A solar PV array in Arizona. Image: Invinity Energy Systems.

Vanadium flow battery company Invinity Energy Systems has sold a 1.3MWh system to Kinetic Solution for a microgrid project serving a data centre in Arizona.

Invinity has bagged the order for six of its VS3 batteries which will be installed alongside a 400kWp solar PV array at the data centre in the state bordering California and Mexico. Kinetic has paid a deposit and Invinity will start building the batteries shortly for a delivery date in early 2023.

Invinity’s vanadium flow batteries were chosen because of their robustness in high-temperature environments and their ability to perform long duration energy discharge, defined as 4-24 hours, during power outages. Arizona has a particularly hot and dry climate, and a press release said outages are a regular occurrence.

Kinetic will use the microgrid to provide 24/7 renewable power and mitigate the risk of outages for the data centre. The company provides distributed energy solutions, specialising in microgrid infrastructure for commercial and industrial (C&I) sites across the US including data centres, manufacturing sites, distribution hubs and EV charging parks.

The deal will generate investment tax credits (ITCs) for Kinetic thanks to the recently-passed Inflation Reduction Act, the press release said (though ITCs have existed for co-located projects for some time).

“This deal embodies a number of positive developments: the growing awareness of the need to power datacenters with renewable energy, an opportunity to work with Kinetic, an emerging expert in solar microgrids, and the receipt of U.S. government support for energy storage through the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Matt Harper, chief commercial officer, Invinity Energy Systems.

Data centres’ need for a steady supply of power, and the potentially huge commercial ramifications of outages, have made them fertile ground for non-lithium battery technologies which can claim to be more resilient than the industry incumbent (although lithium-ion battery system integrators are still winning orders in the segment).

A Microsoft data centre at an undisclosed location, thought to be in the US, recently installed a battery storage system from liquid metal battery solution company Ambri. ZincFive, one of a handful of companies using the mineral for their battery products, is installing its solution in Wyoming for a local data centre company.

Similarly, iron flow battery company ESS Inc also scored a 400kWh order earlier this year for installation at a data security company’s facility.

Harper recently spoke to Energy-Storage.news about the benefits of gaining key safety certification standards like UL1973 and NFPA855 to commercialisation.

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Black coal, the closest competitor to battery storage, will be all but off the system by the mid to late 2030s. Image: Flickr user John Englart.

Hundreds of megawatts of new large-scale battery storage in Australia will increase competition and put downward pressure on the costs of ancillary services to help balance the grid.

The frequency control ancillary services (FCAS) market is administered by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). It is open to a broad range of energy technologies and has increasingly become an opportunity for battery energy storage systems (BESS) to earn revenues by helping maintain the electricity network’s optimum operating frequency.

In May, quarterly figures released by AEMO highlighted that in Q1 2022, for the first time ever, BESS was the technology type providing the largest percentage of frequency regulation in the market. Across the eight different FCAS markets, batteries took a 31% share, 10% ahead of either black coal or hydroelectric, the next two biggest contributors.

According to new analysis by Cornwall Insight Australia, 736MW of new BESS is expected to be installed and connected to the National Electricity Market (NEM) by the end of 2023, which will lead to greater competition in the market and therefore lower prices.

This will likely be most felt in the Raise Regulation market, which is used to correct a minor drop in frequency, with Cornwall Insight Australia forecasting prices will drop to an average of AU$10/MW/hr (US$6.27/Mw/hr) by the middle of this decade, from about AU$15/MW/hr today.

The role of battery storage in the market is predicted to continue growing dramatically, with about half of all FCAS services procured (between 40% and 55%) in the 2024 financial year to come from BESS.

Forecasting further out for the next couple of decades, by the early 2040s, between 70% and 90% of Raise Regulation and Lower Contingency – the latter accounting for three markets where assets must respond in a range between 6 seconds and 5 minutes to prevent a major rise in frequency following a contingency event – will be provided by BESS.

The trend is likely to be similar in the other markets as well, but Cornwall Insight’s expectation was that it would be most pronounced in those two ancillary services categories.

Pledges and policy put market in line for at least 4,300MW of new BESS by 2030

The development of the overall market for battery storage in Australia is already accelerating, and over the next few years to 2030, state policy strategies such as the New South Wales Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap will lead to the addition of about 4,300MW of new grid storage, the consultancy group said.

This will in turn aid the continued lowering of prices and ultimately costs to the system and bill payers. If more ambitious policies are adopted – two examples being the state of Victoria’s proposed 6.3GW by 2035 energy storage deployment target and the government of Queensland’s Energy Storage Strategy being prepared for publication – there could be even greater changes in market dynamics.

Some, such as the national Clean Energy Council industry body and Victorian Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University have proposed the adoption of a nationwide energy storage target, along the lines of Renewable Energy Targets that have proven successful.

In an article published in our quarterly journal PV Tech Power earlier this year, Cornwall Insight Australia managing consultant Ben Cerini noted that not only are batteries good for the FCAS market, but the FCAS market is good for batteries too.

About 80% to 90% of grid-scale battery asset revenues in Australia typically come from FCAS, Cerini said, with only the remainder from energy trading.

Today, other technologies playing in the FCAS market along with batteries, black coal and hydro albeit to a much lesser extent are combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT), brown coal, demand side response, open cycle gas turbines (OCGT) and liquid fuel.

Batteries will continue eroding coal’s market position, but that competitive dynamic all but disappears as the 21st Century progresses, with coal power plants earmarked for retirement with hardly any expected to be in operation by the 2030s.

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An industrial battery storage system being installed in Ontario, Canada. Image: Sungrid.

The government of Ontario, Canada, has ordered the procurement of at least 1,500MW and up to 2,500MW of energy storage.

The drive was announced on Friday (7 October), as the government looks to ensure electricity supply is sufficient and reliable as demand is forecast to increase significantly over the next few years as the province’s population grows.

In other words, while Ontario currently operates on a surplus of electricity resources and has been forecast to be able to do so until at least 2025, according to modelling by the Ontario Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) after that date the margins become thinner.

A total 4,000MW of new electricity supply will be procured, and within that sits the energy storage target, alongside a planned 1,500MW of new natural gas generation. The IESO had recommended to the government that grid-scale battery storage should play a key role in the push for new resources.

Trade association Energy Storage Canada sent a statement to media including Energy-Storage.news applauding the Friday announcement made by Ontario Minister of Energy Todd Smith.

The announcement signaled that the provincial government, led by Premier Doug Ford, recognises “…the critical role energy storage resources must play in ensuring reliability, resiliency and helping to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in Ontario’s electricity grid,” Energy Storage Canada executive director Justin Rangooni said.

Rangooni has blogged occasionally for this site on various topics around unlocking the potential of energy storage in the North American country, often with a focus on Ontario.

IESO’s forecast was made in its Annual Planning Outlook document published in 2021. Energy minister Smith had more recently tasked the system operator with providing recommendations on the eligibility of natural gas projects in its electric capacity procurements.

The system operator suggested that around 2,500MW of energy storage should be procured to provide flexibility to the energy system, with the storage assets charging during times of low demand or surplus renewable generation and then outputting to the grid at times of peak demand.

Most of that new supply should be online by 2027, the IESO said in the Resource Eligibility Interim Report it produced in response to Smith’s request.

It also recommended that other forms of low carbon energy should be procured, such as hybrid resources – power plants that combine renewable energy generation with storage – or biofuels and potentially other technologies.

The addition of the new gas capacity meanwhile would help mitigate against global supply chain delays and help balance out the system, the IESO said. It recommended that the majority of gas capacity additions should be made by upgrading or expanding existing facilities.

IESO VP of planning, conservation and resource adequacy Chuck Farmer said it was important for Ontario to be able to turn to a diverse set of resources to meet those predicted mid-decade energy shortfalls. That included being able to call on electricity imports and the addition of more energy efficiency programmes, Farmer said.

Electrification enabling growth of Ontario economy, minister says

Ontario currently has electricity generation capacity of about 38GW available to it from nuclear, hydroelectric, gas, wind, and solar PV, but annual electricity demand is forecast to grow at about 1.7% every year for the next 20 years.

The province has in fact been home to a fairly robust energy storage market for a while. However, this market is centred around the Global Adjustment Charge.

That’s a tariff or levy that large industrial users of electricity have to pay for power consumed at their facilities during peak times. As such, it has led to a lot of megawatt-scale behind-the-meter battery energy storage systems (BESS) that help those industrial entities lower their bills and grid power consumption, rather than front-of-the-meter energy resources of the type sought by the government.

The IESO is releasing another report later this year, ‘Pathways to Decarbonization’, which it said will include further recommendations on the role of natural gas in Ontario. The system operator manages Ontario’s electricity network in real-time, plans for future needs and aims to implement efficient market design.

“Our government is building the electricity generation and storage needed to support our success in driving electrification and attracting new jobs to the province including unprecedented investments, from electric vehicles and battery manufacturing to clean steelmaking,” energy minister Todd Smith said.

“Saying no to jobs and investment is a non-starter for our government. An unreliable system with brownouts and blackouts is a non-starter for our government. With today’s actions we are ensuring that the electricity will continue to be there for families and businesses when they flip the switch.”

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Mass Megawatts has improved an additional 20% with a redesign of its patent pending solar tracker to maximize the albedo or solar reflection effect of receiving electric power output from the backside of solar panels that can accept solar rays from both sides of the solar panel. The cost-saving improvement is possible since the solar tracker uses a low-cost method for protection against high-wind and hurricane-related events. The solar panels attached to the tracker platform would force the face of the panels to turn 90 degrees from the direction of the wind.  The system allows a slip feature during high-wind conditions. Once the wind returns to less dangerous levels, the tracker resumes its operations. The “yaw sideways” technique avoids the need for additional material and cost needed to protect against high-wind events.

In addition to the increased power output from enhancing the solar panel backside reflection, Mass Megawatts has enhanced its patent-pending, solar tracking technology to improve energy production levels by an additional 7% with the adjustment of the panels based on the sun’s altitude each day.  These adjustments are also expected to improve the power generation level of the solar panels.

Mass Megawatts is developing a patented pending, Mass Megawatts Solar Tracking System (STS) which is designed to automatically adjust the position of solar panels throughout the day to receive an optimal level of direct sunlight. Unlike other solar tracking technologies, the Mass Megawatts STS utilizes a low-cost structure that adds stability to the overall system while also improving energy production levels. The STS utilizes a proprietary mechanical innovation to limit dynamic and static loading on the tracker, which can occur during periods of high wind and extreme weather. The technology reduces wind-related stresses and system downtime. The STS allows Mass Megawatts to lower the cost of material and reduce the number of solar panels needed to generate the rated capacity.

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Ministers at the joint meeting. Image: Twitter/@SecGranholm.

The US and India have launched a joint energy storage taskforce to support the integration of new renewable energy resources.

The announcement was made in a Strategic Clean Energy Partnership Ministerial Joint Statement on 7 October, which followed a meeting between US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and India’s Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri.

“As climate and clean energy leaders, the United States and India share a common vision to deploy clean energy at scale during this critical decade to reduce emissions and achieve climate change mitigation goals, taking into account different national circumstances,” the statement read.

The two parties reviewed progress across a range of energy sector partnerships and said that they would enhance bilateral efforts in a range of areas.

The first listed was strengthening the power grid to ensure reliable, affordable, and resilient clean energy supply including through smart grids and energy storage.

The new Energy Storage Task Force aims to support the large-scale integration of renewable energy needed to support the clean energy transition, the statement said.

India is in the process of tendering large amounts of energy storage, standalone and co-located, as previously reported by Energy-Storage.news.

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Prime Minister Modi at the Sun Temple as part of the inauguration visit. Image: Narendra Modi official Twitter account.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has attended an inauguration event for a community energy network enabling an entire town to source all its electricity from solar PV.

The first-of-its-kind project combines a 6MW solar PV array with a 6MW/15MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) and smart controls as well as solar rooftops “on all feasible buildings,” as described by India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE).

It is sited at Modhera, home of Modhera Sun Temple, a location in the state of Gujarat chosen partly for its symbolic significance. The energy network enables the temple, the town of Modhera and a nearby village where the PV array is located, to source all their electricity needs from renewables 24/7.

Prime Minister Modi was at the event yesterday (9 October), calling it a “big day for Modhera as it takes a giant leap towards harnessing solar power,” on Twitter.  

Modi, as former chief minister for the state of Gujarat, is said to have had the vision for the project, aiming for it to demonstrate a replicable model for enabling access to electricity in towns and villages, from low carbon sources.

MNRE had tendered for the project in 2020. In June, as work on the project came towards completion, Energy-Storage.news reported that it included 271x 1kW rooftop PV installations. The project first came online in summer 2021, with the official inauguration held over until this year.

According to the MNRE, there are now more than 1,300 rooftop solar systems in Modhera, enabling residents and local government buildings to save more than two-thirds of their electricity bill costs. As part of the project, the area now also has electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure and smart metering of electricity.

The 6MW ground mounted PV array. Image: GPM / Mahindra Susten.

Smart controls were provided by digital renewable energy services company GreenPowerMonitor (GPM), a subsidiary of DNV.

GPM’s regional manager Sergi Bosque Garcia said in June that creating the solar-battery hybrid project was challenging, but “opens a wide range of possibilities to provide 100% renewable and clean energy to local communities,” and could be replicated “in other regions with similar needs”.

Bi-directional power conversion system (PCS) units were provided by FIMER, an inverter and power electronics manufacturer headquartered in Italy with an established Indian market presence.

The project was reported to have cost a total of about US$8.4 million, paid jointly by the Gujarat state government and the national Union government via the MNRE.

India is targeting – and achieving – massive renewable energy growth, targeting the addition of 500GW of non-fossil fuel energy resources by 2030, having already surpassed the 150GW mark this year.

Where most of that new capacity is likely to be utility-scale wind, solar and battery storage, the government also has policy targets to increase electricity access for communities that don’t yet have it, or only have unreliable grid access, particularly in rural and remote areas.

On a related note, but on a bigger scale, various tenders have been held and power purchase agreements (PPAs) signed in India for supply of round-the-clock (RTC) renewable energy for utilities and corporations.

One prominent example of that is a 400MW PPA signed by independent power producer (IPP) ReNew Power with the national Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), signed in August 2021.

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Executives from Wärtsilä and partner companies along with government minister Rob Jetten (centre/sixth from left). Image: Wärtsilä.

GIGA Buffalo, the largest battery energy storage system in the Netherlands provided by technology group Wärtsilä, has been officially inaugurated after 10 months of construction.

The ribbon-cutting ceremony last week (6 October) marks the opening of the 24MW/48MWh project, which uses Wärtsilä’s grid-scale energy storage product Gridsolv Quantum and its energy management system (EMS), the GEMS Digital Energy Platform.

GIGA Buffalo, developed by Dutch company GIGA Storage, is co-located with both wind and solar assets at Wageningen University & Research test centre in Lelystad, just east of Amsterdam.

Rob Jetten, Minister for Climate and Energy for the Netherlands, and the CEO of GIGA Storage Ruud Nijs led the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the project, which is in the service territory of grid operator Liander.

Whether the system is currently online and participating in the market is not 100% clear, with Wärtsilä saying that it was ‘completing the commissioning’ of the project on the day of the ceremony while Nijs described the project as ‘online’. It uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells.

“We’re pleased to see this landmark project complete construction and come online. Battery storage is critical for the stabilisation of the country’s electric grid and imperative for reaching our clean energy goals,” said Ruud Nijs, the CEO of GIGA Storage BV.

The developer is leasing the battery storage system to energy supplier Eneco on a long-term basis, and Nijs gave an interview to Energy-Storage.news in January discussing this storage-as-a-service model.

The local grid has reached maximum capacity for the feed-in of wind and solar. Eneco will use the battery system to alleviate intermittency from renewable energy resources and to regulate energy frequency while adding reliability to the grid. It will also monetise the system by optimising renewable assets and providing peak demand capacity.

GIGA Storage has partnered with Liander, one of seven grid operators in the Netherlands, on two other battery storage projects, in Amsterdam and Alkmaar as previously reported by Energy-Storage.news. It is exploring the use of time-limited contracts where the batteries can only charge or discharge at certain times, an idea which could help more storage be approved in future.

This is because, currently, grid operators have to consider the maximum amount that all connected resources could request simultaneously, limiting how much they can approve.

Wärtsilä cited reports claiming that the Netherlands needs 29-54GW of energy storage by 2050 to achieve its renewable energy goals, including a 95% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

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Inovat battery storage enclosure at the company’s factory in Ankara, the Turkish capital. Image: Inovat.

The approach taken by Turkey’s government and regulatory authorities to adapt energy market rules will create “exciting” opportunities for energy storage and renewables.

According to Can Tokcan, a managing partner at Inovat, a Turkey-headquartered energy storage EPC and solutions manufacturer, new legislation is expected to be adopted soon that will drive a major uptick in energy storage capacity.

Back in March, Energy-Storage.news heard from Tokcan that the energy storage market in Turkey was “fully open”. That came after the country’s Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA) ruled in 2021 that energy companies should be permitted to develop energy storage facilities, whether standalone, paired with grid-tied energy generation or for integration with energy consumption – such as at large industrial facilities.

Now, energy laws are being adapted further to accommodate energy storage applications that enable the management and addition of new renewable energy capacity, while mitigating grid capacity constraints.

“Renewable energy is very romantic and nice, but it creates a lot of issues on the grid,” Tokcan told Energy-Storage.news in another interview.

Energy storage is needed to smooth the generation profile of variable solar PV and wind generation, “otherwise, it’s always natural gas or coal fired power plants that are actually accommodating for these fluctuations between supply and demand”.

Developers, investors, or power producers will be able to deploy additional renewable energy capacity, if energy storage with the same nameplate output as the renewable energy facility’s capacity in megawatts is installed.

“As an example, if say you have a storage facility of 10MW electrical on the AC side and you guarantee that you will be installing 10MW of storage, they will be increasing your capacity to 20MW. So, an additional 10MW will be added without any sort of competition for the license,” Tokcan said.

“So instead of having a fixed pricing scheme [for energy storage], the government is providing this incentive for the solar or wind capacity.”

A second new route is that standalone energy storage developers can apply for grid connection capacity at transmission substation level.

Where those previous legislative changes opened up the Turkish market, the newest changes will likely lead to significant development of new renewable energy projects in 2023, Tokcan’s company Inovat believes.

Instead of the government needing to invest in infrastructure to accommodate that additional capacity, it is giving that role to private companies in the form of energy storage deployments that can prevent transformers on the electrical grid from becoming overloaded.

“It should be considered as additional renewable capacity, but also additional [grid] connection capacity as well,” Tokcan said.

New rules will mean new renewable energy can be added

As of July this year, Turkey had 100GW of installed power generation capacity. According to official figures, this included about 31.5GW of hydroelectric power, 25.75GW of natural gas, 20GW of coal with about 11GW of wind and 8GW of solar PV respectively and the remainder comprising geothermal and biomass power.

The main route for adding large-scale renewable energy is through tenders for feed-in tariff (FiT) licenses, through which the government wants to add 10GW of solar and 10GW of wind over 10 years through reverse auctions in which the lowest-cost bids win.

With the country targeting net zero emissions by 2053, those new rule changes for front-of-meter energy storage with renewables could enable quicker and greater progress.

Turkey’s energy law has been updated and a public comment period was recently held, with legislators expected to announce soon how changes will be implemented.

One of the unknowns around that is what sort of energy storage capacity – in megawatt-hours (MWh) – will be required per megawatt of renewable energy, and therefore storage, that is deployed.

Tokcan said it’s likely it will be somewhere between 1.5 and 2 times the megawatt value per installation, but remains to be determined, partly as a result of stakeholder and public consultation.

Inovat’s energy management system (EMS) user interface, showing the onsite energy generation, consumption, storage throughput, CO2 emissions and more from one of the company’s own industrial facilities. Image: Andy Colthorpe / Solar Media

Turkey’s electric vehicle market and industrial facilities present storage opportunities too

There are also a couple of other changes that Tokcan said also look very positive for Turkey’s energy storage sector.

One of those is in the e-mobility market, where regulators are issuing licenses to operate electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. Roughly 5% to 10% of those will be DC fast charging and the rest AC charging units. As Tokcan points out, DC fast charge stations are likely to require some energy storage to buffer them from the grid.

Another is in the commercial and industrial (C&I) space, Turkey’s so-called “unlicensed” renewable energy market – as opposed to installations with FiT licenses – where businesses install renewable energy, often solar PV on their rooftop or at a separate location on the same distribution network.

Previously, surplus generation could be sold into the grid, which led to many installations being larger than the consumption at the point of use in the factory, processing plant, commercial building or similar.

“That also has changed recently, and now you can only get reimbursed for the amount that you actually consumed,” Can Tokcan said.  

“Because if you do not manage this solar generation capacity or generation potential, then of course, it actually starts becoming a burden on the grid. I think now, this has been realised, and that’s why they, the government and necessary institutions, are working more on speeding up the storage applications.”

Inovat itself has a pipeline of about 250MWh, mostly in Turkey but with some projects elsewhere and the company has recently opened a German office to target European opportunities.

Tokcan noted than when we last spoke in March, the Turkey’s installed energy storage base stood at a couple of megawatts. Today, about 1GWh of projects have been proposed and have gone to advanced stages of permitting and Inovat predicts that the new regulatory environment could propel the Turkish market to “about 5GWh or so”.

“I think the outlook is changing for the better, the market is getting bigger,” Tokcan said.

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Puesh Kumar

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has released a long-term evaluation of the cybersecurity considerations associated with distributed energy resources (DER), such as distributed solar, storage and other clean energy technologies, and the potential risks to the electric grid over the next 10 years. The study finds that while a cyberattack on today’s DER systems would have a negligible impact on grid reliability depending on grid conditions and regional DER installation and integration, the projected growth and evolution in DER deployment could pose cybersecurity challenges for future electric power grid operations if cybersecurity is not taken into consideration. The report presents strategies that DER operators and electric power entities could undertake to make the grid more secure, as well as policy recommendations for decisionmakers.

“We have a strategic opportunity like we’ve never had before,” states Puesh Kumar, director of DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response (CESER). “We can address both climate risks by deploying clean energy solutions and integrate cybersecurity into those systems from the ground-up. This is good for U.S. energy security and U.S. national security. This report is meant to start these critical conversations between the clean energy and cybersecurity communities, particularly as we begin to make historic investments in the U.S. electric grid through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).”         

“To scale up clean energy deployment, we must ensure that our electricity systems are secure and resilient to disruption,” says Alejandro Moreno, acting assistant secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. “This crucial report lays out key cybersecurity challenges associated with wide-scale distributed energy deployment so clean energy industries and other stakeholders can work to reduce risks and protect American families.”

DOE has maintained the importance of ensuring power grid cybersecurity while achieving critical decarbonization goals essential to addressing climate change. DOE’s goal is to ensure that cybersecurity is fully engineered from ideation to deployment in relevant clean energy research, development, and deployment efforts. This “cyber by design” strategy leverages opportunities early in the design lifecycle to proactively reduce cyber risk rather than attempt expensive aftermarket bolt-on efforts. 

Large energy resources, like a utility-scale wind or solar plant, are connected to the transmission grid, while DER are smaller in scale and are connected to the distribution grid where residences and businesses are also connected. There are about 90 GW of DER installed today, half of which are rooftop solar systems – accounting for over 3 million systems. DER deployment is expected to quadruple by 2025 to approximately 380 GW. Each of those systems uses software and networks to integrate with electric power operations, and those systems could be hacked. Depending on systems conditions, a fleet of DER aggregated to significant size could pose a reliability challenge if under the control of an advanced, capable attacker, and if cybersecurity considerations and threat mitigation strategies are ignored.    

The Cybersecurity Considerations for Distributed Energy Resources on the U.S. Electric Grid report, developed by the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response, and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, provides recommendations for the DER industry, energy sector, and government to take action and secure current and future systems. The report also acknowledges the ongoing need to engage with DER industry stakeholders to develop cybersecurity standards and best practices, provide education and training, and establish information sharing mechanisms. Broad industry involvement is key to developing robust DER cybersecurity standards. As outlined in the report, DOE also intends to fund research on next-generation DER defenses, including security-by-design and the recently released Cyber-Informed Engineering strategy, to ensure security in a decarbonized grid.

Deployment of wind, solar, and energy storage will help to achieve the nation’s clean energy goals, diversify the electricity supply, and make the grid more resilient to outages, making investment in security for DER essential to safeguarding the nation’s energy infrastructure.

The study’s key recommendations include adopting best practices and meeting minimum security requirements. DER providers can utilize multifactor authentication encryption, and other tools to secure their devices. Many cybersecurity standards exist and can be used to develop security technologies and measures appropriate for their use.

It also recommends implementing good governance, designing security into utility and DER systems from the beginning, and making security a priority for all employees, suppliers, and customers. The study emphasizes incentivizing cyber resilience to go beyond the standards and work to actively detect threats and adopt a zero-trust approach to verify commands and data.

Read the full report here.

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Interior at the first 500kW/2,500kWh commercial-scale test facility for Lockheed Martin’s Gridstar Flow product. Image: Lockheed Martin.

Energy infrastructure group TC Energy has begun work on a solar PV power plant in Alberta, Canada, the company’s first solar project.

While the first phase of TC Energy’s Saddlebrook Solar Project will see the installation of a solar system with 81MW of bifacial solar PV modules. In the second, a flow battery supplied by Lockheed Martin will be added to it, with 6.5MW output and 40MWh capacity, enabling the solar stored to be dispatched to the grid at peak times.

TC Energy is known mostly for natural gas and oil pipeline energy infrastructure development but has contracted for 400MW of renewable energy through power purchase agreements (PPAs) signed over the past two years.

It is also, like many legacy energy companies, considering entering the hydrogen business, exploring plans to build a 60 tonne-a-day hydrogen hub at one of its natural gas storage facilities.

The company said it will invest CA$146 million (US$106.4 million) to build the Saddlebrook plant, located near the small Alberta town of Aldersyde at an industrial park.

All regulatory approvals and permits for the project have been cleared and TC Energy has scheduled for construction to be completed during next year.

Provincial non-profit corporation Emissions Reduction Alberta is supporting the project with CA$10 million funding. Some of Emissions Reduction Alberta’s money comes from contributions paid by industrial groups to partly compensate for their greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting activities and to date support for more than 100 projects has been pledged.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news in December 2021, the funding is to help cover the cost of the flow battery energy storage system.

It will be one of Lockheed Martin’s first deployments of its new product, called Gridstar Flow and following on from its Gridstar Lithium solution, which is already on the market and in use at various sites.

The aerospace, defense and engineering multinational bought out SunCatalyx, a flow battery company spun out of labs at MIT, in 2014 and began developing what would become Gridstar Flow, announcing its first commercial-scale test project at a Lockheed Martin lab in 2020.

That test started up shortly after the company had signed an agreement with TC Energy to explore potential North American sites for a project, before settling on Saddlebrook. The University of Calgary will work with them to research the system’s performance and see what can be learned about the suitability of solar with energy storage for Canada’s energy transition.

One of two flow battery projects at solar plants supported by Emissions Reduction Alberta funding

Lockheed Martin is thought to be investing about CA$9 million into the project. While at the time of the December 2021 announcement the PV capacity was given as 102.5MW and the flow battery was described as a 6.5MW/52MWh (eight-hour) system, a project info webpage created by TC Energy puts the flow battery at 6.5MW/40MWh and the bifacial solar array at 81MW instead.

In common with fellow major engineering multinational Honeywell which has also developed a proprietary flow battery technology, Lockheed Martin has kept the chemistry of Gridstar Flow firmly under wraps so far. Along with Saddlebrook in Alberta, the company is also deploying a 1MW/10MWh system at Fort Carson, a US Army facility in Colorado, US, where an 8.5MWh Gridstar Lithium system is already in use.

Emissions Reduction Alberta is supporting another solar-plus-storage project with a flow battery, this time with a less mysterious electrolyte chemistry: Anglo-American vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) provider Invinity Energy Systems will install one of its devices at Chappice Lake Solar+Storage.

In that instance, Invinity will work with project developer Elemental Energy to deploy a 2.8MW/8.4MWh VRFB in a DC-coupled configuration at the 21MWp new-build solar PV plant. Emissions Reduction Alberta will contribute another CA$10 million towards the total expected CA$40 million cost of Chappice Lake.

Alberta is the Canadian province most dependent on coal for its electricity and is home to a big fossil fuels industry sector, including tar sands oil production. However, in recent years, development of renewable energy and in particular solar-plus-storage and wind-plus-storage appear to have picked up pace.

The province got its first utility-scale battery system, at a wind farm, in 2020, and a few hundred megawatts of solar-plus-storage projects are in the development pipelines. These include three solar farms with more than 700MW of PV generation capacity tied to 280MW of battery energy storage systems (BESS) from developers Greengate Power Corporation and Westbridge, as reported by Energy-Storage.news in March this year.  

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