Another Exus Partners project, the Travers solar project in Canada

Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) has chosen Exus Management Partners to provide their full range of asset management services for the Greasewood, Misae and Sage solar projects across Texas and Utah, totaling 750 MW.

The deal takes Exus’ partnership with CIP in North America to over 2 GW across wind and solar, with CIP having previously appointed Exus as asset manager at the 477 MW Fighting Jays solar farm in Texas and the 700 MW Travers solar project in Alberta, Canada’s largest solar farm.

The agreement marks the beginning of Exus’ relationship with Ingka Investments, the investment arm of Ingka Group, a strategic partner in the IKEA franchise system. Ingka Investments is part-owner of the Misae and Sage projects.

“Trusted partnerships and high-quality services are key to the successful development, construction and maintenance of renewable energy projects,” says Dhaval Bhalodia, partner and head of Asset Management North America at Exus. “We are excited to continue building our relationship with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, and begin our journey with Ingka Investments, in the US renewables space. We will continue to innovate to fine-tune the technical performance of our assets and prioritize the asset management activities that deliver the most value for our clients.”

The recently signed deal incorporates a five-year initial term allowing Exus to fully demonstrate its scope of asset and financial management, operations and maintenance, and project management services.

“We are pleased to continue collaborating with Exus who have consistently demonstrated their ability to go above and beyond our expectations regarding the management of our renewable energy assets,” states Mads Skovgaard-Andersen, partner at CIP. “Optimizing and maintaining solar projects is essential to maximizing returns for our investors. Our work with Exus will enable us to excel in achieving that over the coming years.”

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The Victorian Big Battery is currently Australia’s largest BESS installation and went into operation just before the end of 2021. Image: Victoria State government.

A liquid coolant leak caused thermal runaway in battery cells, which started a fire at the 300MW/450MWh Victorian Big Battery in Australia last July.

A technical report into findings of specialist investigators has been released to the public, written by experts at Fisher Engineering and the Energy Safety Response Group (ESRG). The fire happened as the system was under construction and destroyed two of the 212 Tesla Megapack battery energy storage system (BESS) units being installed.

After the situation was brought under control and authorities cleared the site to resume construction and pre-commissioning testing activities in September, developer Neoen and Tesla brought the Victorian Big Battery online in December, since when it has been participating in the National Electricity Market (NEM).

The technical report was presented to stakeholders in January this year and now made public. It notes that the incident is the first fire to affect Tesla Megapacks. The US-headquartered EV, solar and BESS company deployed around 4GWh of energy storage in total worldwide during 2021. It has just announced an ambitious target for its deployments this decade, claiming it could reach 1,500GWh of annual installations by 2030.

A single pre-manufactured 3MWh Megapack unit caught fire on 30 July 2021, spreading to a neighbouring Megapack. The spread stopped there and the fire burned itself out over a six hour period. This was in line with guidance offered by the manufacturer to emergency responders to let burning Megapacks consume themselves while monitoring other possible exposures at a safe distance.

It was a ‘safe failure,’ with no injuries reported to site personnel, first responders or the general public and the multi-team investigation commenced almost immediately, on 3 August.

The investigation largely confirmed what was found by Energy Safe Victoria, the state’s regulatory body, as it cleared the project to resume testing and commissioning, but added more details as they became known.

Site personnel noticed smoke emanating from a Megapack at around 10am on the day in question, and once emergency crews arrived, a perimeter was established around the unit, and water was applied to cool it. Fire then spread to the adjacent Megapack, which was about 15cm away.

Fisher and ESRG said that a leak within the first Megapack’s liquid cooling system caused arcing within the battery modules. Heat created then took battery cells into thermal runaway.

Tesla has already taken steps to prevent repeat incident

It is important to note that some of the circumstances which caused the fire are unlikely to be repeated when the system is in normal operation – as the unit was undergoing testing, it had been manually disconnected from some of the usual monitoring, control and data collection that it would be hooked up to.

High wind conditions also contributed to the fire’s propagation, despite the units being properly spaced apart as per requirements. The report said UL 9540A burn testing only accounts for wind speeds up to about 12mph, whereas that day the area experienced wind speeds of up to 35mph.

Tesla has already addressed many of the factors which led to the incident, including improved inspection procedures for coolant systems and adding more alarms to the Megapacks telemetry.

In an interview with this site a few months ago, Paul Rogers of ESRG, one of the company’s principals and a former firefighter that elected to become a battery storage safety subject matter expert, said that battery fires are likely to be extremely rare events, but that every possible care needs to be taken to address both the risk and what to do in the event they do happen, as they can be extremely serious otherwise.

The release of the technical findings comes as power company AES Corporation is undertaking an investigation of its own into a fire at a 10MW battery storage facility in Arizona, US.

The report into the Victorian Big Battery incident can be found here.

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The battery cells are initially to be supplied from FREYR’s gigafactories in Mo i Rana, Norway. Image: FREYR

Norwegian lithium-ion battery gigafactory group FREYR has signed a conditional offtake agreement with energy storage system integrator Powin Energy totalling 28.5GWh over six years.

Under the agreement, FREYR will deliver 28.5GWh of battery cells to Powin from 2024-2030. Initially, the cells will be supplied from its gigafactories in Mo i Rana, Norway, before later coming from FREYR’s planned facility in the US. The Mo i Rana facilities will open in 2023-24 while the US site, a joint venture with Koch Strategic Platforms, should open by 2030.

Powin will integrate FREYR’s batteries into its battery energy storage system (BESS) solutions across the globe. The Oregon-based company is the fifth-largest system integrator in the world according to IHS Markit.

FREYR’s gigafactories in Norway will be almost entirely powered by renewable energy, mainly hydropower but also some wind, and will use 60% less power than conventional lithium-ion production, the company said. “We have the ambition to produce the world’s cleanest or greenest batteries,” CEO Tom Jensen told Energy-Storage.news in a recent interview.

The agreement with Powin brings FREYR’s cumulative offtake agreements announced to-date to 78.8GWh, after a 19GWh agreement with Honeywell and a 31GWh agreement with an unnamed energy storage solutions partner. Energy-storage.news has asked FREYR to confirm Powin is not the unnamed company and will update the story when a response is received.

The cumulative offtake agreements add up to 67% of the projected nameplate capacity of FREYR’s Mo i Rana factories and more than 90% of targeted production under current ramp-up and operational efficiency assumptions.

Jensen told Energy-Storage.news in the interview that FREYR could dedicate half of its 2030 annual production capacity, 100GWh, to energy storage. All major offtake announcements so far have been in energy storage, perhaps unsurprisingly given all its initial production will be of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries.

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Li-Cycle has a two step process to recover and reintroduce nickel, cobalt and lithium carbonate back into the supply chain. Image: Li-Cycle.

Li-Cycle’s latest high-profile investor will be natural resources giant Glencore, which has agreed to back the Canadian battery recycler to the tune of US$200 million.

Under commercial agreements that the two companies have come to, Glencore’s primary metals supply business for lithium battery manufacturers will be able to leverage Li-Cycle’s materials recovery and recycling ecosystem.

Glencore will supply both manufacturing scrap and end-of-life lithium-ion batteries to Li-Cycle’s facilities, while the metals company will offtake black mass, battery grade end products and by-products from the recycler. Glencore will also supply Li-Cycle with sulphuric acid, which is a key reagent in the proprietary recycling process Li-Cycle has developed.

While a press release discussed primarily the potential importance of this deal for electric vehicle (EV) markets, Li-Cycle has been vocal in the past about the big role stationary energy storage systems (ESS) will play in its activities, from the standpoint of offtaking recycled materials as well as being a source of them.

The deal, announced last week, closely follows Li-Cycle’s sealing of ‘preferred battery recycling partner’ status with LG Chem and with LG Energy Solution, with each of those two companies committing to a US$25 million investment alongside multiyear commercial agreements.

Other backers to the company include Koch Strategic Platforms, which committed to a US$100 million investment a few months ago.

In a recent interview with Energy-Storage.news, Li-Cycle chief commercial officer Kunal Phalpher said that being able to deliver lithium, nickel and cobalt all at battery grade from one facility distributes the raw materials costs across the three metals.

“So you can really get towards the bottom of the cost curve on all those materials,” Phalpher said.

“And over time, as there’s more recycled material, that can help make the materials cheaper once they’re in full supply. Right now, we have short supply and high prices and over time, we want to help to make EVs more affordable across the supply chain.”

That ability to source three key raw materials could also simplify customers’ procurement processes, the Li-Cycle CCO said. Li-Cycle has a number of facilities in operation and under construction in North America and is understood to be in the process of launching two large sites in Europe.

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Valmont Industries Inc. and Convert Italia, a Valmont Company and supplier of single-axis solar trackers, are launching the new Valmont Solar brand. Unique to the brand partnership between Valmont and Convert is the ability to supply total grid solutions, in addition to its flagship solar tracker product line. Thanks to a full line of engineered products, from transmission and distribution to substation packaging and renewable generation, Valmont Solar has the ability to provide bundled offerings to partners.

“Europe is seeing unprecedented times when it comes to energy,” says Matteo Demofonti, Valmont Solar’s European business line manager. “On one hand, Europe has aggressive renewable energy targets to meet by 2025. On the other hand, supply chain and energy market volatility is causing a lot of uncertainty. The time is perfect for a company like Valmont to leverage their more than 75 years of expertise to meet these challenges.”

Valmont Solar will offer solutions for the PV industry in European, Latin American and North American markets.

“Valmont has been a major player in the utility industry for years providing grid-hardening solutions to build a smarter, more resilient grid,” states Greg Turi, vice president of Valmont Global Generation. “Now, with Valmont Solar, we are bringing in the generation piece by partnering with PV integrators through our product and service offerings. It’s a unique role to be supplying the hardware and service that is going to help us realize a modern, clean electricity grid and we couldn’t be more excited to be on the forefront of this change.”

Valmont Solar’s main product, the Convert Single Axis Tracker, is a solar tracker with more than 15 years of performance in the field. Convert Trackers increase efficiency by following the sun as it moves across the sky and have up to a 25% performance increase compared to a 1 MW project using fixed-in-place solar racks.

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The potential of C&I storage is an opportunity that should not be missed, the audience heard. Image: Andy Colthorpe / Solar Media

Industrial-scale battery storage systems can significantly lower electricity costs for the facilities they are installed at, but could also help manage the cost of power for consumers, if allowed to.

Speakers at the Electrical Energy Storage Europe (ees Europe) conference in Munich, Germany, said today that commercial and industrial (C&I) battery energy storage systems (BESS) could be a vital source of flexibility for grids across the continent.

A panel discussion held this afternoon (10 May) asked if C&I storage, defined loosely as systems between 30kW to 1,000+kW and installed at different types of commercial and industrial facilities, could be “the next big thing” in Europe’s energy storage market.

Battery systems can lower the amount of electricity a facility needs to draw from the grid. If used strategically, reducing grid consumption at times when demand is at its peak – an application called peak shaving – can also reduce electricity costs dramatically.

In Germany, for example, as demand for electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure and renewable energy rises, an increasing portion of costs of managing the network to accommodate them is levied onto C&I electricity users in the form of demand charges.

One company headquartered in Southern Germany, Bayernwerk Natur, installed a 2MW/1MWh lithium-ion BESS at a dairy farm coupled with two 800kW combined heat and power (CHP) generators. Bayernwerk Natur general manager Matthias Jacob said the dairy farm is able to save as much as €600,000 (US$63,240) per year on its electricity costs, such was the intensive nature of its use of power from the grid before installing the new equipment.

The panel discussion’s moderator, Dr Holger Hesse from the University of Applied Sciences Kempten at Technical University Munich (TUM), noted that there has however only been a “little growth” in the C&I market despite “a lot of potential”.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news in March, another team of experts found that during 2021, just 27MW/57MWh of C&I storage was installed in Germany compared to more than a gigawatt-hour of residential energy storage.

Alongside this ability to reduce onsite electricity costs, batteries at industrial plants could be a powerful resource for the entire network, but current market design rules don’t value or incentivise this potential, various speakers on the panel today said.

‘We don’t have tariffs that value flexibility’

Lars Stephan, policy and markets director for energy storage system integrator Fluence highlighted a day in March this year when there was an abundance of renewable energy, far more than load on the grid to consume. Yet on that day, 20 March, thermal generation plants kept running and the system plunged into negative pricing.

C&I storage could bring flexibility to that situation, he said, “but in Germany we don’t have tariffs that value flexibility”. So for example in California’s CAISO grid service area, time of use electricity pricing has been introduced, which directly correlates the price of power with the demand for it from end users.

Another example Lars Stephan gave was 4 April this year, in France. Settlement prices in day ahead auctions at 7am and 9am went above €2,700 per MWh, and 28GWh was transacted. This came about because interconnectors with other countries were down, and so was much of the country’s nuclear fleet.

Stephan claimed that if just 500MW of two-hour duration (1,000MWh) battery storage was installed on the French grid and could be called upon, the clearing price would have been reduced substantially for the French system, and ultimately for French consumers.

Energy storage systems are noted for their versatility and range of applications they can provide. However, with things being as they currently are, only a narrow band of those applications is incentivised for C&I customers that want to invest in them, these applications generally being peak shaving and the enabling of self-consumption of onsite generated renewable energy.

Energy storage hardware and software development company Fenecon’s CEO,  Franz-Joseph Fellmeier, said that as well as recognising and capitalising on the multi-use potential of energy storage, it’s important to derisk investment in the technology and develop an open source ecosystem for hardware and software.

In other words, compatibility across different energy storage systems and adjacent technologies such as EV chargers and heat pumps that BESS can be used to manage and control would help lower costs and increase accessibility. Fellmeier drew the example of the smartphone, where multiple app developers can benefit from a shared operating system platform, be it Android or Apple. Among the ways of derisking investment that can work are rental models for BESS, which lower the capital cost for customers.

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Salvador Battery Energy Storage Project in the Atacama desert of Northern Chile. Image: (Rendering Credit: Mitsubishi Power) (CNW Group/Innergex Renewable Energy Inc.)

Independent Power Producer (IPP) Innergex Renewable Energy has ordered two battery energy storage system (BESS) projects from Mitsubishi Power Americas for co-located sites in Chile, South America.

Innergex has awarded Mitsubishi Power the order for its Emerald storage solution and the projects are expected to come online in 2023. Emerald is a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) based BESS product with a duration of up to six hours, although the two projects ordered will only be able to discharge for five hours.

The projects will be co-located with existing solar PV facilities operated by Innergex and will provide load shifting capabilities, storing the solar energy during the day and dispatching it at night.

The 68MW Salvador solar PV facility will add 50MW/250MWh of storage while the 50.6MW Andrés site will add 35MW/175MWh of capacity. Innergex acquired the Salvador and Andrés sites in March 2020 and January 2022 respectively.

The BESS will receive capacity payments and trade energy on the wholesale energy, or ‘merchant’, market. They will also provide grid resiliency for Chile’s transmission and distribution infrastructure. A total of US$128.5 million will be invested into the two BESS facilities.

The press release said they will be among the first co-located solar and storage projects in Chile, as well as Innergex’s first BESS projects in Chile and Mitsubishi Power’s first in South America. The country is aiming for 80% clean electricity by 2030 and 100% by 2050.

Mitsubishi Power Americas’ senior VP for energy storage Tom Cornell told Energy-storage.news in an exclusive interview recently that the storage market would broaden out into many more regions in 2022, having been dominated by a handful of US states last year, mainly California. The company has more than 1.7GWh of utility-scale BESS projects in deployment across the globe.

Commenting on the announcement, Cornell said: “We are excited to bring our technology to South America and grow our business beyond North America. The coupling of renewables and Mitsubishi Power’s Emerald storage solutions are enabling a better, smarter and more resilient energy future for our customers in Chile and around the globe.”

Michel Letellier, president and chief executive officer of Innergex, added: “The combination of hydro, wind, solar and battery energy storage systems enables Innergex to meet customer needs at any time of the day and offer 24/7 energy supply to industrial customers through its portfolio of projects. In addition, the capacity payments for energy storage enable these projects to benefit from stable and predictable revenues to which are added the revenues derived from the merchant market, making these projects viable.”

Mitsubishi Power is also bringing its own energy management system (EMS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) platform along with the delivery of the bricks-and-mortar BESS. Its Emerald Integrated Plant Controller provides real-time BESS operation and a monitoring/supervisory control platform.

Chile is set to hold another big auction for renewables and energy storage, which will contract 5,250GWh per annum for 15 years, later this year to support the government’s decarbonisation plans.

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Richard Keiser

S2G Ventures, the direct investment team of Builders Vision, has made a $16.5 million investment in community solar provider Common Energy. The new round of capital will be used to expand consumer access to local, community solar projects across the country, scale Common Energy’s energy management platform, and grow the company’s management and operating teams.

“Renewable energy is the foundation for solving global climate change because abundant clean electricity enables all other decarbonization solutions,” says Richard Keiser, CEO and founder of Common Energy. “This investment will enable Common Energy to accelerate our efforts to bring clean energy to more households and communities across the country, and to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

For project owners, Common Energy’s platform is a cloud-based SAAS that enables them to manage and monetize complex, multi-tenant distributed generation projects. Common Energy’s software platform provides financial and collections visibility.

“Community solar is an important option for broadening access to clean and cost-effective renewable energy across the US, and we are excited to be supporting the Common Energy team as they deploy their sophisticated platform to accelerate adoption of this resource,” states Dr. Francis O’Sullivan, managing director of S2G Ventures.

“Community solar plays a valuable part in the United States’ national energy strategy because it advances clean energy deployment in a way that allows many households to promote solar energy while reducing energy costs,” comments Dr. Ernest Moniz, the U.S. Secretary of Energy under President Obama and a Common Energy advisor.

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Laura Pagliarulo

SolaREIT, a solar real estate investment fund, has purchased a portfolio of land assets underneath solar projects from TPE Development LandCo, a land holdings business that directly supports TurningPoint Energy‘s community solar development business nationally. The solar assets have been developed to various stages, from construction ready to fully operating projects over the prior five years. The deal involves more than 350 acres of land across five solar projects in Virginia, Rhode Island and Maine.

SolaREIT, which launched in late 2020, partners with solar developers and landowners, offering flexible capital solutions that provide a range of options for taking advantage of solar development on their land.

“We are excited to establish a strategic relationship with SolaREIT as an investment partner for this portfolio of land assets we have held over the last several years,” says Adam Beal, principal of TPE Development LandCo. “SolaREIT was highly efficient to work with and provides us with flexibility on how best to optimize our capital for future land holding efforts in support of TurningPoint Energy’s efforts.”

“We’re excited to work with TurningPoint Energy on these projects. Solar projects require significant land and capital – we’re committed to partnering with developers to offer solutions that reduce project complexity while freeing up capital so developers can focus on what they do best – developing solar projects,” comments Laura Pagliarulo, president of SolaREIT.

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Some of the most complex work involved in an energy storage project takes place behind the scenes, way before construction and site installation (pictured) even begins. Image: Florida Power & Light.

Energy storage deployment in the US is growing at a phenomenal pace. But the appetite for storage is much greater than the ability to build, and getting grid interconnection rights is often the biggest hurdle. As reported by Energy-Storage.news back in March, a new multi-stakeholder project aims to correct that. Gwen Brown, communications director for the US Interstate Renewable Energy Council, which has led the project, explains in further detail.

Energy storage is a critical piece of the puzzle in the transition to an electric grid powered by high levels of renewable energy. Storage makes it possible to capture the intermittent power produced by distributed energy resources (DERs) like solar and wind and use it when it is most needed.

However, many of the most valuable characteristics of storage can’t easily be utilised on the distribution grid today. That’s because most state-level interconnection rules—the rules that govern whether and how DERs are permitted to connect to the grid—have not been updated to deal with energy storage systems in a way that maximises customer flexibility and ensures the continued safe and reliable operation of the grid.

For example, some DER systems with ESS do not send any electricity back to the grid (non-export systems); others may be designed so that the energy they do send to the grid never exceeds a certain level (limited-export systems) or is exported only during specific times of the day. Yet most interconnection procedures use outdated rules of thumb for assessing the grid impacts of ESS that fail to account for these capabilities.

This and other technical and regulatory barriers make the interconnection process challenging for energy storage, slowing market growth and hindering our ability to deploy these systems at the pace needed to meet climate and clean energy goals.

A new suite of actionable recommendations for regulators and utilities aims to change that. The project team is led by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) with support from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office, includes the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the California Solar & Storage Association (CALSSA), utilities New Hampshire Electric Cooperative Inc. (NHEC) and PacifiCorp, and law firm Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, LLP (SMW).

The Toolkit and Guidance for the Interconnection of Energy Storage and Solar-Plus-Storage provides vetted, consensus-based solutions to eight key regulatory and technical barriers to the interconnection of energy storage and solar-plus-storage systems on the distribution grid. It is based on more thana year of research and analysis and includes model language that utility regulators can draw from to update state interconnection rules in diverse states and markets across the US.

Adoption of these recommended solutions can have a significant impact on how many distributed energy resources (DERs), like residential and commercial solar PV systems, can be added to the grid. For example, original research for the Toolkit found that when energy storage is used to control the export of energy from DERs, the grid can host more DER capacity. In the most pronounced cases, modeling and simulation research found that using storage to limit DER export (one of the issues the Toolkit provides guidance on) can double available DER capacity on a circuit!

This article provides a high-level overview of the challenges addressed by this Toolkit and their recommended solutions.

Updating interconnection procedures to be inclusive of storage

One of the most basic barriers to interconnecting energy storage systems on the distribution grid is the fact that many interconnection rules do not mention energy storage or specify how existing rules and related documents apply to storage systems.

Interconnection rules need to clearly state that the procedures apply to the interconnection of new standalone ESS and ESS paired with other generators, such as solar. They also should define ESS and related terms necessary to enabling the unique operating capabilities of storage (e.g., “non-export,” “limited-export,” and “operating schedule,” to name a few), and the requirements for using related equipment and functions. Related interconnection documents, such as application forms, study agreements, and interconnection agreements, also need to be updated accordingly. Chapter II of the Toolkit provides guidance on how regulators and utilities can make these changes.

Energy storage can do so much for the grid, but this is only just starting to be recognised in the grid’s ‘rules of the road’. Image: Convergent Energy + Power.

Interconnection rules need to recognise control of energy export by ESS

The ability of ESS to limit the export of energy to the grid is one of its most valuable traits. That’s because energy export is a major factor in how a system will impact the grid and whether it can be interconnected without the need for distribution system equipment upgrades.

One reason interconnection rules fail to recognize this functionality is that there has been a lack of consensus on acceptable methods that can be used to control export in limited-and non-export systems. To allow a system to connect to the grid, utilities need to know that the export control method is safe and reliable, but it’s not practical for a utility to individually review every such system.

Chapter III provides guidance on acceptable methods that can be trusted and relied upon by both the interconnection customer and the utility. With such guidance, interconnection rules can be updated to specify acceptable export-control methods for energy storage. This paves the way for solving another critical challenge in the storage interconnection process: how the system’s grid impacts are evaluated.

Because most interconnection procedures were drafted without export controls in mind, the review processes they require also need to be updated to specify how limited- and non-export projects will be reviewed. The Toolkit also provides guidance on how utilities can appropriately evaluate the impacts of these systems, rather than relying on conservative yet inaccurate operating assumptions that overestimate the grid impacts of storage systems (Chapter IV).

Understanding inadvertent export

Another barrier to unlocking ESS capabilities has been concern about the impacts of inadvertent export. Inadvertent export is power that is unintentionally exported from a DER when load drops off suddenly, such as when an electric water heater switches off, before the export control system responds to the signal to limit or stop export.

Until now, there has been a lack of clarity about the grid impacts of inadvertent export from limited- and non-export systems, such as voltage or thermal disturbances that could affect power quality. This has made it harder for utilities to evaluate such impacts when a system with energy storage requests to interconnect.

Original research conducted for the Toolkit (detailed in Chapter V) sheds light on the grid impacts of inadvertent export and how they should be accounted for when evaluating export-controlled ESS.

As the Toolkit explains, “Time-series analysis of an urban feeder and a rural feeder were conducted with exporting solar photovoltaic (PV) systems and non-exporting storage distributed along the feeders to understand the range of worst-case impacts.” The research measured the response times of power control systems—used to control the export of power from an ESS—to see how quickly inadvertent export is stopped by available products on the market. The response times found were “below any known thresholds for concern” for thermal impacts.

The research also demonstrated that “feeders can host more DER capacity if the DER is export-controlled…. While both the urban and rural feeder assessments supported this finding, the extent to which hosting capacity can be increased will depend on feeder characteristics, as well as the location and size of the exporting DER.” On the urban feeder, DER capacity “could be doubled with export limiting (inadvertent export) compared to steady export.”

Improving ESS interconnection with grid data, options for design changes, standards alignment, and more

The Toolkit addresses in detail many more existing barriers to storage interconnection (eight total) and provides model rule language for incorporating recommended solutions. These include:

The need for greater transparency about distribution grid equipment and constraints to enable project developers to choose appropriate locations or system designs to avoid the need for costly distribution system upgrades (Chapter VI).The need for pathways to allow project developers to modify the system design of their project, such as by limiting export with ESS, in order to avoid the need for upgrades. Currently, developers must forfeit their place in the interconnection queue in order to make design changes (Chapter VII).The need to incorporate interconnection standards (like the suite of IEEE 1547TM standards) into state interconnection rules. These standards help ensure that devices are interconnected safely and reliably, and enable utilities to trust device performance on the grid without the need for customized review processes (Chapter VIII).Lack of defined rules and processes for the evaluation of operating schedules, in which ESS operates on a predetermined schedule, in terms of the amount of power imported and exported and when that import or export occurs (Chapter IX).

Each of these issues represents an important step in improving the interconnection process so that the unique characteristics of energy storage can support the transition to a cleaner electricity grid.

Just the beginning for reforming storage interconnection

The Toolkit and Guidance for the Interconnection of Energy Storage and Solar-Plus-Storage provides previously unavailable insights on how the interconnection process for energy storage can be improved. It provides actionable solutions for regulators and utilities that can make energy storage interconnection more efficient and enable more DERs on the grid. 

Over the coming year, IREC and partners will conduct extensive training and educational outreach to drive adoption of the solutions across the country. Parties interested in receiving training or more information on the Toolkit can contact the partner team via the Toolkit website.

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