Thermal energy storage solution provider Viking Energy Solutions has had its tech validated by a two-year evaluation. Image: Viking Cold Solutions.

It’s been a positive week for thermal energy storage technology, with utility Edison International validating a cold storage solution, a collaboration between two groups to achieve 100% round trip efficiency, and an acquisition involving several intellectual property rights patents.

Edison validates Viking Cold Solution’s cooling thermal energy storage tech

Viking Cold Solutions has had its thermal energy storage (TES) technology validated after a two-year evaluation study by environmental consulting firm D+R International on behalf of utility Southern California Edison (SCE), part of Edison International.

Its solution, pictured above, stores cold energy with up to 25% more efficiency than conventional cold storage, the company said. The evaluation study recommends adopting Viking Cold Solutions’s TES into SCE’s portfolio of programs to promote greater energy efficiency and demand response in cold storage facilities, the company said.

Viking said the study, carried out at a foodservice distributor in Southern California, validates the commercial benefits of TES to improve grid stability and decrease electricity use. Refrigeration is the third-highest category of energy use in California.

The evaluation study determined that “phase change materials combined with intelligent controls significantly improved energy efficiency and demand management capabilities for cold storage facilities”. Specifically, Viking’s TES technology increased energy efficiency by 25% within the refrigeration system and substantially reduced peak load demand, while better maintaining required product temperatures.

The Houston-based company is hoping this will now kickstart the adoption of its technology by food manufacturers, distributors and food retailers across the US. Adoption into existing incentive programs for operators of temperature-controlled facilities to lower energy use would go a long way towards this, and Viking says the evaluation’s success promotes its TES technology into those programs. You can read the whole evaluation study’s results here.

Israeli-based thermal energy storage group seeks to achieve 100% round-trip efficiency

Meanwhile, Israel-based thermal energy storage cell producer Nostromo Energy (TASE:NOST) has announced a technology collaboration with commercial cooling systems manufacturer Smardt Chiller Group.

The partnership will seek to “introduce an energy storage system with the highest Round Trip Efficiency (RTE) ever,” of 100%, the company said.

In the context of energy storage, round-trip efficiency means the fraction of energy put into storage that can be retrieved.

Nostromo’s core product is its IceBrick, a modular, encapsulated ice cold behind-the-meter energy storage system which enables rapid freezing at high temperature. Its primary use case is to replace building cooling. It cools water into stored ice during off-peak electricity demand periods, and uses it to cool a building’s circulated water at peak hours.

It claims 86-92% thermal round-trip efficiency, 85% full cycle round-trip efficiency, 94% depth of discharge with a four-hour cycle, and less than 1% degradation over a 20 years. Energy-storage.news interviewed its founder and CTO Yaron Ben Nun last year shortly after a stock market listing.

The partnership between the two companies involves the establishment of a lab to develop operating protocols for both companies’ systems to optimise each other’s performance.

Norway-based molten salt battery group expands into Spain

Meanwhile, Norway-based thermal battery producer Kyoto Group AS has acquired Mercury Energy, a company based in Spain holding a number of intellectual property rights (IPRs) related to the development of thermal energy storage. Mercury will be renamed Kyoto Technology Spain.

The announcement provides little additional information about Mercury Energy. It says the seller is Andres Barros Borrero, who also owns international energy consultancy company RPOW Consulting with whom Kyoto Group has an existing relationship related to the development of its Heatcube product.

He will be paid an initial cash consideration and additional compensation upon achieving milestones linked to future commercialisation of Heatcubes in Spain up until 1 January 2026, paid as shares in Kyoto Group AS.

The Heatcube is a molten salt-based battery which can be configured with capacities from 4 MWh to over 100 MWh, and with discharge load up to 25 MW. It started a pilot battery in February 2020 which is now dimensioned for loads up to 1MW.

It claims an energy efficiency with a thermal energy only discharge of 90%, while 65% thermal and 25% electric power can be extracted from the battery in a combined heat and power configuration (CHP).

The company listed on the Euronext stock exchange in March last year.

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Chuck Leitner

CBRE Investment Management (CBRE IM), a real assets investment management firm, and Altus Power Inc. are building and operating a portfolio of rooftop community solar projects to provide renewable energy to residential customers and CBRE IM logistics tenants in Maryland.

Rooftop-based solar systems of up to approximately 20 MW will be located on the logistics facilities that are owned by CBRE IM’s funds. Power generated from these solar systems will be provided to both commercial tenants and residential customers. Thirty percent or more of the generated electricity will be allocated to low- and moderate-income residential customers in the state. Energy storage and electric vehicle charging may be added to these facilities in the future.

“Our collaboration with Altus Power will greatly advance our sustainability goals and support the transition to clean energy,” says Chuck Leitner, CEO of CBRE IM. “This initiative is an excellent example of how we use scale to make our portfolio more resilient, profitable and sustainable.”

“Altus Power has been serving public and private customers in Maryland with solar-generated electricity since 2011,” adds Lars Norell, co-CEO of Altus Power. “We are excited to expand our community solar portfolio in the state and to advance our relationship with our strategic partner, CBRE.”

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The Kosovo A Power Station in Obilic. The country gets the bulk of its power from coal. Image: Flickr.

The government of Kosovo this week announced it will build a battery energy storage system (BESS) with a capacity of 200MWh-plus to deal with the country’s energy crisis.

The country’s economy minister Artane Rizvanolli tweeted that the government has approved a program that will make use of a US$234 million grant to build the BESS and increase women’s inclusion in the energy sector.

The grant is being provided by the United States through the Millennium Challenge Corp, a foreign aid agency established in 2004.

The money was initially going to be used to build a new gas pipeline from Kosovo to neighbouring North Macedonia but recent high gas prices have made that uneconomical, the government said. Reports say some of it will go to smaller energy projects too.

Rizvanolli has been quoted by local media as saying the BESS power would be at least 150MW with an energy capacity of 200MWh. Reports add that it will help stabilise the fluctuating frequency of electricity, shift load and help the integration of renewable generation assets in the grid like solar and wind.

Kosovo faced an energy crisis in the most recent winter due to low domestic production and high import and had to shed load. Some 85% of its energy is produced from coal but it has recently added some renewable generation sources.

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NHOA Energy was spun out of French utility ENGIE last year. Image: NHOA Energy.

Global energy storage and electric vehicle (EV) technology group NHOA, formerly Engie EPS, doubled its energy storage revenues in 2021 and says it has a €764 million pipeline for the segment.

Overall, revenues across its storage and electric vehicle (EV) segments tripled to €32.9 million (US$36.2 million). Energy storage sales doubled to €16 million while E-Mobility segment quintupled to €17m, making it the majority of sales, up from 27% in 2020.

Although the raw results might suggest a switch in focus to the EV segment, NHOA’s energy storage pipeline and other metrics shows it still has big ambitions there. It has over 1GWh of energy storage in development and expects 280MWh online by the end of 2022.

Within storage it has a backlog of €193m in orders, €56m in secured contracts and a total pipeline of €764m. Its 136-strong storage team is also larger than the EV department’s 90 employees.

Within its storage revenues for the year, 46% came from Europe, 26% from America, 24% from Australia and the remaining 5% from Asia and Africa.

However, within its backlog and secured contracts total of €249m, the Europe and Asia proportions are inversed with Asia accounting for 40% and Europe just 2% (with Australia and America remaining similar proportions). A big part of that will be down to a huge 420MWh order from its new parent company in Taiwan.

A majority stake in NHOA was sold by French utility ENGIE to the Taiwan Cement Corporation (TCC) for around US$150 million in the middle of last year but it remains listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange.

And for its long-term storage pipeline of €764 million, the geographic mix changes completely with 56% expected to come from Australia, Europe 23%, Asias 20% and America just 2%.

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Centrica’s 49MW Roosecote battery storage project, commissioned in 2018 in Cumbria, northeast England. Image: Centrica.

Centrica Business Solutions has acquired a 30MW fully consented battery energy storage project in Scotland, UK, which will help manage North Sea offshore wind farms.

The two-hour duration (60MWh) battery storage plant in Dyce, near Aberdeen, was developed by Cragside Energy Limited and backed by Omni Partners LLP. 

It obtained planning consent in November 2021, and currently has a go-live date of mid-2024. Construction is expected to last eight months, and be aligned with its grid connection date. 

As the offshore wind sector continues to grow in the UK – with research from trade association RenewableUK this week showing there is now a pipeline of 86GW of offshore wind projects, more than eight times the current operational capacity – there is an increasing need to manage network constraints. 

National Grid paid £244 million (US$321.7 million) to wind farm operators to curtail generation in 2021, for example. Battery storage could help avoid such a cost, storing energy when the network is constrained and releasing it when generation is less abundant or demand higher.

To read the full version of this story visit Current±.

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Rendering of the Wandoan BESS 100MW/150MWh project in Queensland, for which financial close was achieved in December 2020. Image: Vena Energy.

Australia logged its first year of annual battery storage deployment exceeding 1GWh in 2021, including 756MWh of non-residential, mostly large-scale front-of-the-meter projects. 

Solar and storage market intelligence group Sunwiz has just released its report into the Australian battery energy storage system (BESS) market, looking back on a record-breaking year for the industry. 

A total of 1,089MWh estimated installations were made in all segments, with 30,246 home battery systems totalling 333MWh accounting for the remainder of the total. 

Sunwiz has forecast that similar numbers are likely to be recorded for 2022, predicting 33,000 home energy storage sales (363MWh at an average size of 11kWh per system) and around 750MWh for grid-scale storage.

That would total around 1,113MWh, while the commercial and industrial (C&I) is poised for fourfold growth but will still remain an extremely small wedge of the entire market, Sunwiz said. 

From 2015 to 2021, a total of 2,657MWh of battery storage has been installed in the country, including residential (1,464MWh) and non-residential (1,192MWh), Sunwiz found. 

By comparison with another leading front-of-the-meter market, according to another research firm, Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, the US energy storage industry’s 2021 deployments stood at 3GW/9.2GWh of grid-scale battery storage and 3.5GW/10.5GWh across all scales. 

Germany, Europe’s leader in residential storage sales, installed 739MW/1,268MWh of home energy storage systems in 2021, according a report co-authored by RWTH Aachen University. Germany’s large-scale energy storage segment, by contrast, only deployed 36MW/32MWh of new installations for last year. 

Victoria is Australia’s leading state

State-by-state, Victoria accounted for 32% of the entire market, with New South Wales (NSW) on 24% and South Australia on 21%. Other states accounted for much fewer percentages, with West Australia on 9%, Queensland 8%, the Northern Territory 2% tied with the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Tasmania 1%. 

That said, for Victoria it was a record-breaking year, while NSW has already recorded strong installation volumes and its tally of 7,377 installations was in line with figures in recent years. South Australia fell behind previous years’ rankings due to the downturn in subsidies in the state and its second place ranking in 2020 was overtaken by NSW. 

Victoria hosts a 48% share of the commercial and grid-scale operating capacity today, with South Australia the next biggest at 24%, Queensland on 14% and NSW on 9%. Last year, the Victorian Big Battery came online, which at 300MW/450MWh made a big contribution to the state’s total. 

Tesla, which supplied the BESS for the Victorian Big Battery, also supplied equipment to four other large projects commissioned in 2021, including the Wallgrove Grid Battery in South Australia (50MW/75MWh) and Bulgana Green Energy Hub in Victoria (20MW/34MWh). 

A smaller project of note for its use of vanadium flow battery energy storage at megawatt-scale is the Yadlamalka Energy Project. A government-supported demonstration project, Anglo-American flow battery company Invinity Energy Systems will provide a 2MW/8MWh vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) to be paired with 6MWdc of onsite solar PV at a site in South Australia.

There is around 1,000MWh of grid-scale energy storage currently under construction, but the development pipeline of projects is a massive 57GWh, according to the report. 

A map of proposed commercial and grid-scale projects showed that nearly all in Australia’s east, with projects spreading inland from Sydney in NSW, concentrated in the south in Victoria and clustered towards the coast in South Australia. 

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Fluence’s GridStack BESS solutions will be used for the project. Image: Fluence.

A 50MW/50MWh grid-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) will be used to demonstrate the ability of smart inverter technologies to support the stability of the power grid in Australia. 

Broken Hill in New South Wales is a site with a strong history in the mining industry. More recently, it’s become host to solar and wind power generation.

However, the area has only a weak connection to the grid network. Renewable energy generated there is having to be curtailed when supply outweighs local demand and the variable nature of wind and solar is causing headaches for the local network’s managers. 

The large-scale lithium-ion BESS will be equipped with grid-forming inverters which will improve system strength and allow for the greater integration of renewables. As highlighted in this recent Guest Blog for the site by Blair Reynolds at inverter manufacturer SMA, inverter-based technologies can play an important role previously played by thermal generation — creating synchronous inertia.

Major Australian utility company AGL is developing and will own the project, part of an 850MW BESS rollout it currently has underway. 

Global energy storage system integrator and services company Fluence will provide the BESS, having signed a framework agreement to work with AGL in early 2021. Australian infrastructure services group Valmec will partner with Fluence on the project. 

The AU$41 million (US$30.88 million) project will be supported with financing from the national Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), which this morning announced it will supply AU$14.84 million in funding.

ARENA, which is a government organisation, sees large-scale energy storage as a “key focus area” and the technology is a priority technology in the Australian government Technology Roadmap, ARENA CEO Darren Miller said. 

“Big batteries are already becoming critical to our electricity system, but we know with grid forming inverters they can provide system strength services traditionally provided by thermal generation,” Miller said.

“We are particularly interested in seeing how AGL’s Broken Hill battery will utilise and demonstrate advanced inverter technology in a weaker section of the electricity grid.”

Darren Miller added that the project can highlight the potential of large-scale battery storage to provide system stability more cost-effectively as more renewable energy is added to the grid.

Broken Hill BESS is scheduled to be commissioned next year. 

Also in development in the area is an advanced compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) project of 200MW/1,600MWh by Hydrostor, which has been selected by electricity network operator Transgrid to provide much larger-scale bulk storage at longer duration to directly ease curtailment issues and manage peak demand.

The announcement today comes a few days after AGL received local government approval for another major project in its BESS push, a 500MW/2,000MWh project planned for construction at a retiring coal power plant site, also in NSW.

How it works

“As Australia moves forward with its energy transition, we know that firming technologies like batteries play an important role in energy storage and supporting the energy supply,” AGL’s chief operating officer Markus Brokhof said.

“Broken Hill’s unique edge-of-grid environment provides an ideal location for this advanced inverter technology to demonstrate how it can facilitate further penetration of renewable energy generation and add to the stability of the wider electricity network.”

Thermal generation equipment, like coal and gas, are synchronous generation which provides stability to the electricity system through their continuous rotating mass while in operation. 

While variable renewable energy sources are basically the opposite of that, inverters can instead play a corrective role and operate as the local network’s voltage source. 

Australia got its first-ever BESS project that plays this role in 2018, in the Energy Storage for Commercial Renewable Integration (ESCRI) project at Dalrymple, South Australia, a similarly ‘edge-of-grid’ location. A 30MW/8MWh BESS supplied by Hitachi Energy (formerly Hitachi ABB Power Grids) serves as a provider of inertia at that demonstration project. 

The Broken Hill system will be unique in that it will always stay in so-called grid-forming mode, inherently resisting changes in voltage and frequency on the grid and providing synthetic inertia through its Virtual Synchronous Machine (VSM) mode, Fluence said today. 

The BESS will also perform more common applications such as participating in frequency control ancillary services (FCAS) markets and playing into other wholesale market opportunities in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM).

It could also assist the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) by combining its capabilities with other inverter-based renewable energy assets nearby in the West Murray region of NSW. 

“The Broken Hill battery project’s full power dispatches instantaneously to quickly respond to large changes in voltage and/or frequency, delivering the fastest response of all battery- based energy storage systems currently available in the market,” Fluence general manager for Australia Aaron McCann said.

“This fast response will enable the system to operate stably and damp voltage oscillations after a fault in weak grid areas the West Murray region, which will enhance the system strength on the grid.”

The grid-forming inverters themselves will be supplied by EPC Power, a California-headquartered manufacturer which was recently picked as power electronics supplier to EVLO Energy Storage, the energy storage system integrator subsidiary of Canadian utility HydroQuebec. 

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The American Clean Power Association (ACP), on behalf of its over 700 member companies, has released its Energy Transition for All initiative – an industry-wide framework to ensure that workers, communities and those historically left behind stand to benefit from the rapid growth of the clean power sector in the United States. The initiative was launched with the release of a report containing an outline of multi-year industry objectives to realize those goals.

“The United States is in an unprecedented transition toward a clean energy future,” says Heather Zichal, ACP’s CEO. “If undertaken thoughtfully, this transition will be an unparalleled opportunity to create a better future for everyone, offering greater access to clean and affordable energy along with expanding economic growth and opportunities for investment and innovation. With the launch of this initiative, ACP member companies across the wind, solar, transmission and energy storage technologies are committing to this vision for an equitable Energy Transition for All.”

Today, renewable energy represents roughly 13% of electricity generation in the U.S. By 2030, the clean energy industry could account for as much as 50% of the electricity produced in the U.S. – creating 500,000 jobs and attracting $700 billion in new investment.

The Energy Transition for All initiative is designed to expand opportunities for workers in disadvantaged communities and to help spur local economic development by promoting diversity and inclusion across the clean power sector.

The Energy Transition for All report identifies a series of responsibilities and associated actions to be taken by the clean power sector over the coming years across the following three pillars. The first pillar expands opportunity for workers, especially those from transitioning and historically disadvantaged communities. The second creates value for communities through supply chains, targeted investments and local economic development. The third pillar focuses on leading in diversity and inclusion, striving towards a workforce and leadership teams that are representative of the communities we operate in.

ACP and its members will pursue programs across these three pillars as part of this multi-year initiative. Additionally, member companies and ACP will partner with local and national organizations and policymakers providing expertise, implementation support, perspectives and networks that can help them support an energy transition for all.

The report also highlights the broad range of existing programs offered by individual companies within the clean power industry that provide economic opportunity to transitioning workers and communities and increase the participation of diverse and underrepresented communities in the industry. ACP sees the initiative as an opportunity and an obligation to scale best practices and drive a cross-sector approach in order to achieve even greater impact in the coming years.

“There is no single solution to ensure a successful energy transition,” Zichal adds. “It will take coordination from policymakers, community leaders and industry to ensure that the transition is equitable and that everyone shares in the economic growth and opportunity. As an industry, we are committed to playing our part in creating a better future for everyone and an energy transition for all.”

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It was a recording break Q4 for energy storage installations in the US. Image: Kenueone.

A total of 1,613MW/4,727MWh of energy storage was installed in the US in the last quarter of 2021 according to Wood Mackenzie, which says annual residential storage installations will hit 2GW by 2026.

The power MW installed in Q4 was more than the first three quarters of the year combined which saw 1.5GW installed. Research group Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables said Q4 saw impressive grid-scale deployment figures in certain Southern States as well as the established frontrunners of California and Texas.

But Q4 should have been even more of an outlier with 2GW of grid-scale capacity expected to come online during the quarter pushed back to 2022 and 2023 in light of supply chain challenges. We could see as much as 1.7GW installed in the current quarter.

Overall, Wood Mackenzie said 3GW/9.2GWh of grid-scale storage came online out of a total 3.5GW/10.5GWh across all segments in the US in 2021. That is 140% year-on-year growth measured in GW and a tripling of deployments measured by GWh. But the 3.5GW is lower than the 4.2GW figure from BloombergNEF’s competing report released earlier this month, covered by Energy-storage.news.

Meanwhile, separate figures covering all clean energy recently released by American Clean Power Association, which also commissioned WoodMac’s recent report, said the utility-scale segment saw 2.6GW of deployment last year. WoodMac’s figures cover all market segments.

It says the residential storage segment had its strongest quarter to date with 123 MW installed in Q4 2021 which was driven by sales of solar-plus-storage systems, of which half was in California. Puerto Rico installed 14.3GW while Texas saw 10.5 MW of deployments in the residential segment.

The report adds that system price gains over the last few years have been nearly wiped out by higher costs for raw materials and transportation. Battery module pricing has spiked the most of all system components while BOS (balance of system) has remained flat.

For the coming five years, WoodMac expects similar growth this year and in 2023 to that seen in 2021, but expects three roughly flat years for deployments in 2024-2026. In total over 2021-2026, the research firm expects 63.4GW/202.5GWh of storage to have been deployed. And by the end of the period, annual deployments of residential storage will hit 2GW/5.4GWh.

It says that projects are still being built at record-setting pace despite costs and supply chain issues causing delays and that its methodology includes additional risk weighting to account for supply chain issues

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Stephen Semlitz

AGP Sustainable Real Assets Pte Ltd. (AGP) and Hartree Partners LP have launched AMPYR Energy USA, the second joint venture between the two companies in just over a year.

AMPYR Energy USA, which will be headquartered in New York, is targeting to build a 5 GW utility-scale solar PV platform across multiple U.S. markets. The company will continue to leverage AGP’s experience in developing large-scale renewable power projects globally, and Hartree’s power trading analytics and zero-carbon solutions.

“With the federal and state goals for accelerating the energy transition, the U.S. will be one of the fastest growing solar markets in the world and a core strategic priority in realizing AMPYR’s ambition of becoming one of the largest independent renewables developer and operator globally,” says Saurabh Beniwal, partner at AGP and board chair for AMPYR USA.

Since its inception in February 2021, Hartree and AGP’s European solar venture, AMPYR Solar Europe (ASE), is making progress towards its goal of rolling out 5 GW of large-scale solar s in Europe. ASE also recently closed a €400 million facility to support this plan.

“We are excited to take another step forward with AGP into the US market,” states Stephen Semlitz, managing director of Hartree. “This new venture allows us to further demonstrate our decades of experience in finding investment solutions, consulting, and generating sustainable and commercially viable strategies for energy renewal and regeneration.”

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