The US and Europe have plans to gain market share from China in Lithium-ion battery production. Image: Yo-Co-Man.

China’s share of the lithium-ion battery cell production capacity market is set to fall from 75% in 2020 to 66% in 2030 as Europe and the US ramp up domestic production, according to a new report from Clean Energy Associates (CEA).

In 2020, China accounted for 75% of the 767GWh production capacity market, the report says. In 2030, the market will be 4,764GWh and China’s market share will fall to 66% with the US and Europe muscling in at 16% and 14%, respectively, the report says.

“Europe is expected to experience the fastest growth in the cell manufacturing capacity as investment in the European battery industry is growing significantly on account of the region’s ambitious decarbonisation targets and strong demand from automakers,” it added.

The report adds that global demand for energy storage systems (ESS) will surpass 100GWh by 2025, though adds that smaller-than-expected price declines may inhibit growth.

China and the US will be half of the global energy storage system (ESS) market over the next five years, it says.

CEA forecasts total demand for lithium-ion batteries to reach two and a half terawatts by 2030 (2,547GWh). Of this, 82% will be for electric vehicles (EVs), 13% for ESS and 4% for mobile phones or other portable devices.

“High demand from centralised PV projects is expected to increase demand for renewable energy plus storage projects, leading to strong base growth in deployment for ESS despite higher-than-expected costs potentially eroding some demand,” the report reads. The ESS sector will experience strong spillover effects from technologies designed for the EV space, it adds.

Interestingly, the report adds that lithium-ion batteries using lithium-ion phosphate (LFP) cathodes outsold those using nickel, manganese and cobalt (NMC) in China’s production market. The country deployed 100GWh of lithium-ion batteries for EVs and ESS combined, of which 44% were NMC with ‘most of the remainder’ from LFP.

NMC started the year ahead, with 5.4GWh shipped in January versus 3.3GWh for LFP, but by November LFP reached 11.6GWh, 25% higher than 9.2GWh of NMC.

“The combination of LFP’s safety advantages and increasingly lower costs as all raw material prices increase, make it a favourable solution for enetry-level EV models and stationary energy storage applications. These factors are leading to growing LFP adoption in the EV space,” the report says.

US sees lithium-ion supply chain as strategically important

Policy and funding initiatives from the EU and the US have picked up in the last few years as the two markets have sought to reduce their reliance on imports from China.

In a recent report from the Department of Energy (DoE), the US government highlighted lithium-ion batteries as an important supply chain for delivering a clean energy future, and one it could increase its market share in. It reminded readers of nearly US$7 billion of funding to address the battery supply chain including cobalt and lithium.

It also said that the US has “untapped potential to support greater domestic production” of lithium and some rare earth elements, with a significant portion of the US territory still unexplored.

Its main supply chain concerns for energy independence which related to batteries are cobalt production in the Democratic Republic of Congo and lithium and cobalt refining by China and Chinese-owned companies.

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The energy storage division of DEPCOM Power Inc., a subsidiary of Koch Engineered Solutions LLC,  a unit of Koch Industries Inc., has expanded its portfolio to 650 MWh of projects in execution.

“As a trusted one-source partner, we help asset owners drive down total cost of ownership and ensure the most competitive and bankable energy storage solutions,” says Johnnie Taul, CEO of DEPCOM. “Our end-to-end advantage combines engineering leadership, procurement power, and operational expertise with Koch’s capabilities. Its investments in next-gen storage technologies, global logistics, and battery recycling make for a compelling, fully integrated solution.”

“We stand behind energy storage systems that are managed at peak, bankable performance,” states Steve Chun, executive vice president of energy storage. “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.”

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SB Energy’s Juno solar farm, located in Borden County, Texas

Funds managed by the Infrastructure and Power strategy of Ares Management Corp. are leading a strategic equity investment of up to $600 million, including capital from potential co-investors, in SB Energy Global LLC, SoftBank Group Corp.’s U.S. Climate Infrastructure Technology platform. The Ares-managed funds have committed the majority of the financing, with the balance expected to come from co-investors.

“SoftBank launched SB Energy to accelerate access to reliable, cost-effective, renewable energy,” states Michel Combes, CEO of SoftBank Group International. “Combining AI and technology with renewable deployment at scale is critical to the energy transformation and benefits people across the globe. Our new investment from Ares brings together Ares’ climate infrastructure experience, SoftBank’s AI and technology ecosystem, and SB Energy’s track record of execution into a single platform to deliver flexible renewable energy at scale.”

SB Energy has grown its Climate Infra-Tech platform with plans to deliver 10 GW of renewable energy and storage projects in operation or under construction by the end of 2025. Since launching in the U.S. market in 2019, the company has completed development of, financed and started construction on nearly 1.7 GW of utility-scale solar projects, of which 1.3 GW are currently providing clean, reliable energy to Texas and California.

SB Energy continues to aggressively grow its renewable energy and storage project pipeline through greenfield development, partnerships, and acquisitions, while also expanding in its digital and technology capabilities. In addition to capital from SoftBank and Ares, SB Energy has forged partnerships with financial institutions to secure more than $4 billion in tax equity and project financing since inception to develop and build renewable projects and make further investments in the clean energy transition.

“We are proud to announce Ares’ funds’ investment, which launches a new chapter for SB Energy and an expansion of our collaboration with Ares that began in 2020,” says SB Energy co-CEO Rich Hossfeld. “With the support of both Ares and SoftBank, SB Energy will rapidly scale our strategic platform in renewable energy, storage and new digital products as a developer, owner, and operator of the next generation of climate infrastructure and technology.”

“We are excited to work with SB Energy to leverage our combined strengths in driving the clean energy transition,” comments Andrew Pike, partner and co-head of Ares Infrastructure and Power. “Our investment in SB Energy builds on our existing relationship and reflects our focus on supporting high-quality climate infrastructure platforms through our innovative capital solutions.”

“Ares and SB Energy share a commitment to accelerating the transition to a low carbon economy through the development of essential climate infrastructure assets,” mentions Mike Roth, partner in Ares Infrastructure and Power. “With the added support of Ares’ flexible capital, SB Energy is well-positioned to meet the growing demand for sustainable clean energy and build on its strong track record, including having brought online nearly 2 GW of solar in just two years.”

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Invinity’s vanadium flow battery tech at the Energy Superhub Oxford. Image: Invinity Energy Systems.

Energy-storage.news caught up with executives from two recently-listed long-duration flow battery energy storage providers, ESS Inc. and Invinity Energy Systems, at the Energy Storage Summit 2022.

Iron flow battery producer ESS Inc‘s EMEA Director Alan Greenshields and vanadium battery producer Invinity Energy System’s CEO Larry Zulch and CCO Matt Harper discussed a range of topics; from the low penetration of flow batteries today and the changing cost equation, to various alternative long-duration technologies and where they see opportunities for their products both near and long-term.

A market dominated by lithium-ion

The need and place for long-duration energy storage solutions in the market was a huge topic of discussion at the two-day conference hosted in London by our publisher Solar Media in late February.

There was wide agreement that 4-12 hour and 12-hour-plus flow battery systems have a plethora of use cases but, as ESS Inc‘s Alan Greenshields says, the current market does not reflect that at all.

“People have been saying for decades that flow batteries are an interesting idea. But if you look at what’s actually happened is that most long-duration energy storage in the world is still pumped hydro and lithium-ion came in for short duration storage and basically squeezed absolutely everything else out of the market. Flow batteries have not really made it beyond the prototyping demonstration stage,” he says.

And those numbers are reflected even in the current development pipeline, let alone what’s been delivered in the past. In the UK, widely agreed to be one of the hottest markets for storage right now, 99% of its 25GW pipeline is lithium-ion (figure from Solar Media’s UK Battery Storage Project Database). Invinity CEO Larry Zulch talks about this with an air of incredulity.

“In 10 years we are going to look back and say: ‘Can you imagine we were taking perfectly good lithium batteries, great for cars, trucks and construction equipment, and putting them in boxes in the ground and causing them to wear out quickly by cycling them really hard when we could have been using them inside vehicles? That’s crazy.’ There just hasn’t been an alternative to lithium-ion and that is what we are building,” he said.

“It’s easy to think that lithium has won the day, and that our vanadium batteries simply don’t have the scale to compete. That’s short-term thinking though: it’s worth considering that the 40 MWh project we’ve just announced with Pivot Power / EDF would have been the largest battery of any kind anywhere in the world before Tesla installed their Hornsdale plant in 2017. That project was announced less than five years ago. Compare vanadium today and lithium then, we would win in most cases. When vanadium gets the maturity level of the lithium market it will take off just as lithium did.”

Cost differential and non-battery long duration tech

So why hasn’t it done already? One thing often mentioned is the higher cost of long-duration solutions – something our interviewees prefer to not go into specifics on – but they claim that to some extent the long-term differential with lithium-ion has disappeared.

Zulch says: “So if you look at the levelised cost of storage (LCOS), vanadium flow batteries are less expensive than lithium batteries for many high-throughput applications,” adding that the current price increase for lithium might not be temporary as everyone expects.

Greenshields also said that on a long-term view iron flow is relatively cheap: “So with any flow battery you have two cost components. You have the power cost of the modules and electronics and then the variable cost of the electrolyte. The latter is the really important one and will increasingly dominate the equation with long-duration storage growth, and that is about US$20 per kilowatt hour for iron flow which is very low. How close you can get to that number depends on the configuration of the system.”

Invinity’s director of communications Joe Worthington pointed to recent projects and their increasing size as evidence of the tide changing.

“People generally haven’t bought into flow batteries because they couldn’t see them operating, but now they can. And bear in mind a lot of flow batteries are not at that stage so it puts us in a different category,” he said.

The discussions moved on to the various long-duration energy storage technologies out there and, for ESS Inc, why it chose iron flow chemistry.

Greenshields: “ESS was founded because although vanadium chemistry works really well, it’s expensive stuff. The founders looked for a flow chemistry with fundamentally cheap materials and settled on iron. Early implementations of iron systems fundamentally suffered from low cycle life, and their research identified what was causing this and found a countermeasure. So now we have a product which effectively has an unlimited cycle life, although we say 20,000 cycles because nothing lasts forever.”

With Invinity’s electrolyte material the most commonly used in the flow battery space, Zulch talked about the need to be wary of new, unproven solutions.

“There are definitely other battery chemistries emerging that have really interesting potential but for now it’s just potential. We haven’t yet seen any of those emerging chemistries that have actually been delivered, and that are solving a problem and have been handed off to a customer. Companies that have raised enough capital to build big prototypes and get a lot of attention but that remain based on just a promising technology can be very, very risky, not just for those companies’ customers but for the reputation of our broader industry,” he said.

Greenshields was particularly sceptical about a green hydrogen, a more recent storage technology which has seen increased interest, as Energy-storage.news has written. He claimed that the energy loss from charge to dispatch when using it to store electricity can be as high as 80-90%, although it would have some use cases.

Bringing in a fairly long-term big-picture point, Zulch added that even calling 4-12 hour storage ‘long duration’ would change soon. “In the future, long-duration storage could mean days, weeks — even months!”

Position today

A lot of the discussion thus far has been around a hypothetical future and long-term prospects of long-duration energy storage so it’s worth circling back to the present day.

Both have impressive numbers and pipelines when it comes to various measures of commercialisation. But as Energy-storage.news wrote recently, ESS Inc is only set to book its first revenue figures in the current quarter. Invinity Energy Systems is a bit further along.

In its last disclosure, for H1 2021, it revealed £13.5 million (US$18 million) of closed sales of which £5.7m million was received and £7.8 million was to follow, with a total operating loss of £8.8 million for the period. In 2018 and 2019, it had £2.5m and £0.7m of revenues respectively.

So which segments of the market are the two companies, both of which floated on US stock exchanges late last year, seeing the most traction for their respective solutions? In response to the open-ended question, both highlight the commercial & industrial sector, colocation with solar and, more long-term, colocation with wind.

Greenshields says ESS Inc’s system didn’t require air conditioning or cooling so could do fine in hot climates while Invinity’s CCO Matt Harper points out that many jurisdictions limited the ability to interconnect solar to the grid, which long-duration energy storage could help with. Harper added the company was ‘seeing the most interest’ from developers looking to use batteries to trade in the market.

Wind is also an interesting one because of how much bigger it is than solar yet how far behind it is in terms of colocation with storage. It accounts for twice that of solar’s energy mix contribution globally (2%/1%), 2.4x in the US (3.1%/1.3%) and more than 10x in the UK (25%/2%). (Data from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, the U.S. Energy Information Administration Monthly Energy Review, and the Balancing Mechanism Reporting System). Yet, as recently reported here, two thirds of colocated storage in the US is with solar.

Harper explains this why and where long duration fits into this: “We think that wind and storage is going to be the next big thing, but the major difference between solar and wind is that the minimum size for a grid scale wind project right now is an order of magnitude larger than the same thing on the solar side. So the battery that is going to have to be in the hundreds of megawatts at a minimum. Because of that we’re just starting to see the first couple of wind-plus-storage projects come online at that scale.”

“Wind power generation can also be even more intermittent than solar so the battery serving it will be cycling far more frequently than with solar. Lithium is just not designed for that use case, it would get worn out within a few years. We are partnering with Siemens Gamesa to develop our next generation of products explicitly for that market.”

Greenshields also said that ESS Inc’s 12-hour storage duration makes wind ‘firming’ opportunities really attractive.

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Power plant developers and operators expect to add 85 GW of new generating capacity to the U.S. power grid from 2022 to 2023, 60% (51 GW) of which will be made up of solar power and battery storage projects, according to data reported in U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory. In many cases, projects combine these technologies.

Battery storage capacity, as well as renewable capacity, significantly increased in the United States during 2021, partly because of tax credits and partly because of falling technology costs, especially for batteries. Depending on the configuration and charging sources, both solar power and battery storage units may be eligible for the solar investment tax credit (ITC), which is scheduled to phase down by 2024.

More than half of the 51 GW of planned solar and battery storage capacity within the next two years will be located in three states. The largest share, 12 GW (23%), will be in Texas. The next largest share, 11 GW (21%), will be in California, and 4 GW (7%) will be in New York.

Utility-scale solar accounts for 41 GW (48%) of the planned capacity in the United States during the next two years. More utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity was added (24 GW) to the U.S. power grid than natural gas (12 GW) between 2020 and 2021, a trend that will likely continue over the next two years as the demand for solar power continues to grow.

In 2022, power plant developers and operators expect to add 22 GW of solar capacity to the grid, significantly more than the 13 GW added in 2021. Large additions of utility-scale solar capacity are likely to continue because of falling solar technology costs and the 2020 extension of the solar ITC, which extended the credit to 26% in 2021 and 2022, 22% in 2023, and 10% in 2024 and after.

In the next two years, power plant developers and operators expect to add 10 GW of battery storage capacity; more than 60% of this capacity will be paired with solar facilities. In 2021, 3.1 GW of battery storage capacity was added in the United States, a 200% increase. Declining costs for battery storage applications, along with favorable economics when deployed with renewable energy (predominantly wind and solar PV), have driven the expansion of battery storage.

The remaining 34 GW of planned capacity additions over the next two years will largely come from natural gas (16 GW) and wind (15 GW). The amount of planned wind capacity dropped by nearly half from the previous two years, which had 29 GW of new wind capacity come online.

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Nuvve EV charging equipment. Image: Nuvve.

US virtual power plant (VPP) project company Swell Energy has formed a partnership with electric mobility specialist Nuvve to explore the integration of different distributed energy resources (DERs) for homes and businesses. 

The pair are launching a strategic engagement that will investigate how electric vehicles (EVs) and associated infrastructure and hardware can participate in Swell’s VPP network.

Swell has under contract more than 300MWh of VPP programmes with US utilities in regions including Hawaii, New York and California, with plans for aggressive expansion underway. 

The virtual power plant model aggregates together large numbers of residential battery storage systems, with and without (although mostly with) rooftop solar PV. Aggregating them together means they can be controlled and dispatched in a coordinated manner, helping the utilities to manage the flows of power on their networks and reducing reliance on thermal power plants. 

In February, Swell Energy unveiled GridAmp, the company’s proprietary distributed energy resources management (DERMs) software platform, as work gets underway on its 80MW VPP project across three Hawaiian Islands with utility Hawaiian Electric (HECO).

GridAmp uses optimisation algorithms and machine learning models to inform and automate the operation of DER assets in a VPP with Swell claiming it can maximise revenues and benefits for both utility and customer across multiple value streams.

Utilities get to use the stored energy to perform grid-balancing functions like ancillary services or to manage peak demand on their networks, while customers are paid sums for the use of their systems which reduce their cost of ownership. 

Nuvve meanwhile produces vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology which enables batteries in EVs to be leveraged as an energy system resource, adding bi-directional power flows to EV charging equipment — in other words energy comes out of, as well as going into, electric vehicles. 

Recent projects for Nuvve have included electric school buses in Colorado with V2G capabilities and a V2G pilot for customers of a rural electric cooperative supplier in New Hampshire. 

Initial 2MW virtual power plant commitment

In the new partnership, Swell and Nuvve, both headquartered in California, want to advance DERMs technology for residential and commercial markets. This will include developing technologies that allow customers to integrate solar PV, smart EV charging and battery storage into one package.

The bi-directional charging that Nuvve’s cloud-based software platform, called GIVe — short for Grid Integrated Vehicle — means that vehicles can become an asset for performing grid services and load management for grid-connected buildings. 

It will be integrated with Swell’s VPP offering. Initially, Nuvve will have access to 2MW from Swell’s utility contracts in 2022, with the partnership expected to grow if successful.

The pair will initially focus on home energy systems but will quickly look to also offer solutions for commercial buildings and commercial EV fleets. 

“Integrating intelligent EV charging operations into Swell’s smart home energy system is a necessary next step in bridging to an increasingly electrified future where customers have greater control of their assets, opportunities to transact with the power grid, and have dependable energy resources available around the clock,” Swell Energy CEO Suleman Khan said.

The partnership will create a comprehensive solution for Nuvve’s commercial customers, while bringing the smart mobility company into the residential space for the first time, Nuvve CEO and chairman Gregory Poilasne said. 

“This is one more way we are catalysing the adoption of EVs, creating a more resilient grid, and fulfilling our vision to accelerate the transition to clean energy,” Poilasne said. 

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CAISO covers 80% of the state’s population. Image: Pgiam | Getty Images.

Energy storage provided a gigawatt of power to the grid in California during a wildfire in July last year, helping to keep the lights on.

It was part of a “fabulous moment” for the technology, according to California Independent System Operator (CAISO) President & CEO Elliot Mainzer. Meanwhile energy storage deployments in 2021 on the CAISO grid grew twelve-fold to 2,359MW, according to figures released by the grid and wholesale market operator.

“This summer (of 2021) has been a really fabulous moment for energy storage. There’s been some some bumps along the way. It’s a new technology. There’s some lessons learned, but in general, the resources performed really, really well. And we’re really quite optimistic about its future on our grid,” said Elliot Mainzer in a CAISO explainer video on energy storage released last week.

The Bootleg wildfire in Southern Oregon on 9 July he referred to limited power being imported into CAISO’s grid from the Pacific Northwest by disabling three transmission lines connecting the regions. The incident led the operator to declare an emergency alert signifying insufficient power to meet demand.

The energy storage system connected to the grid was able to quickly dispatch about 1,000 megawatts of new battery power to help keep the lights on, CAISO has now revealed.

“July 9 was a very, very stressed day for the California grid. This was the summer when we really saw what the new wildfire risks could mean for our bulk electric system,” said Mainzer.

Gabe Murtaugh, the CAISO’s storage sector manager, stressed just how close the system was to breaking point: “If one more thing would have gone wrong, we could have really been in some serious trouble and we might’ve had to shed load.”

Mainzer had said two months before the Bootleg wildfire that he was “cautiously optimistic” about the grid’s reliability in the approaching summer and storage’s part to play in that, but had added there were still “remaining risks to reliability”. Investor-owned utility PG&E echoed this a month later.

“Stunning” growth in CAISO grid-connected storage deployments

The six months either side of the Bootleg wildfire saw a gigantic deployment of energy storage in the state, which aims to have a carbon-free electricity system by 2045, one of the most ambitious deadlines in the US.

Some 2,359GW of utility-scale battery storage was added to the its network over the course of the year, a twelve-fold increase which the operator has called “stunning” and “meteoric”. The figure confirms California’s role as the majority participant and driver of the energy storage market in the US.

CAISO’s annual figure is 90% of the total utility-scale energy storage installed in the US last year according to separate figures from the American Clean Power Association (ACP), as reported by Energy-storage.news. Including all forms of battery storage, it accounts for 62% of the 4.2GW installed last year, according to BloombergNEF.

By the end of January 2022, total installed battery storage capacity on its network had increased to 2,607MW, CAISO said in its monthly report.

Broader renewable records set but path to net-zero still a long one

Last year saw several records set on renewable power generation more broadly on CAISO’s system. There was record peak solar power output of 13,205 MW on May 27, peak wind output of 5,754MW on May 29, and a peak renewables serving load for a few seconds of 94.5% on April 24, at 2.28pm.

But there is still a long way to go. The highest proportion of peak electricity demand served by renewables over a whole day was 43.5%, on August 18, not a record.

And the two aforementioned peak power outputs for solar and wind, which made up 85% of the peak renewables serving load on April 24, would still only cover 43% of the year’s peak demand of 43,982MW on September 8 at 5.50 pm local time. Battery storage provided around 600GW or 1.36% of that peak power demand.

CAISO covers 80% of California’s population. Eight others including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) and Berkshire Hathaway portfolio company Pacificorp’s multi-state grid cover the rest.

See CAISO’s video ‘From idea to reality: Battery storage comes of age on the California grid’ in the embedded YouTube player below.

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Massachusetts’ SMART solar programme has supported solar-plus-storage projects like the one pictured above at a former landfill site in Amesbury. Image: Kearsage.

Legislation supporting clean energy in Massachusetts with a heavy focus on offshore wind looks set to go into law, including some important actions to be taken on energy storage. 

‘H.4515: An Act Advancing Offshore Wind and Clean Energy’ passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives on 3 March and now awaits Governor Charlie Baker’s signature. 

The legislation will bring into law a policy commitment to soliciting 5,600MW of offshore wind capacity — up from a proposed 4,000MW target — as the Commonwealth targets net zero emissions status by 2050 and seeks to make the most of significant hosting capacity for the renewable energy technology.

The latest bill aims to enable the target to be achieved and directs the investment of US$750 million into clean energy growth and development, which the administration authorised later last year. It will also enact tax incentives for offshore wind worth up to US$50 million per year. 

A central offshore wind industry trust fund will be set up, which will administer funds that can support up to 50% of the costs for certified offshore wind projects to connect to the power grid, which has been a barrier so far. 

That much extra wind will require significant transmission capacity and the Massachusetts’ Department of Energy Resources (DOER) will solicit bids for transmission infrastructure to be able to deliver the energy generated to where it will be used. 

Directing support for storage, including long-duration and multi-day

The DOER will also instruct electric companies to create transformation plans for upgrading distribution and transmission lines and other equipment. 

Those plans, among other things, will promote energy storage and electrification technologies that are recognised as necessary to decarbonise both environment and economy. The plans must also set out in detail how improvements will be made, including how energy storage and other new technologies like smart metering will be promoted. 

Electric companies must also describe in detail the opportunities they could seize to deploy energy storage for increasing renewable energy utilisation and reducing curtailment of renewable energy generation.

Electric companies will be required to offer explanations for their investment decisions along three planning horizons: 5-year forecasting, 10-year forecasting and demand assessment to the end of 2050.

A Grid Modernization Advisory Council will be created, headed up by the DOER commissioner and with members representing various sectors: including a representative of the energy storage industry, along with representatives from environmental justice groups, resiliency and weatherisation planners, the electric vehicle industry, large-scale transmission-connected renewables and others. 

Meanwhile offshore wind regulations are expected to allow bids in competitive solicitations for wind generation paired with energy storage, including long-duration energy storage (5 hours to 14 hours duration) and multi-day energy storage (capable of dispatching at full rated capacity for more than 24 hours). 

The DOER, in collaboration with a new Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, will study how to optimise deployment and utilisation of long-duration and multi-day energy storage systems; including the necessity, benefits and costs of requiring distribution companies to conduct joint competitive solicitations and procurements for energy storage systems. 

These could see distribution companies procure or solicit “up to 4,800GWh of stored energy from renewable generation delivered to periods of high demand each year”.  

Distribution companies are also going to be required to come up with new tariffs that can be applied to energy storage systems on their networks — or conversely to issue a notice of intent to file a distribution service rate schedule with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for standalone energy storage systems which are in the distribution company’s service area but plays into New England wholesale electricity markets. 

Massachusetts has already had policies in place which have supported energy storage’s role in decarbonising and modernising the electricity network: including a world-first Clean Peak Standard, which means the percentage of power on the grid at peak times from low carbon sources must increase every year.

There is also the 3,200MW Solar Massachusetts Renewable Energy Target (SMART) programme, which promotes cost-effective solar power and incentivises solar-plus-storage project developers to participate.

Massachusetts lawmakers have spotted that offshore wind presents a huge opportunity for the region and is making energy storage integral to that push. Other eastern states, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York, are also targeting large shares of the country’s offshore wind generation, with New York’s state target at 9GW the largest for any state in the US. 

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Official opening of a hybrid renewable microgrid at Agnew gold mine, November 2021. Image: EDL Energy.

The community of the Daintree Rainforest region in Queensland, Australia, will host a “world-leading renewable microgrid,” after the country’s federal government approved funding support for the project. 

The Daintree Microgrid Program aims to use renewable energy, battery storage and green hydrogen technology to help increase affordability of electricity for people in Daintree, lower emissions and improve energy security and resilience against extreme weather events. 

It will also provide jobs in the local area and be a platform for knowledge sharing on microgrids that can be applied to other regional and remote communities. 

The solar-to-hydrogen project will pair 8MW of solar PV with 20MWh of battery energy storage and a 1MW hydrogen electrolyser. 

This morning Australia’s Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor made the announcement jointly with his assistant minister Tim Wilson and Warren Entsch, who represents the divisional area of Leichhardt in Queensland at federal level. 

The government is awarding AU$18.75 million (US$13.87 million) funding over three years to project lead company Volt Advisory Group.

It follows a feasibility study that was carried out through the Regional and Remote Communities Reliability Fund which pledged AU$50 million to evaluating opportunities for microgrids and other technologies to serve those areas. 

“This is a major win for communities in the Daintree Rainforest, which will see reduced pollution and noise from diesel generators, and will be a valuable demonstration of solar-to-hydrogen technology,” Angus Taylor said.

“The renewable and hydrogen microgrid will use cutting edge technology to reduce emissions and drive down costs by ending the community’s reliance on costly diesel generation.”

Colleague Tim Wilson pointed out that the system will give the community cheaper, reliable power and the project, “a giant leap forward in building Australia’s carbon neutral future,” represented an essential investment into the Daintree community. 

It could reduce diesel consumption by more than four million litres of fuel per year in the area. The project is expected to get underway this year for completion during 2024. Along with the energy system upgrade, the local area will also get improved communications links, with fibre optic cabling to be laid as part of the project. 

With the Daintree rainforest a protected area, the microgrid will be built with consideration to preserving the local area, with development confined to roadways and areas that are already cleared of vegetation. 

The news comes as the eastern coast of Australia responds to an extreme weather emergency, with impacts of more than a week of torrential rain reported to include the evacuation of thousands from their homes in Sydney, with widespread flooding in both New South Wales and Queensland. Reuters news agency reported a death toll of 17 by yesterday.

Critics have long slammed the country’s federal government for a lack of commitment on emissions reduction, although a net zero by 2050 target was finally introduced in October last year. Queensland already had a net zero by 2050 target in place by then, with an interim 50% renewables by 2030 goal and an in-depth Climate Transition Strategy policy document. 

Last week Energy-Storage.news reported that two recently-completed off-grid and remote renewable energy projects in Australia have enabled a gold mine in Western Australia and a township in the country’s Northern Territory to achieve more than 50% renewable energy penetration throughout the year. 

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One of Inovat’s four BESS projects built for distribution companies in Turkey. Image: Inovat.

With a commitment to add 1GW each of new solar PV and wind each year, Turkey’s need for energy storage is coming sooner rather than later. 

The country’s energy regulator has already acted to enable market participation for storage and companies on the ground are ready to deliver, says Can Tokcan, managing partner at Turkish energy storage EPC Inovat. 

Turkey has around 97GW of electricity generation capacity — in 2011 it had about half of that. It currently has about 9GW of solar and about the same amount of wind connected to the grid and is committed to the gigawatt annual targets in the years 2017 to 2027. 

Feed-in tariffs are available for wind, solar, biomass, hydro and geothermal and in 2020, according to official figures, 4,900MW of renewables were deployed, while almost no new fossil fuel generation came online. 

As with other markets, the entry point for battery storage has been a number of relatively small projects, which serve as demonstrations and assessment tools to figure out the right use cases and direction of the market.

In April 2021, Energy-Storage.news reported on the commissioning of Turkey’s first grid-connected battery storage project, a 500kW/500kWh system which was designed to help smooth out local peaks in supply and demand for a town in the north of the country. 

But it’s in regulation that the biggest steps have been taken. 

“What we’re seeing in terms of regulation is going to speed up the markets pretty fast,” Tokcan says.

A few weeks after that first project went online, the national Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EMRA) made changes to enable investment, ruling that energy companies should be allowed to develop energy storage in three distinct segments:

Energy storage facilities integrated with energy generation

Integration with energy consumption

Standalone energy storage

“The general expectation is that Turkey will install about 2GW of batteries in the next 10 years,” Can Tokcan of Inovat says. 

“Turkey is a big industrial country. But there are still maybe only 2MW of storage installed. However, we are having lots of discussions and actually we have a pipeline of about 100MW of projects that we’re discussing for storage applications. So we can see that it’s going to pick up really quick and the potential is there.”

Regulations open up market for wide range of use cases

In the first category above, storage with generation, licenses for energy generation assets can be updated to include energy storage — without renewable generators losing their feed-in tariff. Solar facilities in Turkey usually have about 1.2 to 1.3 times more installed capacity than the amount they can feed in to the grid.

The difference between the megawatt-peak and the megawatt limit of the connection to the grid can be stored and sold with the current feed-in tariff, which builds the business case, Tokcan says.

There are several solar PV projects of more than 100MW each, being built around Turkey as we speak. Inovat expects to see some energy storage integrated with some of those solar farms.

“It’s very romantic to have as much renewable energy as possible. But it also creates lots of problems for the grid in terms of instability. Like the rest of the world, the more we invest in renewables, the more we are losing ‘on demand’ power,” Tokcan says, highlighting the “critical role” energy storage plays in that dynamic. 

Category two, energy storage systems integrated with energy consumption, will likely be at large industrial facilities that want to incorporate storage to enable more renewables, add backup power or resolve power quality issues and arbitrage on their electricity costs through peak demand reduction or arbitrage.

Inclusion in EMRA’s ruling of the final category, standalone energy storage, means energy storage can participate in ancillary services, as has been successfully proven in the UK, much of Europe, parts of the US and Australia.

Industrial facilities with battery storage systems large enough to meet the 10MW minimum technical requirement for ancillary services could also participate. 

The Turkish market is “now fully open,” Tokcan says: “If you wanted to invest in 10MW, 20MW of energy storage in Turkey, you are fully able to participate in ancillary services”.

The ancillary services market has been opened up for energy storage in a “completely public and transparent process,” he says.

In fact, all of the energy markets in Turkey are in general operated in a transparent way, from day ahead, intraday and ancillary services to the imbalance markets, Tokcan says. Pricing data, generation data and consumption data are all available to be viewed and Inovat is currently modelling the financial return for participating in primary frequency response for a number of potential projects. 

Although Turkey is interconnected with grids in Europe, the transmission system operator (TSO) Turkish Electricity Transmission Corporation (TEIAS), has decided that for frequency response, rather than building additional infrastructure to connect its high voltage lines to European grids, it would be better to install energy storage systems to do frequency response locally. 

TEIAS has released its technical requirements for energy storage to participate in frequency services already. The TSO is also aware that it operates the third longest grid network in Europe and energy storage could be a good tool for solving issues at various points on the system.

Inovat BESS enclosure at the company’s Ankara factory. Inovat makes everything from HVAC to EMS, only buying in battery cells and inverters. Image: Inovat.

‘Small but significant’ projects for distribution companies

Inovat has built four battery energy storage system (BESS) projects in Turkey to date. These are pilot, R&D projects built for different electric distribution companies. They range in size from 336kWh to 448kWh.

“The size is relatively small, of course, but it’s significant, considering that it’s one of the first few applications in Turkey,” Tokcan says of the projects. 

The regulatory authority provides funding for distribution companies in Turkey and the outcome of Inovat’s projects could create the opportunity for energy storage investments to be partially funded by the government, he claims.

Turkey’s 21 distribution companies are privatised. However, investments they make in building out or renewing infrastructure are paid for through a government ‘Capex support programme’. 

“After these projects, storage investments will also be included in the list for Capex support; which means that if the distribution company is able to show that installing a storage facility is actually deferring investments, comparable investment, then it will be funded by the government.”

So it seems there are multiple avenues through which energy storage can be invested in already at this early stage in the Turkish market’s development. 

Can Tokcan says it is great to see that companies from outside Turkey are interested in the market, but believes the market has some fairly high barriers to entry. Inovat’s main competitors will be other Turkish companies, at least for the time being, he says. 

Grid codes are fairly unique and distribution companies and the TSO have very different specific requirements. Even SCADA integration is itself a challenge and these and other aspects “need to be addressed delicately by a local team,” Tokcan says.

“The site work and installation has to be done with a local team clearly, because a foreign company coming to Turkey — a big EPC company, let’s say — and finalising the project by itself, is close to impossible. Of course they can send a finished product to Turkey, but there will still be the need for a local team to finalise the installation and the connection.” 

Inovat is a subsidiary of Turkish holding company Tetico, which is involved in numerous industrial sectors from renewable energy investment to defence, aviation and entertainment technology. As well as being an EPC, the energy storage company manufactures its own systems equipment, claiming to make everything except the battery cells and inverters. 

Its factory in Ankara can assemble 200 energy storage system enclosures a year, making products for residential, commercial and industrial (C&I) and utility-scale battery storage, equipped with Inovat’s own energy management system (EMS). 

Due to their R&D nature, the handful of projects Inovat has already done also cover a multitude of use cases. These include batteries that stack applications like peak demand management and VAR support, microgrid and islanding capabilities and several more, giving the company valuable experience in this young market.

Progress at bigger picture level

From a bigger picture perspective, Turkey has plenty of reasons to invest in energy storage.

Most of the fossil fuels burned for energy in the country are imported. The International Energy Agency (IEA) noted in 2021 that 93% of its oil and 99% of its gas was imported. Air pollution and carbon emissions from coal use remain significant, with the use of locally-sourced coal often prioritised over other imported fuels.    

A 4,800MW nuclear plant will go into service in 2023, helping to diversify the national energy mix, and reducing primary energy consumption is also a focus for policies like Turkey’s National Energy Efficiency Action Plan (NEEAP), aiming to reduce consumption across several sectors by 14% between 2017 and 2023.

And as Can Tokcan points out, the history of the solar industry in Turkey is only about a decade long, but has come a long way since the early 2010s. The IEA said renewable power generation took a 44% share of total power generation in 2019, exceeding the national 2023 target of 38.8%.

Yet the IEA said in 2021 that the country could go much further with its renewable energy deployment targets given the considerable resources Turkey has. 

The ongoing liberalisation of gas and electricity markets is improving their transparency, which as Tokcan alludes to is making it easier for energy storage to compete. EMRA’s new regulations also allow R&D energy storage projects of up to 1MW to be built by universities, technology development centres and industrial zones, which is yet another way the use cases for energy storage could be investigated in Turkey.    

Creating a domestic market could also enable Turkish companies to be competitive internationally too, Can Tokcan claims. 

“Logistically speaking and technically speaking, creating these [energy storage] solutions in Turkey is actually quite feasible. Because of the [low] cost, but also because of high quality production and high quality engineering.”

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