Equinor already owns a stake in UK battery storage developer Noriker Power. Image: Noriker Power.

Equinor has approved the final investment decision of its first battery energy storage asset in the UK.

The move follows the Norwegian oil and gas giant acquiring a 45% stake in UK utility-scale storage and stability services developer Noriker Power in December 2021.

In addition to this equity investment, Equinor has a strategic cooperation framework with Noriker Power that allows them to directly participate in the development of assets in the UK, of which Blandford Road will be the first.

Blandford Road is a 25MW/50MWh battery storage asset located in Dorset, where it will connect into the SSE distribution network. It will use CATL lithium-ion battery racks.

To read the full version of this story, visit Solar Power Portal.

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Lon Huber

Duke Energy has filed proposals with the Public Service Commission of South Carolina to create new renewable energy programs for customers and expand an existing program in order to give South Carolina customers the option to supplement their power usage with 100% renewable power.

“Many of our largest customers prioritize renewable power sources and are making decarbonization a long-term part of their business plans,” says Lon Huber, Duke Energy’s senior vice president of pricing and customer solutions. “Duke Energy is proud to offer these customers a wide range of options including the ability to match their hourly use with carbon-free energy in one of the country’s first 24×7 clean energy programs.”

That program – Renewable Choice – would allow large-load customers to contract with either of Duke Energy’s South Carolina utilities to provide locally sourced environmental attributes, including renewable energy certificates (RECs), generated from both utility-owned generation assets as well as third-party owned generation assets and could include energy-storage options.

If approved, South Carolina would have one of the first tariffed programs for time-aligned clean energy in the country.

These proposals come after extensive conversations with customers, developers and advocate groups to learn more about what they need to achieve their carbon and sustainability goals, according to the utility.

Another program being proposed – Clean Energy Impact – is for non-residential customers that want to claim a certain percentage of renewable energy through environmental attribute purchases in support of corporate sustainability goals, or for residential customers that would like to support the local renewable energy industry.

Changes are also being requested for an existing program – Green Source Advantage – an option that allows large customers to offset their power purchases by securing renewable energy from projects connected to the Duke Energy grid. The customer may count the renewable energy generated to satisfy sustainability or carbon-free goals.

Proposed changes include the ability for customers to contract for up to 100% of their energy use compared to the current approximately 30%, as well as expanding the number of solar resources available to customers under the program. As with Renewable Choice, customers can also combine energy storage with their project – allowing them to align the production of renewable energy with their energy load.

These programs are to be sourced from solar generation currently going through the companies’ competitive procurement processes. If approved, both current customers and customers who are in the process of locating their business to South Carolina can sign up for these programs in advance.

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Cummins Inc. has installed its second largest solar array at Rocky Mount Engine Plant (RMEP) in North Carolina. The 3.62 MW solar farm, which sits on 14 acres, produces power directly sent to the mid-range diesel and natural gas engine plant, reducing its commercial energy needs.

The solar installation will produce around 5.6 million kWh of power annually and more than 136 million kWh over 25 years.

“We have ambitious sustainability goals in PLANET 2050 – aligned with the Paris climate accords and a target to be carbon-neutral by 2050 – and are fully committed to achieving them,” says Jennifer Rumsey, president and CEO of Cummins. “To get there, our efforts must touch our products, customers, facilities, employees and supply chain. This project is a reflection of that, and our goal of reducing absolute greenhouse gas emissions from facilities and operations by half by 2030. I was delighted to participate in the ribbon cutting of the solar farm this spring, and proud to see it now in operation and making an impact.”

Uniqiue to RMEP, the project uses solar tracking panels. This system has a single-axis tracker allowing the panels to arc and track the sun as it rises and sets. This increases system efficiency without having to install more panels. The tracking panels were installed with a ground mount, due to the project having the available space and in turn being able to maximize the system size for optimal exposure.

The solar array was installed by the RMEP Engineering and Corporate Environmental teams to reduce purchased electrical consumption.

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Renu Energy Solutions, a locally owned and operated solar installer based in North Carolina and South Carolina, has partnered with Tesla to bring the Tesla Solar Roof tiles to the Carolinas. As the first certified Tesla Solar Roof installer in North Carolina, the Renu Energy Solutions team is now offering residential customers its innovative tiles made with tempered glass three times stronger than standard roofing tiles and engineered for all-weather durability. Renu is also among only a handful of certified Tesla Solar Roof installers in South Carolina.

Tesla Solar Roof allows for maximum solar production while maintaining a seamless and integrated roof design to match architectural style. Following this certification and the completion of initial local home installations, the Renu team is actively marketing the Solar Roof to new residential customers as well as ones who may be pursuing a roof replacement.

Featuring a 25-year tile and power warranty, Tesla Solar Roof incorporates both passive and active tiles to optimize the absorption of the sun’s rays. In order to provide a uniform roof design, there are various components in the solar roof system to accommodate different roof styles.

“For over a decade, Renu has been bringing clean energy to the Carolinas. As a proud partner of Tesla’s for the past five years, this next step of becoming one of the first Tesla Roof Certified Installers in the Carolinas is a natural progression,” says John Sheldon, director of new business capabilities at Renu Energy Solutions. “We are honored that our body of work and quality customer care have earned this vote of confidence from Tesla. This will enable us to continue being industry educators, as well as trusted service providers, with each new solar installation.”

“We’re excited about a new install partner offering Tesla Solar Roof to customers in the Carolinas,” comments Braden Ankeney, account manager at Tesla.

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The state of New Jersey has made slow progress in reaching its energy storage deployment targets. Image: Praneeth Thalla.

The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities has proposed a number of policies to incentivise the deployment of standalone energy storage, to help hit a 2GW target.

The US state has statutory mandates for deployment, of 600MW by the end of 2021 and 2,000MW by 2030, though only 497MW has been deployed and 420MW of that is a pumped hydro facility (as fas as the Board is aware).

But, it said, energy storage investments that would save bill-payers money often do not get built because developers “…generally can only monetise a fraction of the benefits they produce”.

The Board is proposing to create separate energy storage programmes creating incentives for front-of-meter (FTM) and behind-the-meter (BTM) energy storage projects connected to New Jersey’s electric distribution companies (EDC).

The incentives will only apply to projects going online after the programme is implemented. FTM and BTM are being grouped into two market segments; Grid Supply and Distributed/Customer Level, respectively.

At least 30% of the incentive will be in the form of a fixed annual incentive, paid in US$/kWh of energy storage capacity continent on up-time performance metrics, the Board said.

It will be established through a declining block structure to establish a market-based incentive while also providing the industry clear insights into the incentive value for energy storage resources. There will be different pricing structures for each market segment.

The remainder of the incentive programme will be a pay-for-performance mechanism.

For Grid Supply projects, payment will be based on the amount of carbon emissions abated through operation of the energy storage device. This will be calculated using the marginal carbon intensity of the wholesale electric grid (set by grid operator PJM) at the time the energy is discharged, minus the carbon intensity of the energy drawn during the charging interval.

In essence, this means the more renewable load shifting that the energy storage unit does, the more it will be paid. While energy storage units today do as much as 6GWh of load shifting a day in the California market as of February, little of this has been shifting renewables.

For the Distributed/Customer Sited segment, payment will be based on the successful injection of power into the distribution system when called upon by the EDC during certain performancehours. A portion of the Distributed storage incentive will also be reserved for projects located in or directly serving overburdened communities.

Eligibility for the incentive programmes will be technology-neutral and based only on meeting functionalrequirements in a cost-effective manner, the Board added.

The Board is also proposing that private investors be allowed to own and operate the energy storage devices, allowing them to stack revenues from multiple sources.

These would include the wholesale electricity market for Grid Supply projects and, for the Distributed segment, utilising energy storage to actively manage their energy usage to reduce electricity costs or to participate in a Distributed Energy Resource (DER) aggregation service.

The programme is designed to provide ratepayers in the state with a variety of benefits, the Board said. These include carbon savings, hosting capacity improvements and improving system resilience.

Read the whole Straw Proposal, contained in the ‘In the matter of the New Jersey Energy Storage Incentive Program’ notice here.

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Image: Form Energy.

Form Energy has raised US$450 million from investors including ArcellorMittal, bringing the multi-day battery startup’s total investment to date to US$800 million.

The tech company announced the successful Series E funding round yesterday, led by TPG Rise Climate, an impact investing platform for alternative asset manager TPG’s TPG Rise fund, which itself closed in April with US$7.3 billion to invest.

Form Energy is developing and commercialising a novel battery technology based on iron and air, with which it is targeting applications that require 100 hours of energy storage, possibly even more.

The basic principle behind it is the reversible oxidation aka rusting, of iron as the battery discharges, while applying electrical current to it as it charges converts the rust back to iron, emitting only oxygen.  

That means it could enable renewable energy to be a direct replacement for fossil fuels on the grid, helping energy suppliers ride out quiet periods of wind and solar PV generation, company CEO Mateo Jaramilo, a former executive at Tesla, told Energy-Storage.news in a 2021 interview.

The company’s first pilot project was announced in 2020, with Form set to supply a 1MW battery system with up to 150 hours duration to Great River Energy, a Minnesota utility aiming to radically lower its dependence on coal. Discussions were also said to be underway with Georgia Power for a potential pilot with the southern US utility a few months ago too.

At the recent RE+ 2022 clean energy industry event in Anaheim, California, Form Energy senior business development manager Molly Bales appeared in a panel discussion on long-duration energy storage and its role in the market.

While long duration is itself an loosely-defined term, with some definitions talking about systems with four-hour duration or longer, fellow panellists Kiran Kumarasamy of Fluence and Sara Kayal of Lightsource bp both said they felt the term applies to eight hours or longer.

Bales noted that while there will be a need for diverse storage technologies on the modern electricity grid, including shorter duration and diurnal (daily) storage playing roles to help balance the grid, Form Energy’s technology aims to answer a different value proposition around resiliency and reliability for utilities with a need for multi-day use cases.

Answering a question referencing the latest hurricane damage inflicted on Puerto Rico’s energy sector, Bales said that Form’s battery could also “be that asset that can either kind of sustain throughout the disaster, or eventually start back up the grid”.

According to Bales, Form Energy is seeing “serious interest” from utilities around the North American market that the company is focusing on.

“We are working closely with our utility partners to do capacity expansion planning models and things like that, to actually show the value [of multi-day storage], and we’re finding a compelling focus. I think that these opportunities are very real,” Bales said.

Bales noted that while two of the US’ leading energy storage markets, ERCOT in Texas and CAISO in California have very different dynamics today, both are going to need that diversity of energy storage technologies and durations. Broadly speaking, as renewable energy penetration increases on a grid, so does the need for storage and as those levels go up even higher, the need for more hours of storage does too.

A team from Form Energy recently contributed a Guest Blog for this site on how long-duration and multi-day energy storage could support California’s energy transition goals.

Form Energy factory announcement expected this year

Form’s Series E round was oversubscribed and follows a 2021 Series D round that raised US$240 million, US$40 million more than the company was aiming for. ArcellorMittal invested US$25 million into that Series D and followed up with a further US$17.5 million participation in the latest round.

ArcellorMittal and Form have signed a joint development agreement to see whether the metals company could supply direct reduced iron (DRI) for use in the batteries, which Molly Bales pointed out the tech company plans to build domestically in the US. Form has apparently narrowed site selection for its production lines down to three possible sites in the US from a longlist of 100 and is expected to make an announcement before the end of this year.

Other Series E investors include institutional investors GIC and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) which joined for the first time along with existing Form investors like Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, Coatue, Temasek, Prelude Ventures and others.

“The development of reliable, long-duration energy storage technology is critical for the global transition to renewable energy. By introducing new storage solutions to the market, Form Energy can contribute to the energy transition process while also providing attractive risk-adjusted returns for the CPP Fund,” CPP Investments managing director and head of growth equity Leon Pedersen said.

“Form was founded with a unified mission to develop a multi-day energy storage battery that would unlock the power of extremely low-cost renewable energy to transform the electric grid. Over the last five years, through rigorous R&D and product engineering, our 100-hour iron-air battery product is ready to scale,” Form CEO Mateo Jaramillo said.

“The Series E funding will accelerate our ability to responsibly build a globally competitive US battery manufacturing supply chain and advance American innovation.”

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Cruachan Dam, Scotland, site of an existing 440MW pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) facility, one of only four in the UK. Image: Drax.

Asset manager Foresight Group has invested in a co-located 1.6GWh pumped hydro energy storage and wind project in Scotland.

The project, at the disused 1,547-acre Glenmuckloch opencast coal mine near Kirkconnel, will see the construction of a 210MW/1,600MWh capacity pumped hydro energy storage plant along with a 33.6MW wind farm.

The eight-hour system (7.62 to be exact) will utilise two 105MW reversible hydroturbines and help balance the UK grid as more renewable energy resources come online. The adjoining wind farm will comprise eight 4.2MW turbines and will be able to power the pumped hydro plant.

Foresight Group, which describes itself as a sustainability-led alternative assets and SME investment manager, has made the investment through its energy transition fund Foresight Energy Infrastructure Partners.

The firm did not reveal the amount invested in the project, but Britain’s national broadcaster BBC reported in May last year that the project required £250 million (US$285 million) of investment to be completed. The project was approved by the Scottish government in 2016.

Foresight has not provided any information regarding the start of construction or when it expects the project to become operational. This could mean that it is not putting in the full amount required for the project’s completion, meaning it will presumably look to bring other partners on board to get the project off the ground.

Energy-Storage.news has asked Foresight for details regarding this and will update this article in due course.

The UK has only four energy storage sites operational today using the century-old technology, including Drax’s 440MW facility at Cruachan Dam, pictured, also in Scotland.

Another proposed project is the Coire Glas Pumped Hydro project, also in Scotland, whose proponents wrote an article for Energy-Storage.news a year ago about the potential of the technology to help the UK meet its net zero targets.

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A rendering of the Grid Booster battery energy storage system. Image: Fluence / TransnetBW.

Global system integrator Fluence will deploy a 250MW ‘Grid Booster’ battery energy storage system for transmission system operator (TSO) TransnetBW, one of two such projects planned in Germany.

The NASDAQ-listed company will work with the TSO to deploy the energy storage system – called a Netzbooster in German – in the state of Badden-Wurttemberg, where TransnetBW operates the electricity grid. It is set to be completed in 2025 and will be a one-hour, i.e. 250MWh, system.

The Grid Booster will be built as a strategic network node along a transmission line and operated to inject or absorb power into the line in a way that mimics transmission flow lines. This will allow TransnetBW to forego installing extra transmission infrastructure lines, which would be more costly, have a larger footprint, and take longer to do.

It will allow the existing transmission infrastructure to be operated more efficiently by, for example, lowering the need for preventive redispatch measures and conventional network reinforcements and operating costs.

The initiative was first introduced three years ago, reported on at the time by Energy-Storage.news.

The idea has been considered in several countries across the world, sometimes called a ‘virtual transmission line’. Fluence is involved in initiatives in Australia and Lithuania we’ve previously reported on.

Storage-as-transmission asset to ease renewable energy bottlenecks

Germany’s need for it is fairly unique in that the vast majority of its new renewable energy in the form of wind is located in the north of the country while its economic activity is more concentrated in the south, where legacy power plants are being shut down.

The Grid Booster will ease the bottlenecks which stem from transporting that wind energy across the country, while also providing backup power to maintain grid stability.

“Realising the Netzbooster project marks a turning point to accelerate the buildout of energy storage at the transmission network level in Germany and across Europe,” said Paul McCusker, SVP & President EMEA at Fluence.

In a recent interview with Energy-Storage.news at RE+ in California, Kiran Kumaraswamy, Fluence’s VP of growth and head of commercial discussed said that regulatory considerations were the main limiting factor for using batteries as a transmission asset, which represent an “extraordinary value proposition”.

Fluence already has underway a similar energy storage-as-transmission asset project in Lithuania, delivering 200MW/200MWh of batteries across four systems for national transmission operator LitGrid.

Pointing towards today’s announcement, Kumaraswamy said that Germany’s projects were ‘just beginning to transact’ while the US would be helped by having regulations that clarify the use of energy storage for such ‘Grid Booster’ use cases.

The companies said the TransnetBW project is the largest in the world of its kind. It is also likely to be the largest battery storage project in Germany to be officially announced, and certainly the largest that has given a firm operational date.

The other Grid Booster project has been announced by another TSO, TenneT, which is planning two 100MW one-hour systems, also for completion in 2025. If all three went online today, they would increase the size of the German utility-scale energy storage market by around two-thirds.

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Neoen shared this image of the site under construction as it announced the project’s financial close. Image: Neoen via Twitter.

Australia’s national Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) has invested to help a 100MW/200MWh battery storage project reach financial close.

CEFC has committed to lending AU$35.5 million (US$23.06 million) for France-headquartered clean energy developer and independent power producer (IPP) Neoen’s Capital Battery project, under construction in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).

In the process, the council also found a co-lender, infrastructure fund manager Infradebt, which will match the CEFC investment. It’s the first time CEFC has made an arrangement of this type in a project financing.

It is however the third large-scale battery storage facility CEFC has helped fund. Both previous efforts were also for Neoen projects: Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia and the Victorian Big Battery, notable as being Australia’s first >100MW battery energy storage system (BESS) and the country’s current largest BESS respectively.

Neoen announced today that the Capital Battery has reached financial close, sharing a photo of the construction site on Twitter. As reported by Energy-Storage.news in December 2021, work began late last year as Neoen issued a Notice to Proceed to construction and technology partners Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction and Doosan GridTech.

The IPP won the project through a competitive solicitation held by the ACT government in 2020. The state government had been seeking a BESS of at least 50MW output as part of a Renewables Reverse Auction, the fifth tender of its type in the ACT.

The tender awarded projects at record-low average prices of AU$50 per MWh. Neoen’s win included a contract to supply 100MW of wind energy from its Goyder Renewables Zone project in South Australia, along with the BESS award.

Although the tender award had been for a BESS of 50MW, Neoen said last year that it had seen demand surge for battery storage and the services it can provide, leading it to double the facility’s planned size.

This rapid increase in demand was borne out in the company’s half-year 2022 financial results. Neoen reported €39.3 million revenues from energy storage activities, driven mainly by money earned from its Australia projects, an increase of nearly three times from €13.4 million in H1 2021.

Long-term revenues backed by AGL ‘virtual battery’ contract

The Capital Battery project is underpinned by a so-called ‘virtual battery’ contract Neoen signed with major power generator-retailer AGL. As reported by Energy-Storage.news in April, AGL will leverage a 70MW/140MWh portion of the BESS’ stored energy under a seven-year contract.

What makes it a ‘virtual’ deal is that AGL will use the system to participate in the National Electricity Market (NEM) through a grid connection in New South Wales, far away from where the BESS is being constructed in Canberra.

Neoen emphasised at the time that deal was announced that the system will be capable of providing network services as agreed with the ACT government in addition to being available for AGL to use.

The system is scheduled to go into operation in the first half of 2023.

“As Australia raises its ambitions to reach net zero emissions with new targets, we must heighten our focus on developing the enabling technologies that will be critical to our success. Battery storage is key to our ability to decarbonise the energy sector,” CEFC CEO Ian Learmouth said.

“These projects require substantial, tailored investment solutions, reflecting their high start-up capital costs and emerging and untested revenue models, alongside the ongoing development of the market for the risk mitigation services that batteries can provide.”

Learmouth said the CEFC’s lending for Neoen’s three projects helped demonstrate the “economic and grid stability case for large-scale batteries”.

Neoen currently has a total 576MW of battery storage in operation or construction in Australia and plans to build more, including a recently proposed 1GW/4GWh project in a Western Australia community with close historical and present day links to the coal industry.

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Laura Landreaux

The Arkansas Public Service Commission has approved the Entergy Arkansas Driver Solar Project, a new 250 MW AC (or 312 MW DC) renewable energy plant developed by Lightsource bp, which will be located on approximately 2,100 acres near Osceola in Mississippi County. Driver Solar will be the utility’s largest solar facility, capable of generating enough energy to power more than 40,000 homes.

“Driver Solar adds highly economic, renewable generation to our portfolio, further diversifying our energy mix in a way that meets our customers’ evolving expectations,” says Laura Landreaux, president and CEO of Entergy Arkansas. “It is a key contribution toward business expansion in northeast Arkansas, and we are excited to be a part of it.”

“We are listening to our customers as we develop and execute our generation strategy for the future,” Landreaux adds. “We are privileged to be able to work closely with U. S. Steel Corporation to develop sustainable solutions to help them meet their objective of producing steel using renewable electricity while simultaneously lowering rates over the long term for all 728,000-plus Entergy Arkansas customers.”

The Driver Solar site is located along Arkansas Highway 61 near Carson Lake Road and Arkansas Highway 198, just south of Osceola, and will be situated adjacent to both the U.S. Steel’s Big River Steel facility and the recently announced $3 billion expansion. Lightsource bp has completed development and permitting of the solar field and will build the facility under a build-transfer agreement with Entergy Arkansas. Driver Solar has an expected completion date in late 2024.

“This project with Entergy Arkansas and Lightsource bp illustrates the importance of partnerships,” comments Richard Fruehauf, U.S. Steel’s senior vice president and chief strategy and sustainability officer. “Driver Solar not only helps us meet our robust sustainability goals, but it will also help us deliver sustainable steel solutions for our customers. The renewable energy generated will power the production of verdeX, our advanced sustainable steel product, which is composed of up to 90 percent recycled steel content, as well as other products produced at our Big River Works facility.”

“The Driver Solar project is another demonstration of how solar can power our country’s industry with cost-competitive, clean, dependable electricity,” mentions Kevin Smith, Lightsource bp’s CEO of the Americas. “Arkansas’ largest solar project will help build American-made sustainable steel, as well as create hundreds of U.S. jobs for construction and across the supply chain.”

“With their solar industry leadership and commitment to supporting domestic manufacturing, we couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to work with Lightsource bp,” Landreaux concludes.

“Driver Solar enables U. S. Steel to grow its business in Arkansas, meet their sustainability goals, and further demonstrates how the State of Arkansas and Entergy Arkansas support companies that provide high-paying jobs grow in the state,” comments Arkansas Secretary of Commerce Mike Preston.

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