FTC Solar Inc., a provider of solar tracker systems, software and engineering services, has introduced Pioneer, a new and differentiated, one module in portrait (1P) solar tracker solution.

“Pioneer achieves a full 18-36 percent pile count reduction per MW vs. the current industry-leading solutions by volume, allowing customers to benefit from reduced labor and materials costs,” says Nagendra Cherukupalli, chief technology officer of FTC Solar. “And with a high-density design, Pioneer enables up to 5 percent greater energy output for the same site compared to the competition, among numerous other advantages.”

Pioneer’s proprietary and unique design can reduce piles/foundations by 18% or more, significantly reducing capital expenditure and potential costly rework from refusals. Its higher energy density means shorter row length enables more than 5% greater energy output for a given parcel of land. With fast assembly, the proprietary fast-module hang technology and fewer overall fasteners save time, greatly reducing person-hours per MW. The zero-degree stow allows for shorter pile embedment depth, with resulting material and labor cost savings. Pioneer accommodates ultra large format modules with 550 and 600w, wide-format modules. In addition, no Torque Tube (TT) dimpling or through-bolts are required to index the module to the TT, allowing for module changes and retrofits. The high slope tolerance includes a 17.5% north-south tracker row allowance.

In addition to these advantages, Pioneer supports all module factors, including those over 2.4 meters in length, providing customers with increased flexibility when designing projects. In addition, Pioneer will operate independently from the grid during outages and is self-powered with a high-energy battery for up to 3-days overall backup, offering increased energy resilience. Additionally, Pioneer’s design also allows the use of ground screw mounting systems to overcome challenging sub-surface conditions.

Pioneer has undergone rigorous wind tunnel testing by an independent engineering firm RWDI to assure structural and torsional stability in wind conditions up to 120 mph. In addition, Pioneer’s distinctive torque tube shape allows for longer spans, improved torsional rigidity and positive alignment of components without the need for torque tube penetrations.

“The introduction of Pioneer, FTC’s unique solution to 1P Single Axis Trackers, will disrupt the status quo while enabling the company to serve our customers’ growing portfolios of PV projects with differentiated 1P and 2P solutions,” states Patrick Cook, chief commercial officer of FTC Solar.

In addition to the launch of Pioneer, the company has been selected by Primoris Renewable Energy (Primoris) in a multi-year agreement to supply at least 500 MW of its solar tracker technology for multiple project sites in the U.S. Primoris is expected to utilize FTC Solar’s new and differentiated Pioneer 1P tracker technology on multiple projects to optimize performance while reducing capital and labor costs.

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Peter Faricy

SunPower, a residential solar technology and energy services provider, has made minority investments in EmPower Solar and Renova Energy. With these investments, Renova and EmPower are the newest additions to SunPower’s Dealer Accelerator Program.

The Dealer Accelerator Program, which SunPower launched in March, provides high-potential solar dealers with capital financing and business strategy support to accelerate growth and meet the increasing homeowner demand for solar nationwide. Dealers in the program exclusively sell SunPower solar systems. They also offer SunVault battery storage and leverage SunPower Financial offerings for solar financing.

“With an increasing need for more affordable and resilient energy coupled with new federal incentives to adopt clean energy, consumer demand for solar is at an all-time high,” says Peter Faricy, CEO at SunPower. “Through these investments, SunPower is enabling local dealers to capture this strong demand and grow their business. Renova and EmPower share SunPower’s commitment to quality and service, and we look forward to helping them bring the benefits of solar to more people across the country.”

Renova Energy is a SunPower elite dealer in California and Arizona. EmPower Solar has served Long Island and the greater New York area.

SunPower also made investments in Freedom Solar Power and Sea Bright Solar as part of the Dealer Accelerator Program earlier this year.

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Rendering of an EVLO battery storage container system, with integrated PCS from EPC Power. Image: EPC Power / EVLO.

Investment firms Goldman Sachs and Cleanhill Partners have swooped to acquire a majority stake in EPC Power, a US manufacturer of power conversion systems (PCS).

San Diego, California-headquartered EPC Power produces inverters and full PCS kit for utility-scale energy storage and solar-plus-storage applications as well as for data centre backup UPS systems.

To date the company has sold more than 2GW of its smart inverters worldwide, operating a factory in San Diego County, with another planned to open on the US East Coast towards the end of this year. It also has an office in Helsinki, Finland, from which it conducts European sales and engineering operations.

Its equipment can be paired with different energy storage technologies, including electrochemical, like batteries, and mechanical, like flywheels. Its utility-scale storage solutions include 1500V products and its power inverters are all certified to applicable North American standards, well as to grid codes and standards for Australia and Europe.

In March EPC Power was selected as the PCS supplier for EVLO, an energy storage system integrator and manufacturer launched by Canadian state-owned power company Hydro Quebec. Also that month, it was revealed the company’s advanced inverters are being used in a so-called ‘grid-forming’ battery energy storage system (BESS) project in Australia, by Fluence.

Earlier this year in July, Dynapower, another PCS manufacturer for the energy storage space based in the US, was acquired by industrial sensor company Sensata in a deal worth US$580 million.

It was bought from private equity group Pflingstein Partners and Sensata said it expected to earn about US$1 billion in revenues by 2026 from integrating Dynapower’s offerings into its own electrification division.

The acquisition of the majority stake in EPC Power, under undisclosed financial terms, comes quickly on the heels of the US Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA’s) passing and with it a recognition that the energy storage market in the country is poised for even more rapid growth.

EPC Power claims to be the US’ only end-to-end PCS solutions provider. As such, it is well positioned to benefit from the IRA’s demand-side incentives for energy storage, particularly the introduction of an investment tax credit (ITC) for standalone energy storage systems, the company said.

Market research company Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables has said that the ITC can be a major driver in propelling the US energy storage market to a level of more than 50GWh of annual installations in 2026. As reported today by Energy-Storage.news, Wood Mackenzie is forecasting about 13.5GWh of deployments this year.

Goldman Sachs Asset Management managing director Alexander Mass said EPC Power is “uniquely positioned to play a critical role in the evolution of the US solar and energy storage value chains and is now well capitalised to continue its trajectory of rapid growth”.

“As the only scaled supplier of smart inverters that are designed, engineered and 100% manufactured in the US, EPC Power is a natural continuation of our thematic investment activity in this space, in partnership with Cleanhill Partners and EPC management,” Mass said.

Meanwhile private equity firm Cleanhill’s Rakesh Wilson and Ash Upadhyaya, both managing partners, said that EPC Power “stands out for its industry-leading technology,” noting that Cleanhill first invested in the PCS company in 2021. Goldman Sachs was also an existing investor in the company.

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A large-scale solar-plus-storage plant in California, US, recently brought online through Canadian Solar’s US subsidiary Recurrent Energy. Image: Recurrent Energy.

Canadian Solar has launched a utility-scale energy storage product and announced a battery manufacturing capacity target of 10GWh by end-2023, up from 2.5GWh today.

The vertically integrated solar PV and storage company, based in Ontario but with manufacturing mainly in China, has launched SolBank, a proprietary designed and manufactured energy storage battery solution.

The product uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells and has an energy capacity of up to 2.8MWh per unit, and comes with liquid cooling and humidity control and an active balancing battery management system (BMS).

It is being launched by subsidiary CSI Energy Storage which is producing the SolBank at its workshops in Jiangsu Province in China. The current annual battery manufacturing output capacity there is 2.5GWh and is expected to reach 10GWh by the end of 2023, the company said.

This includes the manufacturing of its own proprietary designed battery modules, packs and containerisation into ready-to-go energy storage system solutions.

The company will provide all the wrap-around services alongside the SolBank solution, including full commissioning and integration services, turnkey engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) project execution and long-term operational and maintenance (O&M) services.

Dr. Shawn Qu, chairman and CEO of Canadian Solar, commented: “Our manufacturing capacity in battery storage will spur the continued growth of our battery storage solutions business, which will in turn enhance the synergies with our battery storage project development business. Solar plus battery storage will be one of the key solutions to combat climate change. We look forward to working together with our existing and new partners and contribute to global decarbonisation efforts.”

Canadian Solar said CSI Energy Storage has an energy storage system integration pipeline of 11GWh, including 861MWh under long-term service agreements, 1.9GWh under construction or contracted and an additional earlier stage pipeline of 8.2GWh. However, its project development businesses, including Recurrent Energy in the US, have a pipeline of more than 31GWh of battery energy storage projects.

The CSI Energy Storage Team will be showcasing the new storage system at RE+ in Anaheim, US, next week from 19-22 September. Members of the Solar Media editorial team from both Energy-Storage.news and PV Tech will also be in attendance.

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Facebook’s data centres used 7.17TWh of energy in 2020. Image: Meta.

Microsoft, Meta, which owns Facebook, Fluence and another two dozen energy storage developers and industry actors have formed the Energy Storage Solutions Consortium to assess the emissions reduction of energy storage technologies.

The Consortium’s goal is to both assess and maximise the greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction potential of electricity storage technologies. As part of this, it will create an open-source methodology to quantify the emissions reduction benefits of grid-connected energy storage projects, verified by third party Verra through its Verified Carbon Standard Program.

The methodology will look at locational marginal emissions, which measures the tonnes of GHG emissions displaced through the charging and discharging of energy storage facilities on the grid at a specific location and point in time.

It hopes this will be a tool to help organisations ‘create credible progress toward their net zero emissions goals,’ a press release said.

Meta is one of three steering committee members along with REsurety, which provides risk management and software products to the buyers and sellers of clean energy, and developer Broad Reach Power.

“We need to decarbonise the grid as quickly as possible, and to do that we need to maximise the emissions impacts of all grid-connected technologies – whether generation, load, hybrid or standalone storage,” says Adam Reeve, SVP of software solutions at REsurety.

The consortium also has 24 advisory committee members coming from the energy storage industry. Amongst these are system integrators Fluence and Stem Inc, developers Jupiter Power and Primergy Solar, asset managers active in the sector including Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners and UBS Asset Management, optimiser Habitat Energy and tech giant Microsoft.

Other members are 3Degrees Group, Inc., Akamai Technologies, Clearloop, Equilibrium Energy, General Motors, GlidePath Power Solutions, Hannon Armstrong, Longroad Energy, Marathon Capital, Microsoft, Primergy Solar, RES Group, Rivian, Rowan Digital Infrastructure, Tabors Caramanis Rudkevich, TimberRock and WattTime.

Facebook’s total electricity use, which is 100% powered by renewables, totalled 7.17TWh in 2020 according to its Data Disclosures for that year. The vast majority of this is used by its data centres.

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Image: Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables.

The US market is on course to reach 13.5GWh of energy storage installations during 2022, according to Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables.

The market research and analysis firm has just issued the Q2 2022 edition of its quarterly US Energy Storage Monitor, produced in partnership with the American Clean Power Association, in which it found that the three-month period saw 3,042.4MWh of storage deployed across the grid-scale, residential and non-residential (commercial, industrial and community) market segments.

In the grid-scale market segment alone, 2,608MWh was installed during the quarter, the highest second quarter figure recorded to date. The Texas market was the single strongest regional contributor to that grid-scale number, with more than 60% of deployments.

This was in spite of various factors that have caused delays to projects around the country in recent months. Back in June, as the firm’s Q1 findings were published, Wood Mackenzie (WoodMac) said that procurement challenges and long interconnection waiting times put project completion dates back by months in many cases.

In Q1, WoodMac said 2,875MWh of storage was deployed across all segments, including 2,339MWh of grid-scale storage – which was also the strongest opening quarter to a year on record.

WoodMac previously said its US deployment forecasts for 2022 had been downgraded by about 30% versus earlier predictions, with one major driver for that being uncertainty around the fate of anti-dumping countervailing duties (AD/CVD) tariffs placed on imported solar modules.

That led solar-plus-storage developers – a significant chunk of the US storage market – to hesitate or delay on procurements. The tariffs are gone for now, since President Joe Biden ordered a two-year pause on them, but the industry continues to “wrestle” with the US’ policy on products associated with forced labour in the Xinjiang region of China, which means some hesitancy is still expected, WoodMac said.

That and other causes of delays such as price spikes for raw materials, components and shipping costs impacted around 1.1GW of large-scale battery storage projects that were expected to come online during Q2 2022. While a significant portion of that number may be cancelled altogether, WoodMac does expect the majority, around 709MW, to still come online during Q3 or Q4.

“Despite impressive growth, the US grid-scale energy storage pipeline continues to face rolling delays into 2023 and beyond,” Wood Mackenzie senior energy storage analyst Vanessa Witte said.

“Supply chain issues, transportation delays and interconnection queue challenges were the main drivers behind delays in the commercial operations date (COD) for many projects.”

Inflation Reduction Act poised to transform an already rapidly-growing market

The firm’s prediction for the full year would represent a big increase on 2021 figures, when about 10.5GWh was deployed in total including 9.2GWh of grid-scale energy storage.

Regular readers of this site will be aware that the recent passing of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) legislation in the US is projected to add a considerable upside to an already rapidly growing industry. Chief among its impacts will be the eligibility of standalone energy storage for investment tax credit (ITC) incentives from the end of this year, which many have commented could supercharge the sector by reducing capital expenditure costs on projects by around 30%.

That and other clean energy-friendly measures in the IRA will spur the US on to become a 52.4GWh annual market in 2026 and see cumulative deployment of 191.6GWh of energy storage in the 2022 to 2026 timeframe, according to the firm’s predictions.

Chloe Holden, another Wood Mackenzie analyst who authored the new report, noted that the IRA’s extension of the existing ITC for solar PV would likely have a positive impact on the residential solar-plus-storage market.

The residential sector also had a strong Q2, with 154MW/375MWh of installations, the strongest quarter to date in terms of megawatt-hours.

“The solar ITC extension is good news for the residential storage industry, preventing a drop in residential solar-plus-storage installations that would have otherwise arrived in 2024,” Holden said.

“The standalone storage ITC will also boost storage retrofits on homes with existing solar.”

The non-residential segment struggles to record major growth however, with deployments focused largely in states with supportive policies, like California, New York and Massachusetts. Just 26.3MW/59.4MWh of non-residential deployments figured in WoodMac’s report.

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Neoen-Tesla’s 300MW/450MWh Victorian Big Battery. Image: Victoria State government.

Neoen has proposed building a gigawatt-scale battery storage project in partnership with the community of Collie, Western Australia, a region with close and continuing ties to the coal industry.

France-headquartered developer, owner and operator of renewable energy and energy storage assets Neoen has already delivered Australia’s biggest battery energy storage system (BESS) to date, the 300MW/450MWh Victorian Big Battery in the state of Victoria.

It also built the Hornsdale Power Reserve project in South Australia with Tesla, considered a landmark project for large-scale BESS around the world. In reporting its most recent financial results in August, Neoen said that it earned €39.3 million (US$39.3 million) in revenues from its energy storage segment in the first half of 2022, three times higher than in the same period last year.

This was driven by successful market participation of its projects in Australia, with the VBB accounting for the biggest portion of that.

In its application filed with planning authorities in the Shire of Collie, the company said its proposed development will be a 1GW/4GWh BESS facility, built in stages, starting with an initial 200MW/800MWh installation.

Whether it progresses to that total capacity depends on demand for the battery system’s services, with each stage adding 200MW/800MWh of new BESS equipment. It will be connected to the Western Power transmission network.

A power plant at Collie is one of the last two coal-fired power stations in Western Australia that is still owned by the state’s government. The plant is scheduled for closure in 2027, while the other, Muja, will go offline by the end of this decade.

The motivations for doing that are economic as well as environmental and societal. The state government in June said costs of keeping the plants open could add between AU$1,800 (US$1,214.50) to AU$3,000 a year to the average customer’s energy bill every year from AU$3 billion in anticipated losses for Synergy, the state-owned power producer which operates them.

State Premier Mark McGowan and Minister for Mines, Petroleum and Energy Bill Johnston said then that Western Australia would invest around AU$3.8 billion to facilitate an “orderly transition” to renewables and storage. Investments made would largely go towards upgrading and enhancing the South West Interconnected System (SWIS) grid network, the politicians said.

‘Just transition’ for historic coal region

A fund worth more than half a billion dollars is being committed to Collie’s transition, with the area home to coal mines as well as the power plants.

A source close to the company said that the site chosen by Neoen, about 4km away from Collie power plant and 13km away from the town, is an ideal location for battery storage in a region which has been significant for Australia’s energy sector for half a century.

The source noted that the project is in line with the Collie Just Transition Plan formulated and funded by the state government and will bring investment to region, supporting local jobs and businesses.

If the project goes ahead, a programme to share community benefits will also run, in partnership with the Shire of Collie Council.

In April, another developer, ZEN Energy, started feasibility studies for another BESS project in the region, which it said was expected to be 200MW with between 600MWh and 800MWh of capacity. Funding for that study came from the WA government.

That project would supply renewable energy to commercial and industrial (C&I) entities, helping them reduce their exposure to wholesale markets. It would also be a key piece of a Collie Battery and Hydrogen Industrial Hub Project that the state government wants built.

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Chloe Holden

According to Wood Mackenzie, a Verisk business, and the American Clean Power Association’s (ACP) latest U.S. Energy Storage Monitor report, grid-scale storage was boosted by a series of deployments in Texas, with the state contributing 60% of installed capacity this quarter. However, challenges to the sector remain due to delays. The U.S. energy storage market set a new record in the second quarter of 2022, with grid-scale installations totaling 2,608 MWh – the highest installed capacity for any Q2 on record.

“Despite impressive growth, the U.S. grid-scale energy storage pipeline continues to face rolling delays into 2023 and beyond,” says Vanessa Witte, senior analyst with Wood Mackenzie’s energy storage team. “More than 1.1 GW of projects originally scheduled to come online in Q2 were delayed or cancelled, although 61% of this capacity, 709 MW, is still scheduled to come online in Q3 and Q4 of 2022.”

“Supply chain issues, transportation delays and interconnection queue challenges were the main drivers behind delays in the commercial operations date (COD) for many projects,” Witte adds. 

Given the prevalence of hybrid deployment between storage and solar, ongoing trade issues negatively impacting the solar industry contributed to headwinds for energy storage deployment. Namely, the current enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), recently enacted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The U.S. Congress passed a solar investment tax credit (ITC) extension and standalone storage ITC as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. This critical piece of legislation will support all segments of the energy storage industry, increasing deployment of solar-plus-storage systems while also incentivizing standalone facilities. As a result, Wood Mackenzie forecasts 59.2 GW of energy storage capacity to be added through 2026.

“The U.S. energy storage industry is reaching maturity,” comments Jason Burwen, vice president of energy storage at ACP. “Energy storage is now regularly being installed at over a GW per quarter. In addition, Texas overtaking California this quarter should serve as a reminder that generators, customers and grid operators in all geographies are increasingly relying on energy storage. Combined with the tailwinds of newly available tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, the question for investors and grid operators now is not whether to deploy storage, but how much storage to deploy – and how fast.” 

Residential storage also had its strongest quarter to date with 375 MWh installed in Q2, beating the previous quarterly record of 334.1 MWh in Q1 2022. 

Demand is rising in the residential segment with over 150 MW of residential storage installed for the first time, but ongoing supply shortfalls and rising prices have suppressed deployment. New solar installers continue to add storage to their product offerings, despite ongoing procurement issues.

“The solar ITC extension is good news for the residential storage industry, preventing a drop in residential solar-plus-storage installations that would have otherwise arrived in 2024,” says Chloe Holden, research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, and one of the authors of the report. “The standalone storage ITC will also boost storage retrofits on homes with existing solar.”

Community, commercial and industrial (CCI) storage continues to lag behind other market segments, with only 59.4 MWh of CCI storage installations seen this quarter, making it the lowest quarter recorded for MWh capacity since 2019.

“Market players look forward to the emergence of a more diverse market, but current deployment remains limited to a few policy leaders in California, New York and Massachusetts,” Holden continues.

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Canadian Solar Inc.’s CSI Energy Storage, which is part of its majority-owned subsidiary CSI Solar Co. Ltd., is launching SolBank, a proprietary designed and manufactured energy storage battery solution for utility-scale applications. CSI Energy Storage is also expanding its battery manufacturing capacity from the existing 2.5 GWh to 10 GWh by the end of 2023.

The SolBank is a lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) chemistry-based battery enclosure with up to 2,800 kWh of usable energy capacity, specifically engineered for safety and reliability for utility-scale applications. The SolBank is designed with liquid cooling and humidity control, active balancing battery management system (BMS) technologies, and complies with the latest international safety and compliance standards.

CSI Energy Storage currently produces the SolBank at its workshops in Jiangsu Province in China. The current annual battery manufacturing output capacity is 2.5 GWh and is expected to reach 10 GWh by the end of 2023. These workshops include the manufacturing of its own proprietary designed battery modules, packs and containerization with fully automated, state-of-art production lines and testing facilities.

To complement the newly launched SolBank battery solution this, CSI Energy Storage is also providing full commissioning and integration services, turnkey EPC project execution, and long-term operational service and capacity maintenance.

“We are delighted to launch our proprietary battery storage product, the SolBank, which is one of the best in the market in terms of product safety and cost competitiveness,” states Dr. Shawn Qu, chairman and CEO of Canadian Solar. “Our manufacturing capacity in battery storage will spur the continued growth of our battery storage solutions business, which will in turn enhance the synergies with our battery storage project development business. Solar plus battery storage will be one of the key solutions to combat climate change. We look forward to working together with our existing and new partners and contribute to global decarbonization efforts.”

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Eos Znyth battery storage unit on its production line near Pittsburgh. Image: Eos Energy Enterprises via Twitter.

Eos Energy Enterprises has progressed to the due diligence stage in its application for a share of US$2.5 billion in US government loans.

The company manufactures zinc-based battery energy storage systems which offer three hours of storage duration per unit but can be stacked to make longer durations of up to about 12 – 15 hours. Based on an aqueous zinc hybrid cathode that plates and replates zinc as it charges and discharges, Pennsylvania-headquartered Eos claims its products are long life and durable and made using abundant materials.

Eos is in line to reach a targeted annual production capacity of 800MWh by the end of this year, but wants backing for a more ambitious 3GWh target.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) returned to active status shortly after President Joe Biden took office in early 2021, with solar industry veteran and clean energy investor Jigar Shah at the helm.

Eos applied for a loan through the office’s Renewable Energy and Efficient Energy solicitation, through which it could access debt capital, a customised financing arrangement, enter a committed partnership with the LPO, or benefit from direct technical experience provided through the office.

The LPO invited the company to the next step in the process, the final part of the second stage in applying, Eos said yesterday. That means that it has gone through vetting for project risk allocation, creditworthiness, legal, environmental and regulatory factors and more.

Eos’ 3GWh production plan will now undergo LPO’s due diligence process. In discussing the loan earlier this year, Eos CEO Joe Mastrangelo said the company sources 80% of its raw materials domestically – within a five-hour drive of its factory – and aims to go to 90% by the end of this year.

That could aid the company in its push for the loan, with increasing the domestic supply chain for energy storage a stated aim of the US government. Another is to reduce the cost of providing long-duration energy storage (LDES) in support of increasing renewable energy adoption.

In June, the LPO made its first lending commitment in its present-day incarnation, confirming a US$504 million loan to the Advanced Clean Energy Storage (ACES) 300GWh green hydrogen storage hub in Utah.   

Eos received a US$200 million investment commitment in April from an unnamed investor affiliated with the company’s financing partner Yorkville Advisors, and then secured an US$85 million loan facility with Atlas Credit Partners in August.

The battery storage company went public via a SPAC merger in November 2020 and claimed an order backlog worth US$457 million as of the end of Q2 2022 from 1.9GWh of customer orders, including US$258 million of orders booked during the second quarter alone.

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