Solar and battery storage dominate planned capacity additions through 2023, with another 10GW of battery storage. Image: US EIA.

From 10GW of battery storage expected to be deployed in the US over the next two years, more than 60% will be installed with solar PV, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The EIA conducts surveys to collect statistics on existing and planned generators and associated equipment at power plants, of 1MW or more nameplate capacity. The independent group is an agency of the US Federal Statistical System. 

In reporting its most recent monthly stats, the group noted that 3.1GW of battery storage was added in the US during 2021. This was a considerable increase on 2020, when cumulative installed capacity by the end of that year was found by EIA to be 1,650MW. 

It’s an even more phenomenal rise when considering that installed base was about 100MW a decade ago in 2012 and crossed the 1GW line only in 2019. Over the next two years, another 10GW is expected to be added across the country.

When installed together at the same time and meeting certain conditions on charging, solar PV and battery storage can qualify for the investment tax credit (ITC), which lowers the capital cost of investment.

This has been a powerful driver for solar-plus-storage in the US but has not applied to standalone energy storage, which does not qualify for the ITC without PV. Industry groups and advocates continue to lobby for the inclusion of storage in the ITC, as well as a direct-pay option to unlock ITC benefits more quickly and simply.

The falling costs of battery storage have also been cited as a driver for activity, albeit at the moment a combination of shipping delays, high demand from the EV sector and raw materials price shocks are among factors arresting the sharp-trajectories in cost reduction batteries have enjoyed for the last 10 years.

Industry battles supply chain uncertainty

Industry sources have commented that they see many of the issues — particularly those relating to the COVID-19 pandemic — resolving in the next few months. Some have also changed strategies, with energy storage technology provider Fluence recently deciding to include raw material index-based pricing in contracts.

Fluence and others are also seeking to lock in long-term supply contracts and increased production of batteries in North America and Europe as planned over the next few years will undoubtedly change the landscape further. 

Over the next two years, 41GW of utility-scale solar PV plants and 10GW of battery storage are planned by developers and operators of power plants, EIA said, which is 60% of the entire expected 85GW of capacity additions over the 2022-2023 timeframe. 

Texas, California and New York will be the leading states for solar and battery storage in that time, between them accounting for 27GW of new additions. The US will also see 16GW of natural gas and 15GW of wind power installed in the next two years. 

Sister site PV Tech reported that EIA expects 22GW of new utility-scale solar PV online in the US in 2022. The sector deployed 13GW in 2021.

EIA’s reported numbers for 2021 battery storage deployments are lower than the approximately 4.2GW of battery storage capacity found to have been added to the grid during last year in research by BloombergNEF, as recently reported on this site. 

BloombergNEF’s report, produced for The Business Council for Sustainable Energy, accounted for all segments of the storage market, from residential and commercial to industrial and utility-scale. 

Meanwhile a similar year-end 2021 report from the American Clean Power Association found 2.6GW of utility-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) deployments in the US during the year.  

You can keep up with the monthly and annual generator and electricity sector reports and other information from the EIA at its website here.

Continue reading

FlexGen has been appointed as supplier of battery storage for the three-site project in California. Image: FlexGen.

Ameresco has secured a US$262 million increase to its credit facility, funding future growth and supporting the energy efficiency and renewable energy company’s 2.1GWh battery project in California. 

The company said earlier this week that an amendment and restatement has been made on its senior secured credit facility, arranged with lenders led by Bank of America, taking the total credit facility size to US$495 million. 

This includes an increase of US$200 million in Ameresco’s revolving loan facility, an increase to an existing term loan which takes it up to US$75 million and a new Delayed-Draw Term Loan A for up to US$220 million, the latter on an 18-month term. 

The funds will be used for both near and long-term growth objectives, starting with Ameresco’s design-build EPC agreement for 537MW/2,150MWh of battery storage, signed with California investor-owned utility (IOU) Southern California Edison (SCE). 

In reporting its fourth quarter and full-year financial results at the beginning of the month, Ameresco had said the contract awarded last October for the three battery storage plants to be built at SCE substations, had driven a significant rise in revenues.  

In an earnings call with analysts to explain those results, CEO George Sakellaris had said that following the announcement of the project, enquiries from electricity suppliers in the US into Ameresco’s battery energy storage system (BESS) offerings had also increased.

System integrator and technology provider FlexGen has been hired to supply the full BESS solutions for the three sites. 

In addition to the SCE project, Ameresco said the increased credit available will be used to grow the company’s energy asset portfolio, for potential acquisition opportunities and for general corporate purposes. 

“This large-scale [credit] facility will provide a low cost and flexible source of capital as we continue to develop and diversify our portfolio of cleantech solutions and renewable energy projects,” Ameresco CFO and executive VP Doran Hole said. 

Continue reading

Sol-REIT LLC has closed a term loan refinancing of the Inspira solar project in southern New Jersey. With the closing of this loan, Sol-REIT will be moving quickly to execute upon its $300 million and growing loan origination pipeline of construction-to-permanent loan financing opportunities for middle-market solar projects across the United States.

To capitalize on its loan investments, Sol-REIT is completing its initial round of senior preferred equity investor commitments and is in the process of raising an additional $300 million in an institutional round.

“Middle-market solar developers are the backbone of our emerging industry,” says Mark Settles, Sol-REIT’s CEO. “Sol-REIT is proud to provide developers fixed-rate, long-term financing that finally closes the gap in developer access to capital.”

The Inspira solar project currently serves the 210-room Inspira Medical Center, the 100-acre campus in Mullica Hill, N.J. The borrower has executed a 15-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with the medical center. Sol-REIT’s term loan finances the remaining 13 years of operations under the PPA. The ground-mount solar project comprises nearly 3,600 solar panels generating 1.8 million kWh of renewable electricity each year.

“Our offerings streamline access to capital for solar developers while providing investors much-needed access to green investments,” states Brian A. Sidman, Sol-REIT’s co-founder and head of capital markets. “Investments like these in a portfolio, backed by solar projects with Inspira coupled with high-quality energy off-takers, provide both income-generating opportunities and growth potential.”

Image: Photo by Jadon Kelly on Unsplash

Continue reading

Image: rawpixel.com.

Technology group Honeywell and utility Duke Energy’s Sustainable Solutions arm will jointly develop and deliver microgrid solutions to US cities and communities to increase energy resilience in the event of grid-level outages.

The strategic alliance will combine distributed energy resources (DER) from Duke Energy Sustainable Solutions with Honeywell’s battery energy storage systems (BESS) and Smart Cities Software solution, to create municipal microgrids alongside city-owned assets.

Those microgrids will help cities to continue providing essential services like water distribution, wastewater treatment or community centers during power outages, the companies say. In 2020, there were just over eight hours of electric power interruptions in the US.

“A smart city starts with resilient and sustainable energy resources,” said Matthew Britt, general manager, Smart Cities and Communities, Honeywell Building Technologies. “Our collaboration with DESS will create energy resiliency programmes that help cities and communities better prepare for unexpected events as well as help manage and measure progress of their long-term environmental, social and governance goals.”

Honeywell says its Smart City Suite, an AI-enabled internet of things (IoT) platform, will help communities make faster, more informed decisions to serve citizens. A corporate brochure says the Suite includes safe city solutions, mobility solutions, citizen engagement e-governance and – most relevant for this area – utilities and services.

The latter covers street light management and waste management through a web portal dashboard, map-based visualisation, scheduler for street lighting, faulty systems alert and comprehensive analytics.

The companies have not said how many potential customers there are for its new microgrid solution. Honeywell says that the Smart City Software Suite is deployed in 75 cities worldwide totalling a population of over 100 million people, though this could be for any of its four different solutions.

The move with Duke is part of Honeywell’s Energy Equity Resiliency (HEER) initiative which works to create energy equity and community resiliency.

Microgrids are a growing trend for local communities as well as for mining and large industrial users of electricity.

As energy policymakers look to wean their grids off large fossil fuel-generating power plants, this can increase grid instability to due intermittent renewables but also involves some decentralisation of power supply and management by virtue of increasing the complexity of the system. And in places like California, growing wildfire risk has reduced the reliability of the centralised power grid irrespective of moves to renewables, making microgrids an important part of communities’ energy resiliency.

Honeywell is a Fortune 100 technology group which is active in four main segments: aerospace, building technologies, performance materials and technologies, and safety and productivity solutions. Energy storage is fast-growing business line for the group but, for now, a negligible part of its top line of US$34.3 billion last year.

Duke Energy Sustainable Solutions provides wind, solar, resilient backup power and managed energy services to over 1,000 projects across the US with a total electric capacity of more than 5.1GW of nonregulated renewable energy. It is part of utility Duke Energy, a Fortune 150 company.

Continue reading

Demo wall

NSG Group (Nippon Sheet Glass Co. Ltd.), a manufacturer of glass and glazing products for the architectural, automotive and creative technology glass sectors, and NEXT Energy Technologies Inc., makers of proprietary transparent photovoltaic (PV) coatings that transform commercial windows into solar panels, have announced a joint marketing effort between its NSG’s European subsidiary and NEXT.

The ongoing work targets the commercialization, manufacture and integration of NEXT’s transparent PV window technology into architectural window units designed to produce electricity to power commercial buildings. NSG’s involvement includes joint-market validation and ongoing technical support. NSG has also indicated its intent to incorporate NEXT’s technology into its insulated glazing units, with volume estimates for potential demand to serve the European commercial building market.

“NSG has been an industry champion of NEXT’s efforts since the company’s early days,” says Corey Hoven, Ph.D., founder and CTO at NEXT. “Thus, it’s especially rewarding to expand our relationship and introduce our proprietary PV coatings to NSG’s architectural and developer stakeholders.”

“We’ve informally collaborated with NEXT for several years, providing them with materials and technical feedback,” comments Alderlan Vitalino, NSG’s European value-added products director. “We’re excited to announce our relationship and work even more closely with NEXT to introduce their unique PV coatings into some of our largest commercial building markets.”

NEXT’s photovoltaic coatings are applied to commercial windows during the window fabrication process, integrating with existing manufacturers without disrupting established workflows and supply chains. This capital-efficient business model reduces risks to customers, removes barriers to adoption and accelerates speed to market, all while effectively extracting costs typically associated with the packaging and installation of solar energy solutions.

Continue reading

Front cover image for PV Tech Power 30. Image: Solar Media / Adrian Cartwright, Planet Illustration.

The new edition of our downstream solar journal, PV Tech Power volume 30, is now available to download, featuring coverage of the solar industry’s efforts to bridge a looming skills gap.

The cover story of PV Tech Power vol. 30 assesses solar’s options when it comes to a shortage of workforce across several critical areas, from system designers to high voltage engineers, while also exploring gender diversity in the sector.

Meanwhile, ‘Storage & Smart Power’, the section of the journal contributed by the Energy-Storage.news team returns as always, with this edition including:

-Data-driven insurance for batteries: An unsung hero of the green energy transition

Charley Grimston, co-founder of specialist data-driven battery insurance technology company Altelium, writes about the importance of insurance in underpinning, and indeed underwriting, the success of the battery industry.

-Building a battery industry for Europe

Northvolt is building out dozens of gigawatt-hours of battery manufacturing in Europe and while its main off-takers will be the automotive industry, subsidiary Northvolt Systems is strongly committed to the stationary energy storage space, Northvolt Systems president Emad Zand writes.

-PROJECT BRIEFING: World’s largest lithium- vanadium hybrid BESS trialled at Oxford renewables hub pilot

Energy-Storage.news writer Cameron Murray takes a close look at Energy Superhub Oxford in the UK, which features the world’s biggest lithium-vanadium hybrid battery storage plant.

You can download your digital copy of PV Tech Power 30 via our subscription service here.

PV Tech Premium subscribers receive every copy of PV Tech Power as part of their subscription as soon as they are published, as well as exclusive content on PV Tech, weekly briefing emails and a host of other benefits.

For more details on PV Tech Premium, including how to subscribe, click here.

Continue reading

Eraring coal power station in New South Wales, Australia. Image: CSIRO.

Australian energy retailer Origin Energy has outlined how a virtual power plant (VPP) and large-scale battery storage will allow it to replace coal in its power mix.

Origin has been planning for the retirement of Eraring, a 2,880MW black coal power plant, proposing to build a 700MW battery energy storage system (BESS) project on the site instead and issuing a call for suitably qualified firms to install the BESS early last year. 

Earlier this year, the company said it planned to close Eraring down in 2025, not 2032 as originally intended. Origin cited that coal was no longer economically able to compete with the emergence of renewables and now storage in Australia, particularly in the revised and updated structures of the National Electricity Market (NEM). 

In a presentation to investors this morning, Origin Energy executives said the battery storage project will be built in two stages: an initial 460MW stage 1, with a later 240MW expansion in stage 2. 

A Final Investment Decision is expected on stage 1 during this year. Although initially Origin had announced that the entire 700MW project would be four-hour duration, the company said today that stage 1 will be two-hour duration (460MW/920MWh).

The battery technology would be used for intra-day energy arbitrage, reducing capacity hedging costs for the company’s retail business and in Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) and other ancillary services markets.  

Coal retirement frees up Opex

Firming capacity would also be provided by Origin’s VPP, which currently has around 200MW of assets under control. The VPP, which aggregates together customers’ distributed energy resources (DER) like batteries, hot water systems and air conditioning units, provides very low-cost capacity which can partially replace Eraring, the company said. 

It aims to grow the VPP to around 2GW, using it like a peaking asset to move energy load from high demand periods to low demand periods. While it requires the enrolment of a large customer base, the VPP asset tends to have very low or even no upfront capital costs to establish, as well as being low cost to operate. 

Closure of the Eraring coal plant will also allow Origin to grow low cost renewable generation, the company said, whether buying in from the NEM or building or contracting for renewable energy projects.

It is also considering further battery storage projects as well as the possible expansion of its Shoalhaven pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) plant. Further investments in batteries could include building the company’s own projects or contracting for capacity from third party-owned assets.  

Origin’s presentation noted that the company holds sites with grid connections across the mainland NEM regions already, due to its existing fleet of generation assets. 

However, a large amount of balancing will continue to come from Origin’s 3GW fleet of thermal peaking capacity plants. These remain cheap to own and are expected to be called on more frequently as coal retires. 

Former coal plant sites are being considered for redevelopment with solar-plus-storage or standalone energy storage projects in parts of the world where coal is in its most rapid decline, including parts of the Mid-Western US.  

In Australia, another integrated energy group EnergyAustralia said in March 2021 that it would build a 350MW/1,400MWh BESS at the site of Yallourn, a coal power station in Victoria scheduled for retirement in 2028. 

In the case of both Yallourn and Eraring, cost of running the coal power plants has been cited as another reason for their effective obsolescence in the market, with Yallourn costing EnergyAustralia about AU$200 million (US$147 million) to AU$300 million per year to run and Eraring costing Origin about AU$95 million a year. 

Continue reading

Tesla’s gigafactory near Berlin, September 2021. Image: Michael Wolf.

With Europe set to reach 789.2GWh of lithium-ion battery gigafactory production by 2030 according to new Benchmark data, what does the US need to do to keep up as both race to prevent China completely monopolising the sector as it did with solar?

Panellists speaking on Day 1 of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (LBNL) National Energy Storage Summit yesterday (8 March) agreed that Europe is far ahead of its Atlantic neighbour on getting its gigafactory pipeline up and running – despite some recent forecasts pegging the two markets’ 2030 expected capacity figures closely. So what needs to happen to make that pipeline a reality?

Creating a mindset that says it’s possible

The good news is that the current US administration is bullish on getting there, said Robert H. Edwards, Jr. from the the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office.

“We are uniform across the Administration in believing that our United States innovative energy sector, with some assistance from the federal government, will be able to establish one of the premier battery manufacturing ecosystems in the world,” he said.

That was in response to a good point from Ilka von Dalwigk, Policy Manager at InnoEnergy and the European Battery Alliance. She said that when the Alliance launched in 2017, some argued it was too late to launch a battery industry as Asia had already won, while some said it was too early considering the future generation of batteries like solid-state would be a better bet.

“I think there was a lack of understanding of the speed and scale of this transition and one of the major achievements of the European Battery Alliance initiative has been a change in mindset, to believing we can become a part of and even a winner in this transition,” she said.

Research from information provider Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s Lithium ion Battery Gigafactory Assessment, which supplied the 2030 figure, points to the existing results of that change in mindset. Four of the world’s seven tier one producers of automative-grade lithium-ion batteries have gigafactories in Europe and, once Northvolt’s gigafactory in Sweden is active, that will be five.

Consider ecosystem around the gigafactory and next-gen applications

Northvolt’s expansion on both continents made panellist Landon Mossburg, its America President, uniquely placed on this topic.

He said that the main challenges for getting gigafactory projects off the ground are around finding a suitable site, procuring the necessary amount of clean power and recruiting the adequately skilled workforce. But the challenge goes beyond just the factory itself.

“If you look at Asia, they’ve got about a 10-15 year head start on us in terms of capital equipment, suppliers, raw materials, even things like grid elements and logistics. These factories are just the tip of the iceberg. You need an ecosystem of suppliers that take a very long time to develop and are highly specialised,” he said.

Another major challenge is being ahead of the curve on the future high-volume applications for batteries, for which he highlighted aviation as one, and warned that there were already signs that Asia is moving much faster than anywhere else on this. It is important not to underestimate the challenge, be fully aware of how much capital, partnership, and up-front planning would be needed.

“But I think what’s super encouraging to me is looking at what’s happened in Europe which is an outstanding success story, and I start to see that happening here in the US as well. So I think we’re in a good spot,” he said, finishing on a positive note.

And above all, money

The US federal government has brought in numerous financial schemes to help projects get off the ground, said Monica Gorman, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Manufacturing in the US Department of Commerce International Trade Administration. She explained the significance of the Federal Consortium for Advanced Batteries and its goals, which you can read about here.

But the administration is also keen to do this in a way which helps disadvantaged and disenfranchised communities, especially making sure the transition doesn’t create more post-industrial regions which become unattractive to private capital. She highlighted a US$4 million EV manufacturing scheme in Detroit which created 810 jobs, saved 300, and generated US$45 million in private investment.

She also pointed out the need to invest in the countries semiconductor production sector with the bipartisan Innovation Act, to much nodding of heads from other panellists. “Because if you want batteries and electric vehicles, you have to have semiconductors as well.”

On the same topic of funding, Edwards said the current dearth of substantial gigafactory announcements on US soil would change by the end of this year.

“We currently have US$10 billion of loan applications for battery manufacturing plants. These are greenfield plants in the United States. These plants include both manufacturing plants for lithium-ion batteries for use in vehicles and trucks and transportation generally, as well as manufacturing capacity for energy storage for stationary storage applications for the grid, so before the end of the year you will see some announcements from the loan programmes office that will signal the administration’s financial commitment to build these greenfield battery projects,” he said.

Europe’s 2030 gigafactory pipeline

Information provider group Benchmark Mineral Intelligence said Europe is on track for 27 gigafactories from 18 battery cell producers by 2030.

The most significant will be Tesla’s Berlin Gigafactory, which will commission commercial cell production in 2023 but reach an annual capacity of 75GWh by 2026 and 125GWh by 2030. That will make it the largest in the world behind its counterpart in Austin, Texas.

By 2030, Benchmark anticipated Europe’s top five battery makers by capacity to be:

Tesla (Germany): 125GWhNorthvolt (Sweden x 2): 92 GWCATL (Germany): 80 GWhLGES(Poland): 67 GWhACC (Total/Stellantis) (Germany, France, Italy): 64 GWh

The 789.2GWh capacity by 2030 would give Europe a 14% market share of the global 5,454Gwh lithium-ion battery production market, Benchmark said. Clean Energy Associates’ figures, referred to earlier on, gave Europe a slightly higher (16%) share of a slightly smaller market (4,764GWh).

Benchmark says Europe will grow its capacity more than six-fold (500%) between end-2022 and 2030, China by 220% and the USA by 575%.

Continue reading

One of SK’s EV battery plants in Hungary, Europe. Image: Sk Innovation.

Ascend Elements will recycle manufacturing scrap from SK Innovation’s lithium battery gigafactories in Georgia, US, while chemicals company BASF has bought land in Canada for a cathode active materials factory and recycling plant. 

Ascend Elements — formerly known as Battery Resourcers — announced this morning that it will recycle lithium-ion battery cell and module manufacturing scrap from the Korean maker’s production lines in Commerce Business Park.

Currently under construction, the battery company’s SK Battery Americas division is building more than 20GWh of annual production capacity at the two sites, investing a reported US$2.6 billion to get them up and running by the end of 2023. 

As reported by Energy-Storage.news in January, Ascend Elements is building the largest single site lithium battery recycling plant in North America, in Covington, Georgia, close to the SK Innovation factories. Ascend claimed its recycling processes can recover 98% of battery materials and return them to the supply chain from the facility, which will open in August. 

“People often think lithium-ion battery recycling is just for end-of-life batteries, but waste from the battery cell manufacturing process is the biggest segment of the battery recycling market right now,” Ascend Elements CEO Michael O’Kronley said. 

“SKBA is embracing sustainability and reducing its impact on the environment by recycling every bit of scrap battery material it produces.”

The recycling company also touted that active cathode materials produced by its proprietary “Hydro-to-Cathode’ process was found to outperform new cathode materials, as referenced in a study published in scientific journal Joule.

Ascend further claimed the process could be 93% cleaner than mining and producing from raw materials, and at much lower cost. 

While the initial focus is largely going to be on electric vehicle (EV) batteries, Ascend Elements told the site that it also wanted to process as much material from the stationary energy storage system (ESS) sector as it can. Materials produced from recycling will likely find their way into ESS projects too, through the company selling them back to cell manufacturers. 

It is a similar story for the SK Innovation deal, an Ascend spokesperson told Energy-Storage.news.

“While we are recycling EV battery manufacturing scrap for SK Battery America, our innovative Hydro-to-Cathode recycling process works well with ESS batteries too,” the spokesperson commented. 

“We are currently recycling ESS batteries for several organisations. Additionally, the customised cathode material that we produce from the Hydro-to-Cathode process can be used by battery manufacturers making ESS solutions.”

SK Innovation also has a partnership in place with energy storage system integrator and manufacturer IHI Terrasun which could see the maker’s battery cells used in IHI projects in the US starting this year.

‘US needs recycling policy’

Yesterday, at an event hosted online by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), US Department of Energy director of the vehicle technologies office David Howell said that “significant effort” must be put into developing recycling capabilities.

“The supply chain is more than gigafactories. You need to look at the entire supply chain from upstream material supply, refined materials all the way through battery component manufacturing, like cathode, anode to electrolytes, and key components like that — cell production, pack production,” Howell said. 

“If we want to realise a sustainable ecosystem, we definitely need to put significant effort in recycling spent lithium batteries, getting those spent lithium batteries back into the supply chain. And those materials particularly represent a key domestic supply of materials going forward.”

Howell said he “could not stress enough,” the importance of recycling, especially for materials for which the US did not have access to adequate natural resources domestically. 

“We really need a national recycling policy,” he said, highlighting that the DoE’s goal is to establish a recycling ecosystem that collects 90% of the spent lithium batteries. Efforts could begin with consumer electronics and be mapped to EVs and grid storage, Howell suggested.

BASF maps supply chain integration at Canada site

European chemicals company BASF is targeting having its cathode active materials (CAM) and recycling plant in Bécancour, Quebec, Canada up and running in 2025. 

BASF already manufactures CAM in North America and said last week that it has signed agreements to secure land at a site between Montreal and Quebec City on the Saint Lawrence River for its expansion plan. 

The selected site will allow it to use hydropower to help power operations and can be well-connected with the company’s global metal sourcing network, BASF claimed. Provisional plans are in place to add an intermediates base metal refinery for nickel and cobalt, as well as recycling facilities for all battery metals. 

The site will have space to expand up to 100kt CAM production capacity per year, including supply of precursor cathode active materials (PCAM). Plans remain subject to necessary regulatory approvals, BASF said. 

“With new investments in electric vehicles and supporting infrastructure being announced continuously in North America, we are pleased to pursue our own investment in the region,” BASF Catalysts division president Dr Peter Schuhmacher said.

Continue reading

Image: DEPCOM.

US solar EPC firm DEPCOM Power has 650MWh of battery energy storage system (BESS) projects in execution.

The portfolio adds to 4GW of utility-scale solar PV projects under the Arizona-headquartered company’s belt, and a further gigawatt under construction and in pre-construction stages. DEPCOM also has 2GW of solar PV assets to look after in operations and maintenance (O&M) contracts.

The announcement comes a few months after Koch Industries’ subsidiary Koch Engineered Solutions (KES) acquired DEPCOM in a deal which closed late last November.  

The move marked KES’ entry into the renewables space, with the acquiring company citing the growing competitiveness of unsubsidised utility-scale solar as a major driver behind the move. KES VP of business development Don Brown noted DEPCOM’s “impressive growth over the last few years”. 

The new owners’ reach and investments in a wide range of areas will be leveraged by the EPC firm’s energy storage division, adding bankability to its fully-integrated technology and services offerings: the company offers energy optimisation, access to top-tier battery equipment, integrated energy management system (EMS) and long-term service agreements (LTSA).

DEPCOM claimed it has access to suppliers of certified technologies that de-risks procurement and gets it competitive pricing, financial energy optimisation that can optimise battery life and improve IRR, provides 24/7 monitoring, EMS with SCADA controls and fully-wrapped LTSAs. 

“We partner hand-in-hand with asset owners to deliver technology-agnostic systems through an end-to-end solution that reduces complexity and risks for maximum revenue and ROI,” the company’s executive VP for energy storage Steve Chun said.   

CEO Johnnie Taul said that recent investments by Koch Industries into areas including battery recycling (with over US$100 million invested into Li-Cycle), next-generation battery technology (with investments into zinc battery maker Eos, iron flow battery company ESS Inc and a partnership on building US advanced battery gigafactories with Norway’s FREYR Battery) and global logistics would make the end-to-end solution offered by DEPCOM a “compelling fully integrated solution”.

Koch Strategic Platforms, one of the industrial conglomerate’s venture capital (VC) investment arms, also recently committed to invest US$150 million in Aspen Aerogels, a company making a ‘thermal runaway barrier’ gel technology.

DEPCOM did not reveal the customers or locations of its portfolio, the applications they will serve or the types of market they will participate in. Energy-Storage.news has made enquiries on this and some other points to the company but had not received a reply at time of publication.

In an interview on the EPC company’s corporate blog, DEPCOM Power chief engineer Rob Rynar said the company worked with Tesla on a recent solar-plus-storage project, combining a 3MW solar array with a 3MWh Tesla Megapack BESS unit. 

Rynar said the fully integrated design of the Megapack, including cells, inverters, HVAC and controls meant it required “virtually no field assembly,” which differentiated Tesla from many of its competitors. 

“There is little debate about the immense future of energy storage’s role in global electrical systems,” Rynar added. 

“The benefits that ESS can bring to all levels of the electrical transmission, distribution and demand side are numerous. Not only does BESS compliment the intermittent renewable energy capacity, but it also allows itself to be a backup in case of grid failure.”

Continue reading