Field’s founder Amit Gudka. Image: Field.

News in brief from around the world in energy storage, this time from the UK grid-scale market.

Bulb founder’s ESS venture raises financing for 110MW pipeline

Battery energy storage company Field is to build a portfolio of four assets across the UK, after securing financing from investment firm Triple Point Energy Efficiency Infrastructure Company (TEEC).

TEEC announced today that it will provide Field with a debt facility totalling £45.6 million (US$59.9 million) that will allow the company to construct the 110MW portfolio of battery energy storage systems (BESS).

The first asset is located in the north of England and is expected to become operational this June, with a capacity of 20MW and a one-hour duration battery.

This will be followed by a 50MW BESS in Scotland and a 20MW asset in Wales, which will both have two-hour duration batteries, and a one-hour 20MW battery installation in southeast England. These three are scheduled to begin operations next year.

TEEC said the funding will take place once the projects are each sufficiently de-risked against construction and operational risks.

Launched by energy supplier Bulb’s co-founder Amit Gudka in early 2021, Field – initially called Virmati Energy – is focusing on developing a portfolio of BESS assets in the UK.

Story by Jules Scully.

This story first appeared on Solar Power Portal.

Investor-developer Gore Street targets fundraise for UK and international expansion

Gore Street Energy Storage Fund is looking to raise £75 million (US$98.48 million) via the issue of 68,181,818 new ordinary shares to fund the acquisition and construction of a new pipeline.

These would be priced at 110p per ordinary share by way of an initial placing, initial offer for subscription and initial intermediaries offer. This initial issue could be upscaled subject to demand, however, the company said, to a maximum of 136,363,636 ordinary shares.

The net proceeds of the issue are to be used to acquire and construct new projects in the company’s pipeline, with its Investment Manager having identified a pipeline of investments with a total project size of over 1.3GW in the UK and internationally.

This includes a number of potential projects comprising 900MW of UK grid-scale projects, 375MW in North America and 100MW in Europe.

The initial issue was announced earlier this month, though no concrete detail was given at the time. This proposed fundraise is conditional on shareholder approval at a general meeting on 11 April 2022, among other things, the company said.

Story by Alice Grundy.

To read the full version of this story, visit Solar Power Portal, where it first appeared.

Santander funding pushes 99MWh Megapack project off starting block

Construction has commenced on a 49.5MW/99MWh UK grid-scale standalone energy storage system following new funding from Santander UK.

The £30 million Chapel Farm battery energy storage system (BESS) development is a joint venture between TagEnergy and Harmony Energy, with TagEnergy having acquired a 60% stake in the project in November 2021.

Santander UK, meanwhile, is providing £12.5 million in funding to the project.

The Chapel Farm project is to use a system of Tesla Megapack lithium-ion batteries together with Tesla’s Autobidder AI software for real-time trading and control. 

The BESS is expected to be operational in Q1 2023, with renewable energy firm RES as asset manager.

Story by Alice Grundy.

To read the full version of this story, visit Solar Power Portal, where it first appeared.

Shell-owned Limejump gets 90MW optimisation deal

Clean energy management tech company Limejump has announced a new partnership with Opium Power, a developer owned by South Somerset District Council in southern England, to optimise 90MW of battery energy storage assets.

This will include the asset owner’s 40MW Fareham Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) in Hampshire – the UK’s largest local authority owned battery – and 30MW Fideoak Mill BESS, near Taunton in Somerset. A further 20MW of BESS is set to go live at Fareham over the summer. 

Limejump will begin to optimise the Fareham asset in National Grid ESO’s Dynamic Containment market from April 2022, as well as wholesale power and ancillary service markets.

Fideoak Mill has been operational since 2020, and Limejump took over optimisation of the site in late 2021. It plays into a number of markets including stacking Dynamic Containment with wholesale trades.

Story by Molly Lempriere

To read the full version of this story, visit Current±, where it first appeared.

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Lab testing of battery cells. Supply chain constraints may not ease until well into 2023, BloombergNEF said. Image: TWAICE.

The global energy storage market will grow to deploy 58GW/178GWh annually by 2030, with the US and China representing 54% of all deployments, according to forecasting by BloombergNEF. 

The group’s H1 2022 Energy Storage Market Outlook report was published shortly before the end of March. While acknowledging that near-term deployments have been dampened by supply chain constraints, there will be a 30% compound annual growth rate in the market, BloombergNEF predicted. 

In 2021, 10GW/22GWh of storage was deployed with the world reaching 27GW/56GWh of cumulative instalments by the end of the year.

The world’s biggest market by country is currently the US, installing 4GW/11GWh last year, bringing its cumulative capacity up to 7GW/17GWh.

However China, helped by its national policy to target 30GW of energy storage by 2025, is likely to overtake that lead, perhaps even before that 2025 deadline.

Germany meanwhile could be set for a resurgence to become the third-biggest market by 2024, again driven largely by policy, this time a 200GW solar PV target which will drive battery adoption alongside residential solar. Merchant opportunities for utility-scale energy storage are also reemerging, BloombergNEF said. 

Other markets of note include Australia’s already merchant-driven utility-scale market and its rapid residential segment growth, which make it likely to reach fourth place by 2030, although BloombergNEF noted the lack of revenue certainty in that utility-scale segment could make financing projects tricky. 

In other words, the economics of battery storage are good in Australia for utility-scale, with the rise of renewable energy and government support at state-level helping things along. However, the lack of coherent renewables policy from the federal government and the inability of storage to access long-term contracts are making it a market of pure merchant risk.

Australia installed around 345MW/717MWh of utility-scale in 2021 and a further 646MW/1,092MWh are forecast for commissioning in 2022 pending delays. By 2030, BloombergNEF forecasts that Australia will be host to 7.3GW/16.4GWh of operational battery storage, but if revenue uncertainty persists and policy becomes more hostile to renewables, this could drop to just 2.3GW. 

India will grow to be the fifth largest market by the end of the decade. As extensively reported at Energy-Storage.news and by our solar colleagues at PV Tech, the growth of India’s renewable energy industry and need to strengthen the grid as well as bring off-grid electrification to rural areas is driving interest already and the government appears keen to support both manufacturing and deployment. 

In other regions, various Southeast Asian countries as well as Japan have introduced more favourable energy storage policies and the construction of large-scale projects in Chile, Mexico, Dominican Republic and El Salvador could signify the start of a turning point for storage in Latin America, where uptake has been limited thus far.

Africa and the Middle East are seeing a sharp rise in uptake of storage for energy shifting applications and this is expected to continue. 

Meanwhile in Europe, long-term revenue contracts are being secured for large-scale projects in countries including Germany, Italy and Belgium, but on the whole the interconnected continental grid, relatively low energy demand and lack of policies supporting storage mean the market is still at a fairly slow pace of deployment. 

However, it remains to be seen what sort of impact the Russian invasion of Ukraine which began in February has on the energy security plans of European countries. 

BloombergNEF noted that lithium-ion battery storage contributed 95% of new utility-scale capacity globally last year, with only a “few rare exceptions” such as three new compressed-air energy storage systems in China totalling 170MW/760MWh.

The firm expects that lithium will maintain that grip on the market for the next few years, expecting that flow batteries, electrothermal and other longer duration technologies will still remain limited to small pilot or special purpose projects. Yet in the future, longer-duration energy storage could be a provider of emissions-free firm capacity to grids, BloombergNEF noted.

Supply chain challenges arrest decline in costs

Meanwhile on perhaps the current biggest topic in the industry — supply chain constraints — BloombergNEF said the US’ 2021 deployment figures were 18% lower than its expectations, with 1.3GWh/9.7GWh of projects delayed and pushing their commissioning dates back to this year from last year.

Regulated markets in California, the southwest, New York and Hawaii featured much longer delays than the Texas deregulated market, because of the need for developers in those regulated markets to renegotiate their contracts with utilities. 

In the UK, found to be the world’s biggest utility-scale market, even the bigger players are facing challenges with their supply chains and seeing their projects delayed. However, continued recognition of the need for energy storage to deal with volatility on the grid means it is still seen as an attractive market. 

Developers and investors in the UK also want to move forward with their projects as quickly as possible and enter market opportunities for ancillary services and other revenue streams before they become saturated. 

China, which is of course the global supply chain hub of the battery storage industry, did not face direct delays to project timelines. However, the country’s energy storage industry does not have as much downstream deployment experience as it does in the upstream materials and manufacturing sector. 

This means there is limited experience in designing and deploying large-scale energy storage projects, and led to lower installations in 2021 than BloombergNEF had been expecting. 

Despite the supply chain issues, energy storage had a record-breaking year in 2021. Yet those constraints will continue to present challenges and price pressures caused by spikes in costs for materials like lithium, graphite and cobalt may not begin to ease until 2023.

Battery pack prices will hit US$135/kWh across the industry in 2022, driven by high commodity pricing and the continuous decline in costs enjoyed in consecutive years prior to 2021 has arrested. 

The price of lithium carbonate has gone up 974% since the beginning of 2021, cobalt 201% and nickel 208%.    

The company rowed back significantly on its expectations for battery storage costs to fall. In late 2021, BloombergNEF had said that it expected to see battery pack prices below US$100/kWh across the industry by 2024 despite “near-term price spikes”. Since 2010, prices had fallen by about 89% until last year.

BloombergNEF surveyed battery manufacturers, energy storage providers and developers earlier this year, finding turnkey system prices for four-hour duration battery storage to range from US$250/kWh to US$400/kWh, for projects scheduled for commissioning in 2023. 

In 2021, the average figure carried in BloombergNEF’s survey of energy storage system costs was US$227/kWh. Smaller companies were more badly affected by cost increases, as they were not able to lock in the sort of multi-year supply agreements in advance that their larger counterparts were able to get signed.  

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A battery energy storage site owned by the Gresham House Energy Storage Fund. Image: Gresham House.

The high rates of return in the UK energy storage market seen in the last 6-12 months are unlikely to continue going forward as capex costs increase and ancillary markets saturate, market intelligence firm Modo Energy has told Energy-storage.news.

But new services coming into the market in future as well as opportunities in the energy trading ‘merchant’ space may offset some of the fall, said Modo’s Robyn Lucas and Alex Done, Chief Analytics Officer and Head of Research respectively.

DC sends UK energy storage market revenues soaring

The UK energy storage market is widely considered one of the hottest in the world, with 1.7GW of grid-connected battery storage and 13.8GW approved for construction (from Solar Media’s UK Battery Storage Project Database Report). Average revenue per MW doubled from £63k in 2020 to £123k in 2021 according to Modo Energy, mainly driven by growth in ancillary service Dynamic Containment (DC).

But 2022 and the coming few years might not be as lucrative with enhanced frequency response (EFR), another grid service, being retired and competition for the rest increasing.

Chief Analytics Officer Lucas said: “The really high rates of return we’ve been seeing in the last 6-12 months are not necessarily here to stay, although the market volatility doesn’t seem to be going anywhere fast. The frequency regulation services make up such a big part of the stack and those will go down with more and more storage.”

“We would expect that we wouldn’t see the same returns that we’ve been seeing over the last year going forward. That coupled with the increasing cost of Capex of these systems and the difficulty in connections means it’s not necessarily going to be plain sailing, but we do still see there’s going to be a significant buildout.”

Shift to merchant already evident

At the start of 2021, it was deemed improbable that battery storage could make more money through wholesale arbitrage than through DC. But there were 23 days through the year when this happened, as reported by Energy-storage.news in a recent guest blog.

Done concurred that increasing competition will drive down prices and revenues from ancillary services but that new revenue streams in the space could materialise in future. He pointed to the example of DC and how it near single-handedly doubled the sector’s revenues in 2021.

“There’s a lot of external policy factors here and plenty of new markets that are coming into the fray. National Grid are trying to set up various new services with the intention of building markets in the future, like voltage control or inter-trip constraint management,” he said.

“The reality is that storage is just going to do what it always does when it comes up against adversity in the marketplace, which is just find a new marketplace to take on and essentially dominate it because of its pretty unique characteristics, whether that’s the wholesale market or the Balancing Mechanism.”

The latter two are merchant opportunities and Lucas added she was certain that UK energy storage would get more of its revenues from merchant this year than in 2021. Separate sources say that increases in average hourly duration of UK energy storage projects point towards the growing revenue opportunity from selling energy rather than power.

It may be hard to pin down the exact numbers of this shift, however, as merchant revenues are harder to build into precise forecasting as not all of it is publicly available data, Done and Lucas both said.

Two new frequency response services are coming onto the market in 2022 – Dynamic Moderation (DM) and Dynamic Regulation (DR) – but both are relatively small compared to DC.

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Installed Array Technologies’ solar trackers at Lamesa Solar Facility in Texas

Array Technologies is supplying nearly 1 GW of DuraTrack HZ v3 single-axis solar trackers for the Gemini solar project, which will be the largest operational solar + storage site in the U.S., according to developer Primergy Solar. The project will store over 1.4 GWh of solar power and is estimated to be worth more than $1 billion. Kiewit Power Constructors Co. is serving as the engineering, procurement and construction firm on the project.

“As solar energy accounts for an increasing portion of the world’s electricity supply, energy storage will play a crucial role in optimizing renewables and ensuring power is available during periods of peak demand,” says Travis Rose, chief revenue officer at Array Technologies. “Project Gemini is historic for its size and scale, and we are well-positioned to optimize it for maximum energy generation while limiting installation time, LCOE and maintenance requirements.”    

Array’s trackers are scheduled to begin deliveries in Q2 of 2022 with project completion planned for the end of 2023. The project site will be located on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in Overton, Nev. It will supply power to Nevada Energy, a public utility which generates, transmits and distributes electric service in northern and southern Nevada.

The energy storage capabilities will enable the photovoltaic plant to discharge energy only when demand is high and supply is low, such as peak afternoon/evening hours in the summer. Gemini’s sophisticated control platform will use an energy management system (EMS) to determine the opportunity cost of discharging the battery compared to passing PV-generated energy directly to the grid. Gemini’s EMS will incorporate daily, seasonal and yearly data into its decision-making capability.

“Kiewit is excited to bring our extensive EPC experience and capabilities to the Gemini solar project, which will feature Array’s innovative solar tracking technology,” states Chris Turnbull, Kiewit’s president. “Gemini is a landmark project that will have a lasting impact on the availability of renewable energy sources in Nevada.”

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Part of JSW Energy’s Baspa hydroelectric plant in Himachal Pradesh. Image: JSW Energy.

JSW Energy, part of Indian conglomerate JSW Group, has inked a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Chhattisgarh government to build a 1GW pumped hydro storage project.

The agreement to build the Hasdev Bango Pumped Storage Project (PSP), reported by The Economic Times, saw the company’s share price jump 4% in the early hours of today (April 4). Chhattisgarh is a landlocked state in central east India.

“By integrating Hydro PSPs with our solar and wind power plants in the near future, we can provide firm dispatchable renewable power,” said Prashant Jain, joint managing director and CEO of JSW Energy.

Fossil fuel generation accounted for 70% of the company’s 4.6GW power output in the year ending Mach 31, 2021 (FY21) with the remainder from two pumped hydro projects and a small solar site.

But it has aims to ramp up renewables production by 18% a year from 1.4GW in FY21 to 16.8GW by FY30, and is targeting green hydrogen, pumped storage and battery energy storage alongside attached products and services. It has 225MW of solar near the commissioning stage and around 2,000MW of wind energy under construction.

Last year saw JSW Energy sign agreements with other state governments for pumped hydro storage projects. It says that water allocation has been approved for a 1.5GW project in Maharashtra and a 1GW project in Rajasthan, with environmental clearance processes and techno-economical feasibility studies underway. Looking further ahead, it has MOUs for renewable energy resources of 5GW and 10GW in each state, respectively.

The company says that India has 90GWh of potential to host pumped hydro, of which only 3.3GWh has been tapped to-date. Greenko is the main existing player in the pumped hydro space there.

JSW Energy also sees green hydrogen as a big opportunity with India having the second-largest hydrogen demand base in the world, and is working with a subsidiary of Australian iron ore giant Fortescue, FFI, to explore potential projects.

The capital expenditure needed to get to its 2030 target amounts to ₹75,000 crore, or US$10 billion, the company says. It had total income of ₹7,160 crore last year (US$950 million).

One source of funding could be development banks. UK development bank British International Investment, known as the CDC until November 2021, plans to invest £2bn (US$2.6 billion) in climate finance infrastructure in India and Southeast Asia, according to its Head of Asia Srini Nagarajan in an interview with the The Economic Times.

He said it wants to broaden out its infrastructure investments beyond pure wind and solar towards battery storage paired with solar and emerging storage technologies like green hydrogen, which it sees as a “major investment opportunity across multiple markets.”

BII/CDC founded Ayana Renewables in 2018 with a US$100 million commitment.

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Insurance impacts on nearly every aspect of creating a successful market for energy storage. Image: Altelium.

Insurance is a cornerstone of de-risking financing and investment into energy storage. Dataand analytics-driven decision making is not only for the operation and optimisation of batteries, it’s also vital for peace of mind and cementing the long-term success of the industry, Charley Grimston, co-founder of specialist insurer Altelium writes.

This is an extract of an article which appeared in Vol.30 of PV Tech Power, Solar Media’s quarterly technical journal for the downstream solar industry. Every edition includes ‘Storage & Smart Power,’ a dedicated section contributed by the team at Energy-Storage.news.

Insurance has always been a building block of market growth. The possession of insurance or, in the case of lithium-ion battery products, an insured warranty, is a sign that the product is supported, understood, evaluated and assessed against risk.

The warranty will last beyond the life of the original manufacturer and gives the product quality assurance and bankability, enabling the market to grow and mature. It therefore plays a vital role in the devel- opment of the battery energy storage market.

In addition to this role in helping to secure finance, or in taking risk and financial liability off a business’s balance sheet, insurance can play a key part in helping to meet Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) targets. In doing this, it also helps address and overcome some of the key challenges of the sector, namely confidence in battery lifecycles and fire safety risks.

This is because the information and techniques required to secure insurance, such as due diligence of risk and risk mitigation, are also required by new climate change regulations.

The process can also play a meaningful part in establishing best practice procedures relating to site planning, design and operation to mitigate fire risk, particularly in the context of securing Operational All Risk (OAR) insurance for energy storage sites.

The global standard for corporate climate-related financial reporting is the framework of The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). Endorsed by the G7 and G20, more than 2,200 organisations have officially supported reporting in alignment with the TCFD.

The demand from investors for meaningful information on how companies are preparing for the climate transition is directly relevant to anyone operating in the energy storage market.

President Biden has emphasised the importance of disclosing climate-related financial risk. Image: Flickr user Phil Roeder.

Understand risk to reap rewards

In the same way that life cycle analysis of carbon emissions has to be calculated at every stage in the product’s development, from first to end of life to give a realistic calculation of carbon output (or reduction) so too risk has to be understood and quantified at every stage; from understanding manufacturing systems and internal battery chemistry, to knowledge about best practice operating plans and procedures in energy storage systems.

This is why insurers who specialise specifically in batteries are so important to the future of the energy storage market, because few have the ability to understand the chemistry and technology involved, or the ability to process and apply the battery data required to understand, mitigate and price the risk to offer realistically valued premiums and meaningful terms.

While energy storage companies will want to ensure good ESG ratings for their stakeholders, investors and customers, the metrics and processes involved can play an important part in securing insurance, reducing risk, improving operational safety and increasing profitability.

Reviewing design plans, including heating and ventilation, fire detection systems such as gas detection and infrared thermal cameras, plus water management, spacing of units and blast walls, will all be part of good risk mitigation and planning.

Work together with your insurance provider

There is, of course, mutual interest between lenders and borrowers in ensur- ing projects are appropriately protected against relevant risk exposures. The more well designed and operated the storage system, the more favourable the insurance terms will be and it stands to reason, the more sustainable and higher ranking on any ESG framework that asset will perform.

Insurers are the keepers of extensive applied battery knowledge and experience, and by forming a good working relationship and sharing knowledge with them, the energy storage market will benefit from this expertise through improved premiums and services.

There are two layers to the process used by insurers to assess risk. Firstly the reference data of the batteries involved is examined, to understand the battery chemistry and the electrical architecture within the BESS. The second layer is to look at the operational data from the site to understand how the asset has been designed and built and how it is being managed – the system of checks and maintenance in place.

AI and advanced science replaces historical reference points. Altelium for example works with Lancaster and Newcastle Universities in the UK, each specialists in different areas of lithium-ion chemistry, and our co-founder Professor Harry Hoster is Scientific Director of ZBT, Centre for Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology at Duisburg-Essen University, Germany.

This is an extract of an article from Volume 30 of PV Tech Power, our quarterly journal. You can buy individual issues digitally or in print, as well as subscribe to get every volume as soon as it comes out. PV Tech Power subscriptions are also included in some packages for our new PV Tech Premium service.

About the Author

Charley Grimston is executive Chairman and co-founder of Altelium, an insurtech business offering insurance for batteries driven by real-time AI-powered data analytics.He has deep experience of the insurance industry, remembers the excitement of first seeing a US wind turbine in 1976 being underwritten in the Lloyd’s market and has been involved in the green energy industry ever since. Charley is a member of the British Standards Institution (BSI) committee which developed the UK standards for safe and environmentally conscious handling of battery packs and modules.

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The site of Kidston pumped hydro plant in Queensland, Australia’s first new PHES facility in nearly 40 years, currently under construction. Tasmania could be adding significantly more to the country’s installed base. Image: Genex Australia.

A plan to turn Australian island state Tasmania into the ‘Battery of the Nation’, backed with pumped hydro energy storage (PHES), has taken a step forwards.

Australia’s federal government and the state government of Tasmania announced an agreement on Sunday (3 April) concerning Marinus Link, a subsea interconnector project taking renewable energy from the island to Victoria, and the related Battery of the Nation project. 

Utility company Hydro Tasmania’s plan could see between 1,500MWh and 3,500MWh of pumped hydro developed at 10 sites and 2,000MW to 6,500MW of wind power that could provide up to 20% of the total need for dispatchable capacity in the National Electricity Market (NEM) through to 2040.

Analysis showed that storage of 12-24 hours will be needed to support the system in southern Australian states where a large amount of variable wind power generation has been added, Hydro Tasmania said in a 2018 study which the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) helped fund. 

The offices of Tasmanian premier Peter Gutwein and Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrisson announced yesterday that AU$75 million (US$56.35 million) in additional Commonwealth funding will support the Marinus Link project towards a Final Investment Decision to be made in December 2024.

The state will match that funding, while the Federal Government will also provide AU$65 million towards the redevelopment of Tarraleah, an existing hydropower plant, a little under 1/10th of the redevelopment’s cost.

A Final Investment Decision is also pending on that. Hydro Tasmania, which is owned by the state’s government, will also provide up to AU$58 million in funding for early works on Tarraleah’s redevelopment, carrying on what Gutwein’s office said was “significant prior financial commitments from both Governments to these critical energy projects”.

Private sector interest in funding the project is anticipated, while the federal government could step in to fund the project itself. 

Tasmania is targeting being able to generate 200% of its energy needs with renewables by 2040, making it a potential exporter of energy.

However, a report published in November 2021, authored by Dr Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University, argued that the Marinus Link project is a more expensive way of enabling dispatchable renewable energy to be used in Victoria than even batteries at eight-hour duration. 

Even if Hydro Tasmania were to provide 1,500MW of renewables energy exports to Victoria every day for eight hours, it would still be cheaper to build 1,500MW of battery energy storage systems (BESS) in Victoria, Mountain wrote. 

The utility has said the combined cost of Marinus Link and Battery of the Nation could be about AU$7.1 billion, of which about half would be the cost of establishing new pumped hydro capacity. Mountain said that 1,500MW of four-hour BESS would be less than half the cost of Marinus Link, 1,500MW of six-hour battery would be equivalent to about 79% the cost. 

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Duke Energy Florida’s Duette Solar Power Plant

Duke Energy is soliciting for at least 1,300 MW of new solar capacity in North Carolina. The company is proposing to the state to commence a system-wide solar procurement request for proposal targeting a minimum of 700 MW of utility-owned and third-party solar energy resources in North Carolina and South Carolina to serve customers’ future energy needs as part of the companies’ 2022 Carolinas Carbon Plan and in furtherance of Duke Energy’s integrated Carolinas energy transition.

The state’s recently passed HB 951 provides that 55% of new solar generation under the Carbon Plan is to be supplied from solar energy facilities that are company-built. But the remaining 45% of the total MW of any solar energy facilities procured under the Carbon Plan shall be supplied through the execution of power purchase agreements (PPA) with other companies.

Duke Energy’s plan would be in addition to the roughly 600 MW already put out for bids in the last round of the existing Competitive Procurement of Renewable Energy program. If the N.C. Utilities Commission approves Duke’s latest proposal, its Carolinas utilities would seek bids this year for almost 1,300 MW worth of solar projects.

The procurement supports the overall aim of the law, which says the N.C. Utilities Commission shall take all reasonable steps to achieve a 70% reduction in carbon dioxide emitted in the state from electric-generating facilities owned or operated by electric public utilities from the 2005 level. This initial 2022 solar procurement will be the first of a series of annual solar procurements, with the amounts of each subsequent procurement to be determined by the commission as part of approval of the Carbon Plan.

Duke Energy currently has 4,200 MW on solar capacity on its energy grid in North Carolina with more than 40 solar power plants in the state.

Read Duke Energy’s filing here.

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Solar Landscape has energized its eighth and final community solar project of New Jersey Clean Energy Program’s Community Solar Energy Pilot Program Year One. The final installation – at World Harvest Church in Pennsauken, N.J. – rounds out the company’s nearly 20 MW portfolio.

As part of the pilot program, which is administrated by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU), more than half of the energy generated must go to low- to moderate-income households.

“This is a milestone for New Jersey’s progress in community solar,” states Solar Landscape CEO Shaun Keegan. “Together with our partners across the state, we are bringing affordable solar energy to thousands of people who thought they could never get it, either because they don’t own their home, they live in a place where solar panels aren’t an option or because they lack the financial resources to install them. On behalf of Solar Landscape’s 100-plus employees, we look forward to bringing affordable solar energy to thousands more soon.”

Solar Landscape has begun construction on some of the 46 projects for Year Two of the program. They are expected to generate more than 50 MW DC of power and, once energized, they will provide electricity for another 7,000 households, bringing the anticipated total to at least 10,000 New Jersey homes that will be able to use community solar energy from Solar Landscape.

Solar Landscape’s seven community solar projects that were energized in 2021 generated more than 11.5 GWh of electricity to local residents’ homes and apartments.

In November 2021, Solar Landscape began construction on its first Year Two installations just weeks after they were approved. On October 28, 2021, the NJBPU approved Solar Landscape to begin 46 new community solar projects as part of the New Jersey Office of Clean Energy’s Community Solar Energy Pilot Program Year Two. As part of the community solar program, Solar Landscape has partnered with nonprofits and community partners to train dozens of New Jersey residents to install solar panels on rooftops at week-long training sessions across the state.

Solar Landscape has also partnered with New Jersey community colleges, technical schools and nonprofits to introduce schoolchildren and college students to the potential of working in the solar energy industry as part of its Green Ambassador Program. Last year, Solar Landscape and nonprofit Sustainable Jersey City awarded $20,000 in scholarships to high school seniors through its Community Sustainability Challenge scholarships.

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Enphase Energy’s IQ Battery 10. Image: Enphase/Green Mountain Power.

Microinverter supplier Enphase Energy has been selected by US utility Green Mountain Power (GMP) to supply its home battery system for a virtual power plant (VPP) program.

The programme offers GMP customers the option of leasing the storage system, buying one outright or enrolling an existing system. In both cases, the programme will require customers to agree to share access to their batteries to help the grid during periods of peak demand.

Under the lease agreement, Enphase will supply 100 eligible GMP customers with two Enphase IQ Battery 10 units for ten years for either US$65 per month or a single payment of US$6,500 (excluding installation costs).

The second option for entry into the scheme is for GMP customers to buy an Enphase Energy System outright or enrol an existing system into the utility’s ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) grid services programme.

The BYOD programme pays participants a one-time upfront incentive of up to US$9,500 for four Enphase IQ Battery 10s, and an extra US$100/kW for solar system retrofits in areas where battery power is needed the most. Customers will be able to monitor the storage’s participation in the grid using the company’s in-house app.

Josh Castonguay, GMP vice president and chief innovation officer said: “Our growing network of stored energy continues to deliver savings for all customers, helping cut carbon and costs. Expanding this groundbreaking work with another pilot programme will allow more customers to access storage technology, while increasing the savings through a shared network of neighbour helping neighbour.”

Vermont-based GMP said that its existing network of shared stored energy reduced about US$3 million in costs for all customers in 2021 by cutting power demand during energy peaks.  

The IQ Battery 10 is a residential storage solution using lithium iron phosphate chemistry (LFP). It has a power rating of 3.84kW, an energy capacity of 10.09kWh and a peak output power of 5.76kVA.

Concurrent with the announcement, Enphase is also launching a distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) called the Grid Services Manager which GMP will use to manage VPPs with Enphase.

The company adds that Vermont homeowners can now install its IQ8 solar microinverters which eliminates sizing restrictions on pairing an IQ Battery with the IQ8 solar system.

“We’re proud to work with Green Mountain Power on this program to offer Vermont homeowners Enphase IQ Batteries and IQ Microinverters,” said Dave Ranhoff, chief commercial officer at Enphase Energy.

“Our industry-leading software and hardware make building and deploying virtual power plants easier than ever. And none of this would be possible without the professionalism and experience of our local installer partners, who all offer a best-in-class experience for our mutual customers.”

Enphase Energy primarily sells microinverters but its storage segment is growing strongly and expects to ship 110-120MWh of storage in the first quarter of 2022.

Software is an increasingly important offering for energy storage solution providers across segments but especially in emerging technology solutions like DERs and VPPs. The potential of these programmes to leverage behind-the-meter storage and power assets onto the grid is huge, and so any platform which performs well has the potential to scale exponentially.

VPP specialist Swell Energy recently launched its own DERMS platform after winning VPP contracts amounting to 300MWh of storage and has raised US$450 million to scale. Other groups with DERMS platforms like Autogrid and Leap collectively raised over US$100 million late last year.

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