Renderings for community solar project (Image: PRNewsfoto/Empire State Realty Trust Inc.)

Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT) has shared plans for a community solar project at their office property at in Harrison, N.Y. The property improvement will serve as a new revenue source, contracted for the next 25 years, with approximately 40% of the monetary credits generated by the project allocated towards the ongoing cost to power the Westchester office building. The rest of the credits will be available to local residents to share in the solar project’s benefits, which include electricity cost savings. To be completed at no cost to ESRT, the project will feature a new parking canopy solar array that will provide year-round elemental shelter for roughly 500 vehicles, an 8.2-MWh battery storage system, and approximately 80 electrical vehicle (EV) charging stations for tenant convenience.

“Companies look to ESRT to help them achieve critical sustainability goals which attract and retain employees who value environmental leadership and action,” states Anthony E. Malkin, ESRT’s chairman, president and CEO. “This project helps ESRT meet our sustainability objectives, contributes renewable power to our community, will help to attract tenants, and benefit our shareholders.”

ESRT will partner with PowerFlex, a provider of onsite renewable energy solutions, to complete this project. PowerFlex is a subsidiary of EDF Renewables North America. This project was a part of NYSERDA’s NY-Sun Program, which supports the affordability and growth of solar energy implementation across the state.

“Tenants of 500 Mamaroneck have a leg up to achieve their goals simply through their tenancy in the building,” says Dana Robbins Schneider, ESRT’s senior vice president of sustainability, energy and ESG. “The property is now uniquely positioned to reach some of real estate’s most aggressive ESG targets, to improve the tenant experience, and to generate an innovative new source of cash flow. This community solar and storage project at 500 Mamaroneck will cost ESRT zero capital investment, generate stable, positive free cash flow over a 25-year period, and improve 500’s competitive position.”

The inclusion of battery storage and electrical vehicle (EV) charging stations ensures reliable power for resilient service and the ability to support the increased demand of EV transportation at no additional cost to tenants.

“We are excited to work with ESRT to provide a comprehensive energy solution that incorporates multiple low-carbon energy technologies,” adds Raphael Declercq, EVP of onsite solutions and strategy for EDF Renewables North America. “By combining solar, storage and EV charging solutions, ESRT demonstrates its strong commitment to sustainability with a holistic and forward-looking view. Additionally, ESRT not only increases its own resiliency, but also shares the financial and environmental benefits of renewable energy with its surrounding area through community solar.”

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Tesla Model 3 at the car’s launch event. EV, ESS and consumer electronics battery recycling presents a huge opportunity as well as a challenge that the world needs to solve. Image: Wikimedia user Steve Jurvetson.

Redwood Materials CEO and former Tesla CTO JB Straubel has told a US Senate hearing that his company already receives approximately 6GWh of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries for recycling annually. 

Straubel founded Redwood materials in 2017 after leaving Tesla, having led the automaker through battery cell design, supply chain development, designing and scaling the company’s first gigafactory and ramping up production of its first ‘affordable’ EV, the Model 3. 

In July last year, Redwood announced that it had attracted more than US$700 million in investment to scale up its operations, including facilities close to the Tesla-Panasonic gigafactory in Nevada.

Speaking yesterday at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which discussed the scope and scale of critical mineral demand and recycling, Straubel said that Redwood’s aim is to develop a closed-loop domestic supply chain for lithium-ion battery materials. 

Collecting end-of-life lithium batteries, as well as manufacturing scrap, from everything from consumer electronics and EVs to stationary energy storage systems (ESS), Redwood refines and remanufactures cathode active materials and battery copper foils for anodes.

These two components alone make up about 65% of the cost of a battery. 

Longer term, the company wants to be able to offer “large-scale domestic sources” of anode and cathode components, produced with recycled materials, but augmented with mined materials that should be extracted sustainably, Straubel said. 

The sheer scale of rising demand for batteries, for transport and for the energy sector, means that it would be impossible to meet it using only recycled materials, but a combination of locally sourced recycled and raw materials could help the US meet electrification and clean energy goals, the CEO said.

‘Vital to our energy and national security’

The hearing was being held as part of the US’ ongoing push to address vulnerabilities in the country’s supply chain for critical minerals, which has been a stated objective of the government even during the Trump presidency, but has been dramatically stepped up under Joe Biden. 

Committee chairman, Senator Joe Manchin said as the hearing opened that “accelerating production and establishing secure and dependable supply chains is vital to our energy and national security”.

Manchin referred to recent actions taken by the government including Biden’s invocation of the Defense Production Act last week and the passing earlier this year of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which committed funding to manufacturing and recycling capabilities. 

“While these actions are a crucial step forward, more action is going to be necessary to get supply chains – including mining, processing, manufacturing, and more – where they need to be domestically to keep up with the growing demand for these critical minerals instead of increasing our reliance on China,” Manchin said, adding that while government intervention and support are necessary, the private sector needs to take the lead on “securing reliable and ethically-sourced supplies for the materials that make up their products”.

The West Virginia senator – currently best known in clean energy circles for his ongoing resistance to passing the Build Back Better legislation that has otherwise received similar bipartisan backing and includes tax provisions to incentivise energy storage – recently welcomed the announcement of a West Virginia gigafactory which will manufacture batteries for applications including stationary energy storage.

Redwood meanwhile is targeting the manufacture of around 100GWh of battery copper foil and active cathode materials by 2025 and ramp that up fives times over to 500GWh by 2030.

The company is already receiving the majority of lithium-ion batteries collected and recycled in North America, and that amounts to approximately 6GWh of end-of-life lithium batteries, plus scrap, and a 95% average rate of recovery of materials like nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper is claimed by its technologies and processes. 

Economic and sustainability advantages to recycling

Another recycling company which claims a high rate of recycling is possible through methods it has developed is Canada-headquartered Li-Cycle. 

Being able to recycle and process nickel, cobalt and lithium all in one place to produce battery grade materials means that procurement becomes simplified for customers, while recycled materials can be competitive on costs with new, Li-Cycle chief commercial officer Kunal Phalpher told Energy-Storage.news in an interview.

“Because we produce lithium, nickel, cobalt, all at battery grade in one facility and our feedstock’s very different than what you’ll find in the ground, the cost is distributed amongst those three raw materials — so you can really get towards the bottom of the cost curve on all those materials,” Phalpher said. 

In terms of sustainability, recycling also means less water consumption and fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions versus primary production and extraction, per tonne of materials produced, he said. 

Li-Cycle has facilities in Canada and New York State already in operation and is planning more in West Coast and southern US regions as well as in Europe. Like Redwood Materials and Ascend Elements, which is opening North America’s largest single-site recycling facility near EV battery manufacturing hubs in Georgia, Li-Cycle wants to get in on the recycling value chain as early as possible. 

While Redwood’s 6GWh of batteries received per year sounds like a lot — and it is — it’ll be closer to 2030, when more EVs and ESS units come to the end of their expected life in the field, that the recycling opportunity will scale massively, while demand for end products will also rise steeply. 

For now, much of the recycling sector’s feedstock comes from manufacturing scrap, but this will clearly change over time, Li-Cycle’s Kunal Phalpher said.

Having previously said that ESS will be an important segment as both a supply and a demand source for recycled batteries, Phalpher told Energy-Storage.news that a large ESS with several megawatt-hours of storage can equate to 200 or 300 tonnes of batteries. 

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Powin’s modular Centipede BESS platform. Image: Powin Energy.

Battery energy storage system (BESS) integrator and manufacturer Powin Energy is the latest international company to target rising opportunities in India.

The Oregon-headquartered US company has entered a partnership with Indian renewables platform group O2 Power and could seek to establish local manufacturing operations, Powin executive VP Danny Lu told Energy-Storage.news.

O2 Power, established in 2019, has already been awarded 1.8GW of contracts for renewable energy assets and is backed by two investment companies, Sweden’s EQT Infrastructure and Singapore’s Temasek. 

Powin meanwhile has a contracted pipeline of more than 6GWh of BESS projects around the world, albeit with a major focus on its US home market, as well as about 2GWh already installed to date. The company designs, manufactures and integrates systems using lithium battery cells from Tier 1 providers and launched its newest hardware platform, Centipede, which can fit more than 200MWh of Powin’s Stack750E units into a single acre’s footprint, last year. 

Regular readers of this site will be aware that while India only got its first grid-scale BESS pilot project in 2019, the country’s government is vocally supportive of energy storage and its role in the country’s energy sector, which is targeting the deployment of 500GW of wind and solar by 2030.

Danny Lu said that in order to enter the Indian market, finding a strong local partner was of paramount importance, with Powin and O2 to split their duties along the lines of their respective core competencies. 

“India is an extremely unique market in terms of the market dynamics, the barriers to entry, how to even bid on a tender — all extremely unique,” Lu said in an interview.

“We were really seeking out a high quality partner such as O2 to support [overcoming] the barriers to entry and local market dynamics.”

Along with “very good funding sources from very notable companies,” Lu said, O2 Power also has “extreme competence” in the EPC space in India. Crucially, O2 also knows how to win tenders for projects in the country.

“India is a very big market, but it also has a lot of unique things that we need local partners to really solve for us,” Danny Lu said. 

O2 Power’s chief operating officer and president Peeyush Mohit said that with India having already installed more than 100GW of renewables to date and targeting half a terawatt by 2030, “batteries will play a key role in balancing a grid that has such large volumes of renewable energy capacity”.

According to industry group India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA), the country only has about 85MWh of grid-connected BESS online or under construction so far, but has a solid pipeline of 4.6GWh, including 3.3GWh tendered for and 1.2GWh of announced projects. 

“We, at O2 Power, see a big opportunity in providing battery integrated solutions to power utilities as well as C&I customers desiring round-the-clock (RTC) power. Powin is a global leader in large scale energy storage solutions and by joining hands with them, we intend to bring reliable and cost-effective storage solutions to the Indian market,” Mohit said in a statement. 

Already underway are large volume tenders for energy storage, including a 500MW/1,000MWh Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) opportunity and a tender from state-owned power company NTPC for aggregate energy storage projects totalling 500MW/3,000MWh, all “extremely large projects that we have to give our best shot,” Danny Lu said. 

“Powin’s responsibility is to support O2 on sizing and design of these projects, to potentially do some local manufacturing in India, as well as supporting with competitive pricing for the India market, as well as commissioning of our systems and the long term warranties and guarantees that we have to back.”

“One of the most exciting things” about the O2 Power deal is that the new Indian partner has a well-established service arm, Lu said, which could be trained up to service, install and commission Powin’s systems and become its sole service provider in India.

Nimble manufacturing strategy

In addition to stimulating growth in the industry through tenders for deployment and adapting regulatory frameworks, India’s government is seeking to support upstream manufacturing, awarding incentives recently for 50GWh of advanced chemistry cell (ACC) battery gigafactories which could be brought online under quick timelines. 

For Powin, which as a system integrator buys its cells and then assembles them, local manufacturing in India could have numerous benefits.

The company has sought to bring its manufacturing closer to demand centres in North America through a recent deal with contract manufacturer Celestica, which will produce Powin units from a base in Mexico. The confidence to be able to outsource its production in this way goes back to the opening of contract manufacturing facilities in Taiwan a few years ago, Lu said. 

“That whole process made us a lot more disciplined in terms of how we design our products and then in terms of the documentation around how we designed it: the standard operating procedures, the quality control plans, all the tolerances… everything needs to be extremely dialled in, where there’s no questions or no gaps, no grey area, where if you pass along your documentation to a third party, they can read it, and know exactly how to produce and quality check your products.

“We’ve invested a lot of resources into just auditing all of our documentation, and then making it into a much more transferable manufacturing strategy, where the document package can be transferred to Celestica, [or] it can be transferred to a company in India. It would severely expedite the process to get our products produced in other areas of the world.”

The company wants to be “as nimble as possible” and to have as many options outside of China — where many of its products and indeed most products used in the BESS industry are made — for manufacturing. 

“With all the current events that are happening, we want to maintain as much flexibility in location of our product manufacturing. One [reason for that is] for logistics purposes and optimisation of logistics, another is for tariff optimisation, and another just for pure proximity to where the demand is.”

Other international players pursuing success in the Indian market include GE Renewable Energy, which earlier this year opened a factory in Chennai making renewable energy and hybrid renewables equipment like solar inverters and integrated BESS solutions. 

Powin’s direct rival in the system integrator space, Fluence, is forming a joint venture (JV) company together with another Indian renewables company, independent power producer ReNew Power. The JV was announced in January ahead of an official launch taking place in the summer. 

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Rich Chung

Qcells USA Corp. has closed a financing package for its Coniglio Solar Project located in Fannin County, Texas. The project comprises nearly 405,000 solar modules, supplied by Qcells North America. The solar facility will be the largest project in Qcells USA’s operating portfolio to date in the U.S., with a rated capacity of 168 MWp.

KeyBanc Capital Markets (KCBM) served as the lead arranger for the $29 million bank loan and letter of credit facility for this 168 MWp project. KeyBank National Association acted as the collateral agent and administrative agent. This closing follows the successful tax equity financing and commercial operations in 2021.

“We are very pleased to close financing for Coniglio and to establish a new relationship with a leading bank in our field,” says Rich Chung, head of project finance at Qcells USA. “This debt financing highlights the appeal of our renewable energy growth strategy in the United States and Qcells USA’s strength as a sponsor, especially as we aggressively expand our pipeline geographically and into new technologies like battery storage.”

“As a part of our continuing support for renewable energy, we are pleased to serve as Lead Arranger and to provide capital for the Coniglio Solar Project,” states Tyler Nielsen, director of utilities power  and renewables at KeyBanc Capital Markets. “This represents our first financing with Qcells, and we look forward to continuing the relationship to deploy new technologies and energy solutions.”

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Dan Gulick

Aspen Power Partners has acquired 53 MW of community solar projects in Maryland and Pennsylvania from Trajectory Energy Partners. Trajectory will lead the development of the sites and Aspen will provide the financial support – approximately $96 million – and oversee the design, subscriber management and long-term ownership of the assets.

The portfolio consists of 10 projects across the mid-Atlantic region. Four of the sites are in Maryland and will participate in the state’s pilot community solar program. The remaining six sites are in Pennsylvania; they will be developed in advance of that state’s pending community solar legislation. The portfolio includes a community solar project with a historic church in Prince George’s County, Md.; a community solar project with a nonprofit foundation working to preserve a historic site in Prince George’s County, Md.; and a community solar project on a reclaimed former coal mine in Clearfield County, Pa.

“We are very pleased to be working with a strong development partner like Trajectory. It is encouraging that we are expanding our geographical footprint, continuing to work with landowners to preserve their property for future generations, and advancing the energy transition,” says Dan Gulick, partner at Aspen Power Partners.

“We are excited to partner with Aspen on such a significant portfolio of projects,” adds Megan Strand, Trajectory’s partner and co-founder. “Aspen brings a wealth of experience and resources to developing community solar projects. With Aspen’s financial backing, we can deliver projects that provide clean energy and local economic development to the surrounding communities.”

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Chris Kemper

Palmetto, a clean energy platform leveraging proprietary technology designed to drive the adoption of renewable energy like solar power, has entered the New York State residential energy market. Palmetto has joined up with New York-based operator PlugPV, now a Palmetto subsidiary. The company will now be able to offer residential solar in New York State by leveraging Palmetto’s existing clean energy platform as well as providing the option for electric vehicle charger installation.  PlugPV’s leadership team will continue to operate autonomously in their operations while integrating Palmetto’s software capabilities.

“We welcome the expansion to New York which helps us take one more step towards a well-designed, diversified portfolio of geographical market distribution; a huge thanks to our geographical expansion and policy team, specifically Ryan Barnett: he’s done an amazing job,” says Chris Kemper, Palmetto’s chairman, founder and CEO. “When we looked at market and product expansion, we found a tremendous synergy with one of the best-in-class operators, PlugPV, which we expect to maintain and support as a wholly-owned subsidiary and key partner in a handful of markets, including New York.”

“We’re excited to join forces with Palmetto to bring best-in-class renewables to consumers across the country,” comments Shane Nolan, PlugPV’s CFO and co-founder. “Shifting the energy paradigm in the United States will take companies like Palmetto and ours working together to accelerate the transition to clean energy.”

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Martin Keller (Photo by Dennis Schroeder / NREL)

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has released an in-depth report on the potential for clean energy development in Mexico. The Mexico Clean Energy Report concludes that, in light of this potential and the low cost of renewable energy generation, Mexico is ideally poised to become a clean energy powerhouse. According to the report, rapid growth in renewable energy deployment could enable Mexico to achieve its 35% clean energy generation goal by 2024, generate high levels of investment, increase energy access, reduce costs to consumers, and – together with other technical measures – improve the reliability and resilience of Mexico’s power system.

“Mexico can be a clean energy powerhouse and a vital part of maintaining North America’s competitive edge around the world,” states Martin Keller, NREL Laboratory’s director. “Realizing this potential will require energy policies that facilitate private investment and support our joint efforts on clean energy, climate, and supply chains.”

Mexico’s large and diverse renewable energy resource base could support significant growth in clean generation capacity. National technical potential includes 24,918 GW of solar photovoltaics, 3,669 GW of wind, 2.5 GW of conventional geothermal, and 1.2 GW of additional capacity from existing hydropower facilities – all combined, enough to meet the country’s electricity needs a hundred times over.

Even in the short term, with sufficient private sector investment, Mexico could realize this potential quickly, bringing online 15,257 MW of renewable energy. With this investment, the cost of producing electricity could be significantly reduced, saving the national system $1.1 billion, as well as generating $17 billion in new investment opportunities, creating over 72,000 jobs, and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

The findings in this study underscore that private sector investment is critical for Mexico to achieve its clean energy goals. The investments needed to achieve these gains, however, would have a very low probability of occurring if changes are made to Mexico’s current legal, regulatory, and electricity market frameworks that would result in significant barriers to market entry.

The NREL report reinforces the critical role that Mexico can play as a clean energy leader to propel North American competitiveness, a message that U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm expressed during her visit to Mexico in January 2022.

Read the complete NREL report here.

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Gaskell West 1 Solar Plant

Matrix Renewables, the TPG Rise-backed global renewable energy platform, is acquiring the Gaskell West 2 and 3 project of 105 MW AC solar plus 80 MWh energy storage from Canadian Solar Inc. through its wholly owned Recurrent Energy LLC subsidiary.

The project, located in Kern County, Calif., is fully contracted holding five long-term power purchase agreements with cities and utilities in California. The solar plus storage project is expected to reach commercial operation in late 2022. This hybrid project marks the first transaction between Matrix Renewables and Recurrent. 

“Through this project, we are continuing to grow our presence in the U.S., drawing from Matrix Renewables’ ambitions to become a major renewables platform across the U.S., Europe and Latin America,” says Cindy Tindell, managing director and head of U.S. for Matrix Renewables. “We are pleased to partner with Canadian Solar and Recurrent on a project that will leverage our combined expertise to provide clean, affordable power to the state of California.”

Canadian Solar’s majority-owned subsidiary CSI Solar will support the project by providing the turnkey battery storage solution for the 80 MWh storage part of the project. The integrated technology solution includes the supply, installation and commission of a lithium iron phosphate-based battery system. In addition, CSI Solar will support the battery storage system with capacity and performance guarantees, ensuring system output, safety and reliability.

“Co-locating energy storage with solar is critical to providing affordable, dispatchable and clean renewable electricity, especially during peak demand hours in the evening, thereby meaningfully increasing the value of our projects for our customers and partners,” states Dr. Shawn Qu, chairman and CEO of Canadian Solar.

“The execution of this project demonstrates Canadian Solar’s growing expertise in battery storage, both in its development as well as delivering the integrated technology solution,” continues Dr. Qu. “This is yet another battery storage project that our project development and system solutions teams are delivering in California, following the Mustang, Slate and Crimson battery storage projects. We are pleased to partner with Matrix Renewables in this project and look forward to further contributing to California’s efforts to decarbonize its economy, while creating long-lasting benefits to the local community.”

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Energy Toolbase is launching a new financial integration feature on the ETB Developer platform, which enables users to generate instantaneous financing quotes from third-party financial providers. This release and functionality will streamline the iterative process of generating financing quotes, allowing project developers to more efficiently model and close solar + storage projects.

The software platform is used by project developers, energy service companies and Fortune 500 organizations to optimize and present the economics of solar + storage projects. For eight years, ETB Developer users have been able to configure and model any type of project financing solution, including a cash purchase, power purchase agreement (PPA), loan or lease. This new release eliminates the need to move across multiple applications to generate a full financial model proforma, which incorporates both project finance specifications with avoided cost and other project cash flows. This expedites the process and allows developers to optimize financing with the other parameters of their project.

Green Bridge Energy is the first financing partner integration launching onto the platform. Based in Raleigh, N.C., Green Bridge specializes in providing clean energy financing solutions, including PPAs and operating leases to the non-residential sector. Typical counterparties that Green Bridge serves include MUSH markets (municipal and state governments, universities and colleges, K-12 schools, and hospitals), nonprofits such as churches, and C&I customers (office, retail, industrial and warehouse-type facilities). ETB users can utilize the integration to generate Green Bridge initial indicative quotes in all 50 states.

“We are incredibly excited to be partnering with Energy Toolbase and bringing sophisticated capital to the clean infrastructure market and ETB Developer users,” comments Byrne Huddleston, CEO of Green Bridge Corp. “Providing streamlined access to institutional capital for solar, energy storage, and EV charging projects will allow developers to grow their businesses and drive more margin from their deals.”

“We’re focused on releasing new features that make the modeling process more intuitive and efficient for ETB Developer users,” says Brooke Morales, product manager of ETB Developer at Energy Toolbase. “We’re confident that enabling instant quoting all within one platform will enable more projects to be quickly quoted and ultimately closed.”

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Zinc: versatile, abundant and used by various energy storage companies at differing stages of commercialisation. Image: Wikimedia, Hi-Res Images of Chemical Elements.

E-Zinc, a Canadian company which claims its zinc metal-based battery technology could provide low-cost, long-duration energy storage has raised US$25 million. 

Founded in 2012, the company’s Series A funding round closing announced today comes two years after it raised seed funding and began demonstrating how the battery could be paired with solar PV and grid generation, developing its own balance of system (BoS) solutions along the way. 

The technology is being touted as a means to replace diesel generator sets in providing backup power for periods of between half a day to five days, with remote grid or off-grid sites a particular focus.

In other words, the battery has storage and discharge durations far beyond what is typically achieved with the main incumbent grid storage battery technology lithium-ion, which currently has an upper limit of about four to eight hours before becoming prohibitively expensive.

That ability to discharge at full rated power for several days potentially would take it past the capabilities of other non-lithium alternatives like flow batteries and most mechanical and thermal storage plants, with the likes of Form Energy’s multi-day iron-air battery and green hydrogen perhaps the closest comparison.

However, e-Zinc is yet to move beyond the pilot stage — one project it is already working on is a 40kW system with 24 to 48 hours storage duration which will be paired with a solar PV array in California. That pilot is being installed at a commercial greenhouse site and has been supported by funding from the California Energy Commission.

The project was name checked and described in a blog for Energy-Storage.news by Dr Josef Daniel-Ivad, director of trade group Zinc Battery Initiative of which e-Zinc is a member.

During daytime hours, the battery system will charge from solar to discharge during hours of peak demand and to power the facility’s irrigation at night. It can also be used to provide backup power and is expected to go online by the end of this year. 

Daniel-Ivad also wrote about the significance of zinc in battery history, it having been a component in the world’s first battery made by Allessandro Volta and now taken up by various energy storage tech companies as a possible answer to data centre, other commercial and industrial (C&I) and even residential applications. 

e-Zinc’s tech is also being piloted in the UK, in a project with EDF-owned energy storage developer-investor Pivot Power and helped by funding from the country’s government Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) as part of a programme to support long-duration energy storage technologies to commercialisation. 

Investors include Toyota Ventures and Eni’s VC arm

With the latest financing round, led by industrial and life sciences investment firm Anzu Partners, e-Zinc will move to start pilot production of commercial energy storage systems. Other investors in the round include Canadian VC group BDC Capital, Toyota Ventures and Eni Next. 

As well as investing in the company and its technology, the investors will be important strategic partners and advisors to e-Zinc, with Toyota Ventures set to help it scale its manufacturing and supply chain arrangements, while the renewable energy projects of Eni Next’s parent Eni could provide sites suitable for the battery’s deployment. 

“Despite solar and wind deployments being on track to hit record highs, it is critical to address the issue of intermittency, which is why we are excited to support e-Zinc,” Toyota Ventures climate fund partner Lisa Coca said.

“The company’s innovative battery architecture decouples energy from power to enable cost-effective, long duration energy storage – bringing us one-step closer to a zero-carbon future.”

Another company using zinc as a key component of its energy storage technology, Eos Energy Enterprises, recently released its 2021 annual report. As reported by Energy-Storage.news today, Eos has an order backlog of just under US$150 million and expects to multiply its 2021 revenues of US$4.6 million more than ten-fold to around US$50 million in 2022.

However, Eos, already at the stage of commercial deployments for large microgrid, C&I and grid-scale customers, is not expecting to reach profitability until the end of 2023 and reported a net loss of US$124 million for last year, largely relating to the high costs of scaling up and expanding its reach to new markets globally.  

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