deliver the grid-connected BESS at a site near Las Vegas, Nevada, which will primarily provide load shifting services from peak production hours to peak demand hours. Construction will start in the second quarter of 2023 with completion expected by year-end.

The company, which listed on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year and is known for its EVx gravity-based solution, announced the project discussions a few months ago. It then said in November that it was in the final stages of contract execution.

Marco Terruzzin, chief commercial and product officer, Energy Vault said: “This is Energy Vault’s first public utility customer for our short duration energy storage solutions, which furthers our strategy to be the energy storage company of choice for utilities, IPPs (independent power producers) and large energy users.”

Nevada-focused NV Energy is part of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, part of Warren Buffett’s investment firm and a majority owner of several US power generation firms and utilities. It is the main offtaker for the Gemini solar-plus-storage project, one of the largest being developed anywhere in the world.

Energy Vault has recently been making moves into the short duration BESS segment alongside the long duration gravity-based energy storage solution it is known for. It now has a portfolio of contracted and awarded projects of 4.8GWh, equally distributed between the two segments.

It has also recently expanded into the European BESS market and even green hydrogen, as reported by Energy-Storage.news last month, and is building its first commercial gravity-based solution outside China, for Enel Green Power in Texas.

See all previous coverage of Energy Vault here.

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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