The Clarios Meadowbrook facility in Michigan will produce up to 600MW a year of Natron’s batteries. Image: Business Wire

New sodium-ion battery production facilities have been announced in the US and Sweden by Natron Energy and Altris, respectively, with both set to start production in 2023.

Sodium-ion battery producer Natron Energy has announced a strategic partnership with battery producer Clarios International to develop the production facility at Clarios’ exiting lithium-ion Meadowbrook facility in Michigan. It will produce 600MW a year of Natron’s batteries when mass production begins in 2023.

In the same week, Swedish sodium-based cathode material startup Altris said it signed a deal with Sandvik Materials Technology to house its first industrial scale manufacturing facility in Sandviken, called ‘Ferrum’. Ferrum will produce 2000 metric tonnes of Altris’ cathode material, Fennac, each year, enabling 1GWh of sodium-ion battery production.

‘Largest sodium-ion battery production facility in the world’

California-based Natron Energy claimed the facility, which will use a portion of the Meadowbrook site, will be the largest sodium-ion battery plant in the world.

Under the agreement with Clarios, electrodes and large format cells based on Natron’s proprietaryPrussian blue electrode sodium-ion chemistry will be manufactured in the Michigan plant.

The company has been working on its sodium-ion battery chemistry for mass production for a decade and was the first to achieve a UL 9540A fire testing certification for the battery chemistry. Its batteries are primarily used for critical power applications like data centres and telecoms networks but the company hopes future applications include EVs and grid-scale energy storage.

“This project marks the beginning of a new era for Natron, in which we move from product development to serving our customers at a massive scale. Natron is grateful for the continued support from ARPA-E and Clarios which has helped make this project possible,” said Colin Wessells, Natron’s founder and CEO.

Sodium-ion cathode gigafactory from Northvolt-backed Altris

The Ferrum facility, housed in one of Sandvik Materials Technology’s factories, will be Swedish startup Altris’s first industrial manufacturing facility. Sandvik is a developer and producer of advanced stainless steels, special alloys, titanium and other high-performance materials.

Altris says its patented method for manufacturing that uses a low temperature and ambient pressure makes it a more sustainable and cost-efficient alternative to sodium-ion battery cathode material in the market today.

The Ferrum facility will total 1,800 square meters and development will start imminently with the first output expected in early 2023. It is Altris’ third location along with its head office in Uppsala and sales office in Guangzhou, China. It raised €9.6 million in a Series A funding round in March this year, which included investment from gigafactory startup Northvolt.

Tim Nordh, Altris CTO, said: “We’re delighted to name Sandviken as the home of our first industrial manufacturing facility. Ferrum is not only an important milestone in Altris’ history, but its very existence shows the confidence of our investors and customers in the future of sodium-ion batteries.”

Other sodium-ion battery moves

Sodium does not have the same energy density as lithium, and is three times heavier, but the material is widely cheap and available and interest in sodium-ion batteries is growing.

Chinese battery giant CATL, which has by far the largest planned battery manufacturing capacity globally, is looking at commercialising sodium-ion batteries while Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries acquired a British sodium-ion battery startup Faradion in January.

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Stem’s projects utilise a combination of the company’s own hardware with third-party equipment, backed by Stem’s Athena software platform. Image: Stem Inc / CleanCapital.

‘Smart’ energy storage provider Stem finished the first quarter of 2022 with an order backlog worth in excess of a half-billion dollars and reaffirmed previously issued revenue guidance for the year.

The US company, which specialises in artificial intelligence-driven battery energy storage, listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in April 2021, triggering its reporting of quarterly financial results in line with requirements.

Having said in February when reporting its full-year 2021 results that revenues for 2022 would be in the region of US$350 million to US$425 million, the company said last week that it was on track to achieve that range.

CEO John Carrington said Stem had had a “strong first quarter,” with quarterly revenues of US$41.1 million representing a 166% increase from Q1 2021’s figure of US$15.4 million. It was also 29% above previously offered quarterly revenue guidance.

A GAAP gross margin of 9% was recorded (US$3.6 million), again a significant step up from same quarter last year, when a GAAP gross margin of -1% (US$-0.1 million) was recorded.

However, ahead of its stock exchange listing Stem had highlighted that the path to profitability would take some time to traverse and for the quarter adjusted EBITDA was US$-12.8 million. This was due to higher personnel costs, investment in growth initiatives and the increased costs of reporting finances as a public company.

The company said that its growth potential and the growth of the energy storage and renewable energy markets it operates in is starting to be realised: its 12-month pipeline of forward opportunities stands at a claimed US$5.2 billion, up 30% from the previous quarter’s US$4 billion.

Contracted backlog at the end of Q4 2021 was US$449 million but rose 26% in the past three months to US$565 million.

Industry buffeted by macroeconomic headwinds

Stem acknowledged that while there has been growth in customer demand, well-documented supply chain issues continue to buffet the industry, from ongoing COVID-19 pandemic impacts to the Russia-Ukraine war and the wider battery supply chain bottlenecks and materials price rises caused by the growth in demand for batteries from the electric vehicle (EV) industry.

The company is using strategies including diversification of supply chains and technologies to mitigate the effects, which include increases in the cost of equipment it installs for customers both in front-of-the-meter and behind-the-meter in standalone battery storage and colocated solar-plus-storage.

It said that there is “no guarantee” its efforts to limit the impact on its finances or operations, although the company did say it expects the impacts of the US’ ongoing solar PV import tariffs dispute which have threatened that industry to be relatively benign on its own business.

The company recently also completed the acquisition of US solar asset management software company AlsoEnergy in February. Stem Inc said that although the deal incurred costs in the region of US$533 million in the quarter, the acquisition gave it the capability of offering customers including project developers and commercial and industrial (C&I) entities an integrated solar and energy storage asset management and optimisation solution.  

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Tesla’s Megapack, which have a maximum capacity of 3MWh per unit, continue to be selected for projects around the world. Image: Courtesy of Arevon.

Tesla is still aiming for annual energy storage deployments of 1,500GWh by 2030, which would require an average CAGR of 90% over the decade; something it achieve in the first quarter of this year.

The target was outlined in the previous impact report (2020) and repeated in its latest report for 2021. It is 375 times higher than last year’s deployment figure of 4GWh.

The target is certainly ambitious given it is nearly ten times what BloombergNEF reckons the entire global energy storage market by annual deployments will be by that point; 58GW/178GWh.

Tesla would need to maintain its current growth trajectory to reach its target, which implies a 93.4% CAGR from 2021 to 2030. The company’s storage deployments increased by 90% in the first quarter of this year, despite supply chain constraints.

By the end of the decade, it also aims to be selling 20 million EVs, which is more than 20x its 2021 figure of 940,000.

The Austin-headquartered company sells its home energy storage solution, the 13.5kWh Powerwall, as a product, which complements its solar roof and EV charging solutions. Its utility-scale energy storage solutions are the Power Pack and Megapack, the latter of which starts at 3MWh per unit.

It was recently revealed that it will supply Power Packs to sister company SpaceX for an expansion of the on-site energy sources at its Starbase launch facility in Texas, while its Megapack unit was used in a recently-commissioned 730MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) at Moss Landing.

That 4GWh figure achieved in energy storage last year gave it a market share of over 15% of the global market last year of 25GWh, Tesla said, citing S&P Global figures. BloombergNEF’s slightly lower estimate for the 2021 market gives Tesla a higher market share, of 18.2%.

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Part of the 61MW installation by Saft for TotalEnergies at Dunkirk, France. Image: Saft.

Battery storage manufacturer and system integrator Saft has completed another project in France for parent company TotalEnergies.

TotalEnergies said this morning (9 May) that the 25MW/25MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) provided by Saft is up and running at Carling, near France’s northeastern border with Germany.

The batteries will provide capacity to help manage peak demand periods and deliver ancillary services including primary control reserve (PCR) to French grid operator RTE.

It is the third of four BESS projects Saft is delivering for TotalEnergies in France. The energy major was awarded long-term contracts by RTE through a competitive tender process called AOLT in 2020.

Just before the end of last year the partners celebrated the completion of a 36MW/36MWh BESS installation at TotalEnergies Dunkirk site, adding to 25MW/25MWh already installed at the site a year previously. The combined 61MW at Dunkirk makes it France’s biggest battery installation to date.

The fourth and final installation in the portfolio, in Granpuits, northern-central France, is going to be the biggest at 43MW/43MWh. TotalEnergies said the Granpuit BESS will be commissioned by the end of 2022.

Each of the project sites leverages existing land and infrastructure already owned and put in place by TotalEnergies. This includes interconnection points to the electricity grid. The Dunkirk projects for instance are sited at one of the company’s refineries.

At the just-completed Carling site, TotalEnergies is also deploying two combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants to produce energy for storage. The Carling platform also produces polymers and hydrocarbon resins for the European market, while TotalEnergies is also exploring the production of green fuels from the platform.

Saft, which designs and assembles BESS based on its Intensium Max brand solution for megawatt-scale applications, delivered 11 separate lithium-ion containerised battery units for the project.

In a series of sponsored webinars with Energy-Storage.news, Saft executives and technical team leaders discussed the various strategies for designed, operating and optimising battery storage units, using the completed project at Dunkirk as a reference case study.

Kristin Schumann, deputy director for the energy storage solutions team at TotalEnergies, which acted as developer on the projects, also discussed the portfolio of projects in more detail in the most recent of those webinars.

The BESS units directly connected to the grid at each site need to be available 24/7 and send 25 separate data points every 10 seconds to the transmission system operator (TSO), Schumann highlighted.

French BESS market making progress after slow start

In an interview with Energy-Storage.news in March this year, Corentin Baschet, analyst at energy storage consultancy Clean Horizon noted that the business case for battery storage in France is growing stronger, although to date the country’s market has lagged behind its neighbours in the UK and Germany.

By the end of 2023, publicly announced projects tracked by Clean Horizon adding up to about 900MW will be online, Baschet said. TotalEnergies’ 129MW at the sites mentioned above puts the company second in terms of publicly announced BESS project capacity within that pipeline.

Furthermore, in 2021 battery storage asset owners and operators made significantly higher revenues than had been forecast by projections ahead of time. New tenders by RTE as well as pan-European ancillary services markets are among the different drivers pushing the market forwards.

Meanwhile, Saft has been contracted to supply the BESS for France’s first-ever high-voltage transmission grid-connected battery project colocated with a solar PV plant, Energy-Storage.news reported in February. Developer Neoen awarded the contract for an 8MW/8MWh BESS at its solar PV project in Antugnac, southern France.

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Seated from left: Elias Gedeon, Westinghouse Senior Vice President, Commercial Operations and Ivan Andreev, CEO of Bulgarian Energy Holding signing the MOU. Image: Business Wire.

Nuclear power firm Westinghouse Electric Company has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with a state-owned energy company to build 2GWh of pumped thermal energy storage (PTES) capacity in Bulgaria.

The Pennsylvania-based firm’s MOU with Bulgarian Energy Holding (BEH), announced on 5 May, calls for the installation of two PTES units providing 2GWh of energy storage.

Westinghouse has developed its own thermal storage technology, but has also partnered with Echogen Power Systems to meet the demand for long-duration energy storage (LDES). Echogen is an Ohio-based provider of waste-heat recovery systems and electro-thermal energy storage solutions the CEO of which wrote a guest blog on Energy-storage.news last year.

The PTES technology used will enable a dispatch of 10 hours-plus, has a design life of more than 50 years and uses low-cost abundant materials when compared with more common energy storage technologies, the press release adds, not specifically naming lithium-ion.

The units will boost grid resiliency in Bulgaria and help integrate more renewables onto the national grid, the press release said.

Ivan Andreev, CEO of BEH, said: “The reliability and affordability of energy systems based on various energy sources, such as wind and solar, may depend on the ability to store large amounts of generated low-cost energy for long periods of time.”

“Large-scale deployment of LDES with the benefits this technology brings can significantly reduce the overall cost of future systems generating clean energy from renewables.”

Westinghouse has not revealed many details about its underlying PTES technology although a previous presentation from the company indicates it may involve concrete and oil.

Another PTES group, Malta Inc, converts electricity into heat and stores it in molten salt – a medium which Westinghouse says it considered – simultaneously running off cold energy which is stored in vats of a cooling liquid, then converting that heat and cool back into electrical energy using a heat engine which runs off the temperature difference.

It is the second big energy storage move made by Bulgaria in the space of a week. It has also signed an MOU with power company AES for the latter to develop a colocated 100MW solar PV with battery energy storage system and a standalone 80MWh BESS near the capital, Sofia.

Westinghouse Electric Company was spun out as a standalone nuclear power firm from Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1997. Twenty years later, under the ownership of Toshiba, it filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy and was acquired by investment firm Brookfield Business Partners a year later. Westinghouse says its technology is the basis for half of the world’s nuclear reactors.

One of its former manufacturing facilities in Pittsburgh is now being used by Eos Energy to build its zinc battery storage manufacturing plant.

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Myke Clark

Solar Alliance Energy Inc. has signed a contract to design and build a 500 kW solar project for a commercial customer in Kentucky. The project, with a capital cost of $750,000, will be powered by more than 1,000 Cat solar modules and is expected to be completed by the end of 2022.

“The Solar Alliance team continues to deliver quality, economic solar projects to our customers and that has resulted in increased contract signings in 2022,” says CEO Myke Clark. “With the addition of this project, Solar Alliance’s backlog of projects under contract now exceeds $5,000,000. This growth is driven by our shift to larger solar projects with commercial and utility customers over the last two quarters. We will continue to pursue a balanced strategy – the high growth of building for third party customers combined with recurring revenue from solar assets we own – that is scalable and supports our goal of becoming a leading commercial and industrial solar provider in the U.S.”

The project is the latest to be built in partnership with Boyd CAT, the authorized dealer of Cat solar equipment for businesses and contractors across Kentucky, Southern Indiana, West Virginia and Southeastern Ohio.

To date, Boyd CAT and Solar Alliance have partnered on several projects including the completed 1 MW solar project for Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Company, and a 1 MW project for the Knoxville Utilities Board that will be constructed this year.

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A render of the 780-hectare solar farm. Image: Merriwa Energy Hub/ Maoneng.

Renewable energy company Maoneng has proposed an energy hub in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, with a 550MWac solar farm and 400MW/1,600MWh battery energy storage system (BESS).

The company plans to lodge a development application for the Merriwa Energy Hub with the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment. It said that it expects the project to be completed in 2025 which would coincide with the planned closure of the nearby 550MW Liddell Coal Power Station.

The proposed solar farm would cover 780 hectares comprising 1.3 million PV solar panels paired with the 400MW, four-hour BESS, and the overall project would take 18 months to build. The 1,600MWh BESS would be nearly four times larger than Australia’s largest existing BESS facility, the 300MW/450MWh Victorian Big Battery which went online in December 2021.

Maoneng’s project will require the construction of a new substation directly connecting to the National Electricity Market (NEM) via TransGrid’s nearby existing 500kV transmission line. The company said the project, near the town of Merriwa in the Hunter region of NSW, is designed to address the regional energy supply and grid stability needs of the NEM.

The project’s website says it has moved past the grid studies stage and on to launching a construction tender process to find a contractor to work on it.

Maoneng Co-founder and CEO Morris Zhou commented: “This project will support the NSW Government’s large-scale solar generation and battery storage strategies as the state moves towards increasing use of clean energy. We have deliberately chosen the site based upon its robust connection to the existing grid, making efficient use of the infrastructure that exists today.”

The company recently got development approval for a 240MW/480MWh BESS in the state of Victoria.

Australia currently has around 600MW of grid-connected utility-scale BESS across all states according to Ben Cerini, managing consultant market consulting group Cornwall Insight Australia. Another group, Sunwiz, said there is a little over 1GWh of commercial & industrial (CYI) and grid-connected BESS in construction in its ‘Battery Market Report – 2022’.

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Interior of AES’ Alamitos 400MWh BESS, California. Image: AES.

Amazon has signed cross-portfolio power purchase agreement (PPA) deals with AES Corporation for California clean energy resources.

The logistics, delivery and web services behemoth said on 5 May that it has entered two PPAs with power company AES for renewable energy sourced from solar and battery energy storage system (BESS) assets in the CAISO service territory.

Energy from a total of 450MW of solar PV and 225MW of four-hour duration BESS (1,200MWh) will be sold.

The announcement comes as Amazon targets powering its business from 100% renewable energy by 2030. The company just added another 3.5GW of renewable energy procurements in mid-April, including two large-scale solar-plus-storage projects, one in Arizona and another in California.

For AES, the PPAs are part of a major tranche of 5GW of such agreements that were brokered during 2021. AES said that it has already contracted with Fluence to deliver one of the battery projects included in the Amazon deals – AES is part-owner of the global energy storage system integration and clean energy services company.

AES president and CEO Andres Gluski said Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres will be among the facilities powered by the solar and batteries. AES has recently also been working with Google to provide renewable energy to the search engine company’s data centres, including from wind farms in Chile for Google’s first data centre in Latin America.

Fluence also supplied the BESS to Google’s pilot project at its Saint-Ghislain data centre in Belgium, which could serve as a replicable model for rollout elsewhere in the world.

Fluence and AWS in mutually beneficial collaboration

In a separate announcement also made last week, Fluence said that it will leverage AWS’ cloud computing capabilities to support both hardware and software platforms.

Fluence’s suite of services has broadly expanded in the past year or two to encompass a range of energy storage and renewable energy optimisation applications and the company said AWS’ technologies, particularly in machine learning could support the development and expansion of these.

Fluence noted that in addition to supplying BESS equipment to AES’ projects for Amazon, AES will also use the Fluence IQ Bidding application to optimise the batteries’ utilisation and dispatch.

Amazon’s web services arm could achieve 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years earlier than the rest of the group by utilising renewables and storage that are optimised through Fluence’s digital services, AWS energy and utilities general manager Howard Gefen said.

Elsewhere, AES’ Bulgarian subsidiary has just signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Bulgaria’s government to explore the construction of co-located solar-plus-storage and standalone BESS in the European country.

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S-5!, an inventor of engineered, manufactured, metal roof attachments including solar applications, has introduced its new electrical conduit clamp for metal roofs. The new CanDuit clamp secures and supports conduit for wire management and fastens home runs to metal roofs for solar PV systems, in combination with any S-5! clamp or bracket.

Made from electro-zinc coated steel, the CanDuit clamp features two halves that clamp around the pipe or conduit with an EPDM liner pad that protects against abrasion and a threaded M8 stud that allows for attachment to S-5! Products – providing easy, organized securement without scratching, corrosion or other damage to the roof.

The CanDuit can be used in both residential and commercial settings for a range of applications including electrical, solar, plumbing for gas or water, and condensate drainage.

CanDuit is available in 14 sizes with outer pipe diameters ranging from 0.79″ to 4.6”. Adjustability within each clamp enables minor size adjustment to secure most conduit and other piping. CanDuit’s M8 threaded shaft mounts directly to S-5!’s non-penetrating clamps for standing seam roofs and factory weatherproofed brackets for exposed-fastened roofs and the S-5! GripperFix utility mounting system.

“Our customers repeatedly ask, do you have anything to mount electrical conduit, pipes and other round-shaped objects to metal roofs,” says Rob Haddock, S-5!’s CEO and founder. “So, in an effort to respond to the industry’s needs and as we continue to innovate new and better solutions in a constant product improvement and invention/reinvention mode to bring competitive advantages to our customers, we’ve created the CanDuit clamp. So now, S-5! Can-do-it!”

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A render of Energy Vault’s Energy Vault Resiliency Center. Image: Energy Vault.

FERC States of the Markets 2021: battery storage nearly equalled gas capacity additions

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recently released its State of the Markets 2021 report. Overall, battery energy storage additions in 2021 nearly equalled new natural gas capacity additions, the report said.

Batteries were the fourth-largest category behind gas, wind and solar (in ascending order). Some 3.1GW of battery storage was added versus just 0.5GW during the same period last year.

Unsurprisingly, California ISO (CAISO) is leading the way with battery storage now representing 3.2% of its 70GW generating capacity. It accounted for just under 60% of the 3.1GW in new BESS capacity in 2021, or around 1.8GW, though this figure contradicts CAISO’s own figure of around 2.4GW. ERCOT was the next-largest at just under 20% of the total or around 600MW.

The report added that in CAISO, batteries currently serve only around 4% of increased demand between 12.30pm and 10pm. But, as Energy-storage.news wrote recently having interviewed CAISO, that is well over 10% in some five-minute intervals. This graph shows batteries’ average charge and discharge hours over 2021.

10MW BESS goes online in Germany

A 10MW battery energy storage system (BESS) in Germany, delivered by system integrator ECO STOR for Austria-based electricity provider Verbund is live.

The BESS facility in the town of Eisenach in Thuringia, central Germany, went into operation at the beginning of April. ECO STOR said it is made up of three battery stations totalling 10MW of power.

It will provide both grid-related services as well as load shifting to accommodate the increase in wind and solar on the German grid. The press release said operators of flexible resources receive remuneration from the grid operator because of the “significant contribution to the stability of the electricity grid.”

It is the second BESS that Verbund has turned live this year in Germany, one of 20 international markets it operates in. At the beginning of the year, it commissioned a 20MW BESS in Breitenworbis, near to Eisenach.

The German BESS market is currently dominated by the residential and commercial & industrial sector as Energy-Storage.news wrote recently. However, the utility-scale segment is picking up and has seen the recent entry of UK BESS project developers and investors like Anesco and Gore Street Capital.

Energy Vault begins construction of 100MWh system in China

Gravity-based energy storage company Energy Vault has announced the start of construction of its 10MWh EVx storage system, as previously forecasted by the company.

Energy Vault, Houston-based Atlas Renewable and China Tianying are building the project adjacent to a wind farm and national grid site in Rudong, Jiangsu Province near Shanghai. It will help deliver renewable energy to the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC).

Its technology involves mechanically lifting and lowering large weights to release potential energy.

The press release claimed it is the first utility scale gravity-based storage deployment between a US and Chinese company. Energy Vault and Atlas recently signed a $50 million licensing agreement for the use of the Swiss-American startup’s proprietary gravity-based energy storage technology and accompanying optimisation software suite in the Chinese power market.

Energy Vault raised US$235 million in a SPAC merger listing on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in February, which listed the company at US$1.1 billion.

The company says its technology is scalable and uses low-cost materials although some sources have voiced scepticism about its reliance on moving parts and ability to effectively store and dispatch energy as required.

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