View of First Solar’s jet black thin-film PV modules at the site. Image: SJCE / Terra-Gen.

San Jose Clean Energy, a non-profit electricity supplier in California, has celebrated the completion of a solar-plus-storage project which will ensure the delivery of carbon-free electricity during evening peak times. 

The supplier held an online press conference on 2 February to officially inaugurate the Kern Solar and Storage Battery Project, which was brought online by developer Terra-Gen on 31 December 2021.

Under a 12-year power purchase agreement (PPA) signed with San Jose Clean Energy, Terra-Gen guarantees that 62MW of energy from the facility will be available to the supplier’s member-customers between 6pm and 10pm each day. 

This is the period after solar production has tailed off for the day and evening demand for power from homes and businesses in San Jose, the largest city in Silicon Valley. The city is targeting becoming carbon neutral by 2030, which will make it the US’ first, and SJCE’s 350,000 customer accounts representing about a million people will be a big part of that, city mayor Sam Liccardo said at the press conference. 

Liccardo said the 62MW of power is equivalent to about 20% of SJCE’s demand, but more importantly the project addresses the intermittency, or variability, challenge that renewable energy brings to the grid. 

In effect, clean energy will be supplied from the project for 16 hours a day, seven days a week, SJCE director Lori Mitchell pointed out. It is also the first project to come online from a US$1 billion investment commitment into four large-scale solar and wind projects by SJCE, one of California’s Community Choice Aggregator (CCA) energy suppliers. 

One of the next in that list will be another 100MW project by Terra-Gen, for which the CCA has signed a 15-year PPA, expected to come online during this year. 

The Kern project is at the Edwards Air Force Base site in California’s Central Valley, in Kern County where many of the state’s large solar — and wind — farms are located. 

Aerial view of the project, built on land leased from Edwards Airforce Base. Leasing revenue will go towards maintaining the base’s mission, Terra-Gen’s Simon Day said. Image: SJCE / Terra-Gen.

Terra-Gen, which will own and operate the project, already has a 2GW wind energy power plant nearby, and the project for SJCE is part of a much larger solar and storage facility it is building at Edwards Airforce Base. 

In fact the plant — or rather the vast complex — referred to as the Edwards & Sanborn project, is thought to be the world’s largest combined solar-plus-storage facility to date. Aiming to eventually reach 760MW of PV and 2,445MWh of battery storage, Terra-Gen closed US$804 million financing for its initial 346MWac PV and 1,501MWh of batteries in August last year.

Off-taker deals have been signed with a range of different parties, from corporates like Starbucks to other CCAs and some portions of the project have already been delivering.  

Simon Day, VP and head of solar development at Terra-Gen said that for the SJCE deal, the developer built an oversized 118MW solar PV array at the site, as well as additional new battery storage. 

It is also able to use other resources such as wind from the company’s portfolio to firm the delivery of clean energy for 16 hours a day, in what he described as a “groundbreaking” arrangement for the solar industry. 

Day said the project had been constructed quickly, from permitting in November 2020 to coming online by the end of 2021, using union labour. The solar array was installed by Mortenson Construction, comprising US company First Solar’s thin-film PV modules. 

In response to a media question as to why build the clean energy capacity for SJCE in Kern, some 250 miles from San Jose, Simon Day said that Kern’s planning commission is “robust,” and has a “very defined set of rules,” meaning developers like his company are aware of what they need to do to meet local requirements and don’t expect surprise changes to be sprung upon them. 

While the power generated and stored will go to SJCE’s members, Kern County residents will also benefit because the solar-plus-storage resources at Edwards Airforce Base will help relieve stress on the grid and can provide additional power to the CAISO grid as needed. 

SJCE’s Lori Mitchell noted that Kern County has longer hours of sunshine each day that San Jose, making it economical to site large-scale solar in that area. Mayor Sam Liccardo acknowledged the ongoing regulatory uncertainty over rooftop solar in California, arguing that the state needs a combination of distributed rooftop solar and large-scale solar arrays. 

The city hoped regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) would become more supportive of rooftop solar, but if that does not become the case, “you will see many more large arrays,” Liccardo said. 

It was also important to note, however, said local community leader Quyen Vuong of Vietnamese-American engagement group ICAN, that the Kern Solar + Storage Battery Project offers the benefits of clean solar energy to renters and those on lower incomes that might not be able to host solar on their own rooftops. 

Allowing renters to have a say in improving air quality and supporting cleaner energy is important, Vuong said, because not only are they equally deserving customers, but can become great partners and ambassadors in the community for clean energy. 

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By-products of the treatment process at Reiling GmbH, from which the solar cell fragments are separated and collected (left). Purified silicon and wafers made from 100% recycled silicon (middle). PERC solar cells made of 100 % recycled silicon with an efficiency of 19.7% (right).

Image: Fraunhofer ISE

Around 10,000 tons of silicon in discarded photovoltaic (PV) modules end up on the recycling market annually in Germany. This figure will rise to several hundred thousand tons per year by 2029. Currently, the aluminum, glass and copper of the discarded modules are reprocessed; however, the silicon solar cells are not. In order to be able to reuse the silicon, researchers from the Fraunhofer Center for Silicon Photovoltaics CSP and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, together with German PV module recycling company Reiling GmbH & Co. KG, have developed a solution, in which the silicon in the discarded modules was recycled on an industrial scale and reused to produce new PERC solar cells.

Most PV systems in Germany were installed between 2009 and 2011 during the first wave of PV expansion.

“This expansion will foreseeably be followed by a first wave of disposal twenty years later, around 2029, when the feed-in tariff for the installed PV modules expires,” explains Prof. Dr. Andreas Bett, institute director of Fraunhofer ISE. “Therefore, it is necessary to establish adequate processes and procedures for recovering the silicon material from the discarded modules at an early stage.” Already in 2021, the total installed quantity of PV modules in Germany was about five million tons, with a silicon content of 150,000 tons. As a semiconductor material, silicon is the main component of solar cells.”

A working group at Fraunhofer CSP, together with Reiling GmbH & Co. KG, has therefore developed a process for recovering the silicon material with funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate BMWK (formerly BMWi). With this process, it is possible to recycle all crystalline silicon PV modules, regardless of manufacturer and origin.

“If this were not the case, then this would be far too much work for the recycling companies,” explains Prof. Dr. Peter Dold, project manager at Fraunhofer CSP. “It was important for us to develop a scalable process that makes economic sense. A lot is possible in the lab, but our new process should prove itself in the practice for the recycling industry.”

For the process, solar cell fragments are separated and collected from by-products of the mechanical recycling process, which is already established. At Fraunhofer CSP, the cell fragments with sizes from 0.1 to 1 millimeter are first freed from the glass and plastic by various sorting processes. This is followed by the step-by-step removal of the backside contact, the silver contacts, the anti-reflective layer and finally the emitter by wet chemical etching. The silicon cleaned in this way is processed into monocrystalline or quasi-monocrystalline ingots in standard processes and then into wafers.

The crystallization is carried out with 100% recycled silicon without the addition of commercial ultrapure silicon. The wafers made of recycled silicon were fabricated into PERC solar cells at Fraunhofer ISE’s PV-TEC. In the first trial, the solar cell conversion efficiency was 19.7%.

“This is below the efficiency of today’s premium PERC solar cells, which have an efficiency of around 22.2 percent, but it is certainly above that of the solar cells in the old, discarded modules,” says Dold.

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H3 Dynamics is debuting a new robots-as-a-service solution for autonomous solar farm monitoring in partnership with Sitemark, a specialist AI-analytics company from Belgium.

The new partnership combines the DBX drone-in-a-box robots from H3 Dynamics with visual and thermal analytics from Sitemark to automate and scale up remote monitoring operations in large solar farm installations. Sitemark’s solutions have been deployed by Total, Bouygues, EDF, Engie and Orix to inspect over 30,000 ha of solar PV parks in 35 countries.

Designed as the “eyes and ears” of solar farm owners and operators, the DBX robot (video) can be deployed permanently at solar farms to track solar farm construction progress, identify solar panel degradation and provide on-site security.

“The unique combination of Sitemark Fuse and H3 Dynamics’ DBX will change the way data is captured and processed throughout the entire lifecycle of solar power assets,” says Michiko Lloyd, CEO of Sitemark.

H3 Dynamics is automating inspections across smart cities, precision agriculture, water infrastructure and ports. Last month, the company announced DBX G7, an agnostic drone-in-a-box platform capable of automating drones from any manufacturer, and deploying expert analytics from any developer.

“Our goal is to provide the world’s best data services from specialist vendors all over the world, available at any of our DBX installations globally” comments Taras Wankewycz, H3 Dynamics’ CEO.

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Some of the first solar panels being installed during Los Santos Solar I’s construction
(Source: North American Development Bank)

MPC Energy Solutions (MPCES) has completed the acquisition of Los Santos Solar I project, located in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico.

The plant is operational since 2017 and has a capacity of 15.8 MWp, with the potential to be extended to 90 MWp. The project has a USD-denominated power purchase agreement (PPA) with Leoni Cable, a German cable manufacturer, and the International De La Salle Educational Network. The U.S. government’s Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the North American Development Bank (NADB) provided a 20-year project funding.

“Los Santos Solar I contributes towards Mexico’s goals of achieving 50 percent of electricity generation from clean energy by 2050 and reducing the levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent,” says Martin Vogt, CEO of MPC Energy Solutions. “We are pleased with the swift completion of this project acquisition that marks our first operational asset in Mexico. We would like to thank Buenavista Renewables (BVR) for their excellent cooperation during this process and we are looking forward to a continued collaboration for the future expansion of this project.”

In 2020, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), power generation from renewables accounted for 18.8% of the total electricity produced in Mexico. This is a 28.55% increase in renewables power generation since 2015.

“We are excited to have our first operational project in the portfolio reinforcing our commitment to assist Latin America diversifying its energy mix towards cleaner sources and helping create resilience in the region,” adds Martin Vogt.

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Sumitomo’s 2MW/8MWh flow battery storage project in the SDG&E trial. Image: Sumitomo / SDGE.

4 February 2022: Microgrid trial anchored by vanadium flow battery concludes in California

San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) and Sumitomo Electric Industries (SEI) have successfully completed a zero-emissions microgrid pilot using a 2MW/8MWh vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) energy storage system.

The battery system powered 66 homes and businesses in the California investor-owned utility’s service area for five hours in a test run.

California has been keen to improve grid reliability using zero-emission sources in light of numerous power shutoffs due to the recently increased wildfire risk. Sumimoto managing director Hideo Hato highlighted vanadium’s noteworthy non-flammable qualities in the pilot announcement.

Commencement of the year-long pilot was reported by Energy-Storage.news early last year. It involved two successful test types carried out in various weather conditions. 

The first involved the battery providing a seamless transition for customers as they were transitioned to the microgrid. The second saw microgrid operators establish and sustain service using the battery after a complete loss of power, with customers experiencing a ‘momentary’ outage.

Sumitomo supplied the battery which was installed at an SDG&E substation in Bonita in 2017 and connected to the state grid in 2018, since which it has participated in the state’s wholesale electricity markets. In that time, it has helped the grid mitigate some summer peaks in electricity demand due to air conditioning use.

7 February 2022: Acciona selects Gelion’s zinc-bromide battery for trial at solar plant

Acciona will trial UK technology group Gelion’s Endure zinc-bromide non-flow energy at its Montes del Cierzo solar plant in northern Spain. 

Gelion will provide a 25KW/100KWh system to the 1.2MW-peak solar plant, a company spokesperson told Energy-Storage.news. 

“The Gelion Endure battery will be assessed in various real-world ambient conditions completing various photovoltaic integration functions,” they added. 

“These include ‘ramp rate control’ to minimise the grid impact of PV plants, ‘frequency regulation’ to improve overall grid stability and ‘solar firming’ to produce dispatchable renewable power and reduce the need for backup fossil fuel generators.” 

The 6-12 month test and supply contract will start with an installation in Q3 2022 and, if successful, the Endure battery will form part of Acciona Energía’s supplier portfolio as a renewable energy storage provider. Its success will be measured based on pre-defined battery test performance criteria. 

Gelion’s is one of four emerging energy storage solutions which Acciona selected to proceed to trial, through the company’s programme IM’NOVATION.

Other technologies the Spanish infrastructure and energy group has tried out at the Montes del Cierzo test bed include a stationary battery storage system assembled using second-life electric vehicle batteries.

Endure’s fire resistance is such that the battery has been demonstrated suffering “no catastrophic loss of battery function with no failure hazards” after being placed on a BBQ hotplate at up to 700°C for 30 minutes.

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Sydney University spinout Gelion listed on the AIM stock exchange in London in November 2021, raising £19m (US$25m) for a market cap of £155m. The company mostly targets off-grid applications although the Montes del Cierzo plant is connected to the Spanish grid.

7 February 2022: Zeta Energy raises US$23m for lithium sulfur battery technology

Zeta Energy has raised US$23m in a series A from Moore Strategic Ventures to develop and commercialise its lithium-sulfur (Li-S) battery system.

The announcement comes 18 months after the company raised an US$1.8 million seed round investment from another lithium-sulfur battery developer, Li-S Energy. 

The Texas-based technology group claims its lithium-sulfur battery system does not suffer the polysulfide shuttle effect that has long held back advances in the field, thanks to its proprietary carbon materials.

It adds that its propritery cathodes offer superior stability and higher sulfur content than current metal-based cathode materials and are inexpensive, have high capacity, and use no cobalt, nickel or manganese. The money will go towards expanding its Houston lab facility and further commercialisation activities. 

Sulfur is more abundant and inexpensive than the underlying materials of lithium-ion so the technology holds potential, but commercialisation has been found difficult. UK-based Oxis Energy completed several fundraising rounds for its lithium-sulfur technology but entered into administration in May last year. 

It is not Moore Strategic Ventures first investment in companies looking to disrupt the energy market. 

In September 2021 it led a US$26m financing round for Indian AI-based energy analytics startup Bidgely Inc, which works with utilities and energy companies to create personalised energy profiles for customers, including around decarbonisation. A year earlier, it led an undisclosed Series C investment into Canadian lithium-ion battery recycler Li-Cycle.

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Urban Grid’s project pipeline includes colocated and standalone energy storage as well as utility-scale solar PV. Image: Urban Grid.

Renewables owner and operator Brookfield Renewable has tripled its US development pipeline to 31GW through the US$650 million acquisition of clean power developer Urban Grid.

The deal sees Brookfield Renewable, an affiliate of Brookfield Asset Management, take on Urban Grid’s pipeline, which includes 13GW of utility-scale solar and 7GW of energy storage across 12 US states.

Virginia-headquartered Urban Grid has nearly 2GW of under construction or ready-to-build solar projects. The business will continue to operate as an independent power producer (IPP) under its current name.

Brookfield Renewable said it will leverage its commercial capabilities to optimise the value of the developer’s pipeline.

The acquisition follows Urban Grid closing US$275 million of debt refinance that was provided by asset management firm Crayhill Capital Management last October to scale up the developer’s solar and energy storage platform.

To read the full version of this story visit PV Tech.

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Gore Street’s 10MW Lower Road battery storage asset. Image: Gore Street.

Gore Street Capital, one of two stock market-listed battery storage developer-investor funds in the UK, is seeing its revenues for providing frequency response ancillary services hit record highs.

Three of Gore Street Energy Storage Fund’s battery storage assets have been ranked as some of the highest revenue generating assets on the grid in Great Britain as frequency response prices rise.

According to market data specialists Modo Energy, the three assets – Lower Road (10MW), Larport Farm (19.5MW) and Breach Farm (10MW) – were all some of the highest revenue generating assets per MWh in Q4 2021. Gore Street said they have again been listed as the best performing assets in January 2022.

Alex O’Cinneide, CEO of Gore Street Capital said that across Great Britain, the company is seeing pricing for its services reach “all-time highs from frequency revenue stream opportunities”.

Indeed, all three of the sites benefit from frequency contracts, for which prices have recently reached record levels sustained at approximately £25 (US$33.87)/MW/h. Gore Street told sister site Current± this was a rate achieved by one of its sites for firm frequency response (FFR).

This in turn has led to returns significantly above the base case across the company’s 110MW operational portfolio for the relevant months.

During Q4 2021, there were historic highs in energy prices as well as volatility, Gore Street said, with this driven by historical low wind, planned and unplanned generation plant outages, unforeseen interconnector failures and high gas prices.

The company said it has demonstrated that its assets are capable of capturing trading revenue when such revenue stream offers higher gross margins when compared to other available revenue-generating services.

Meanwhile, Gore Street is continuing to see what it said are extremely attractive acquisition opportunities, not just in Great Britain and Ireland but also internationally, particularly in European and North American markets.

Last year, Gore Street announced it would be expanding its Kilmannock battery storage asset in Co. Wexford, Ireland by 90MW. Earlier in the year, it acquired a 57MW construction-ready energy storage project in Leicester.

This story first appeared on Current±.

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Renewable energy fund CEP. Energy proposed a battery system with up to 1,200MW in the region to help ease Liddell coal plant into retirement. Image: CEP. Energy.

Cross-party backing for a new fossil fuel power plant in Australia has been criticised by experts and clean energy industry voices, who have said battery storage would be a more viable option to provide peaking capacity. 

The plan to build a 660MW peaker plant fuelled by gas and diesel in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales (NSW), had been strongly backed by the country’s federal government, headed by the Liberal Party and Prime Minister Scott Morrison. 

The project, Kurri Kurri Power Station, has been described as a “government-built white elephant” by Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre at Victoria University, in a recent article contributed to The Conversation. 

However, in December 2021 the NSW state government granted conditional approval for the power station to receive critical State significant infrastructure (CSSI) status. A few days ago, Australia’s main national opposition party, Labor, also gave its backing to a project it had previously opposed. 

Labor had given the government plan its support, conditional on the project owner, utility company Snowy Hydro, adapting the Kurri Kurri plant to run 30% on green hydrogen from its start of operations in 2023, and 100% by 2030. 

However, Victoria University’s Bruce Mountain debunked both the need for the (mostly) fossil fuel plant in the first place, as well as strongly questioning the benefit of Labor’s green hydrogen gambit. 

Mountain argued that not only is the power station altogether an unnecessary project, the hydrogen retrofit would be “so expensive as to be unrealistic,” and called burning hydrogen for power “about the least useful thing you can do with it”. 

Professor Mountain, with colleague Dr Steven Percy and independent engineer Ted Woodley, wrote a paper analysing the project’s original plan, published in June 2021. 

Although flexible dispatchable generation has been provided historically by a combination of pumped hydro and open cycle gas turbines (OCGT), lithium-ion batteries have come down in cost and progressed so far in their technological development to become an alternative source of dispatchable generation, they wrote. 

Furthermore, the ongoing rise of renewable energy generation in Australia is already driving forwards development of various flexibility assets for the electricity network, from large-scale transmission interconnectors, to other gas projects, new large-scale pumped hydro and batteries — a lot of batteries, and mainly proposed by private developers. 

The authors disputed a government claim that the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has modelled a need for 1,000MW of new resources to come online to replace capacity from Liddell, a coal-fired power station set for retirement. AEMO had forecast no shortfall of dispatchable generation and in fact more battery and renewable generation projects announced since AEMO’s studies made that even less so.

A claim that Kurri Kurri would reduce power prices was “tenuous,” they argued, given that the peaker plant would have a slow and inflexible response time of 30 minutes, whereas the National Electricity Market (NEM) has introduced 5-minute settlement for electricity pricing since October 2021 — making  fast-responding batteries far more competitive.  

While as assumption is sometimes made that more renewables equals more gas plants to fill gaps in generation from variable wind and solar, according to AEMO’s Integrated System Plan (ISP), gas peaker plants in NSW would run and produce electricity for between just four and 13 hours in every year up to 2030.

The authors strongly questioned a AU$600 million (US$425 million) price tag quoted for the project, indicating the cost would run several hundred dollars over that, even before Labor’s hydrogen retrofit proposal was introduced. 

There is at best “a tiny market for the sort of service that KPPS can offer and so it has no prospect of earning anywhere near the revenues needed to recover its outlay,” Mountain, Percy and Woodley wrote in their study. 

Peaker plant plan ‘undermines’ Australia’s energy transition

This morning the Clean Energy Council, a national trade organisation for the industry said final approval of the peaking plant project “undermined” Australia’s efforts to build a low-cost, low-emissions and reliable energy system. 

“A utility-scale battery for this site was the smarter choice both economically and environmentally,” Kane Thornton, the Council’s chief executive said.

The Clean Energy Council published its own paper last year, “Battery storage — the new, clean peaker,” which offered techno-economic analysis of the batteries versus peaker plants debate. Thornton pointed out today that as outlined in that paper, batteries can provide peak electricity more cheaply than the OCGT plants planned for Kurri Kurri Power Station.

“The Kurri Kurri plant is only expected to run for about one week of every year. When battery storage can deliver a cost saving of 30% while delivering greater flexibility and significantly reducing emissions intensity, it makes no sense to be spending taxpayer dollars on this fossil fuel project,” Thornton said. 

Not only did the study model that a 250MW/1,000MWh battery peaker plant in New South Wales would be considerably cheaper than gas, the Clean Energy Council also pointed out that battery storage is a multiple application asset class. 

The services it can provide, coupled with the ongoing reconfiguration of energy market rules to accommodate it and other clean energy technologies, strongly implied the value of batteries will go up. 

Since the publication of the Council’s paper las year, AEMO has introduced new regulations to incentivise investment in battery storage, and is looking to create battery-friendly market structures for Fast Frequency Response, while the frequency control ancillary services (FCAS) market is already a key source of revenues for large-scale battery projects.

Conversely, new fossil fuel projects carry not only a diminishing economic impetus from a technological perspective, but also carry policy and economic risks; for instance if international carbon pricing markets are brought to bear on the cost of Australian exports. 

Lillian Patterson, an energy economy expert working for the Clean Energy Council at the time the study was published, told Energy-Storage.news in an interview that there is no economic rationale to building fossil fuel peakers in Australia anymore.

Finally, converting Kurri Kurri to run on hydrogen will be an expensive and significant undertaking, not only for the plant itself, but for its pipeline and storage infrastructure, Victoria University’s Bruce Mountain wrote. 

While utility Snowy Hydro said its turbines could extend to a 30% hydrogen maximum mix, the gas pipelines and storage are only being constructed to accommodate 10% hydrogen in the mix and will need a subsequent total rebuild. 

Green hydrogen will likely have a major role to play in decarbonising hard-to-abate emissions in industries like fertiliser production and various heavy industrial processes, or even long-distance export. 

However, burning it in Australian power plants to produce electricity represents an inefficient use when much of the energy will be vented off as heat and wasted. The fact that batteries represent a better alternative, and are already here today, means that there is “absolutely no need to bother” combusting green hydrogen at Kurri Kurri and other sites, Bruce Mountain and engineer Ted Woodley argued. 

Indeed, around this time last year Australian renewable energy fund company CEP.Energy proposed the building of a battery storage plant of up to 1,200MW output in Kurri Kurri, to help replace the Liddell coal power station. It would be the country’s largest battery energy storage system (BESS) to date, if it were to go ahead. 

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El Paso Electric (EPE) has released a request for proposal (RFP) for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) services for a 10 MW utility-scale solar generating facility coupled with an optional 3 MW battery energy storage system.

This RFP is for the expansion of EPE’s existing, fully subscribed, Texas Community Solar Program. This project will be the second expansion of the company’s Community Solar program since its initial launch in April 2017 – EPE’s first voluntary green energy option for customers. All proposals are due by April 4, 2022.

Proposals submitted may be sited within EPE’s Texas or New Mexico service region, but preference will be given to those sited in Texas. EPE will evaluate all proposals taking into consideration overall EPC costs and bidder experience among other items detailed in the RFP. Prospective applicants must submit a Letter of Intent no later than February 22, 2022.

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President Joe Biden

The President has determined that the safeguard action on imports of crystalline silicon photovoltaic (CSPV) cells, whether or not partially or fully assembled into other products, continues to be necessary to prevent or remedy the serious injury to the domestic industry, and that there is evidence that the domestic industry is making a positive adjustment to import competition.

He extended the safeguard measure proclaimed in Proclamation 9693 with modifications, including continuation of the tariff-rate quota (TRQ) on imports of solar cells not partially or fully assembled into other products for an additional period of four years, with unchanging within-quota quantities of 5 GW for each year and annual reductions in the rates of duty applicable to goods entered in excess of those quantities of cells in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth years, as described in Annex I to this proclamation. There is a continuation of the increase in duties on imports of modules for an additional period of 4 years, with annual reductions in the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth years as well as an exclusion of bifacial panels from the extension of duties proclaimed in this paragraph.

“While we are disappointed with the decision to extend Section 201 tariffs on imported solar cells and panels, we are grateful to the Biden administration for clearly considering the range of issues affected by this decision,” states Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). “Administration officials arrived at a balanced solution in upholding the exclusion for bifacial panels and increasing the tariff rate quota for cells.

“SEIA has been fighting for more than three years to preserve the exclusion for bifacial panels, a product not available in the United States at scale,” Hopper adds. “Today’s decision recognizes the importance of this innovative technology in helping to improve power output and lower costs in the utility-scale segment. It is a massive step forward in producing clean energy in America and in tackling climate change. We also support the administration’s decision to increase the tariff rate quota for solar cell imports. This will benefit both domestic module manufacturers and their customers in the residential, and commercial and industrial segments.

“As the nation’s leading voice for clean energy project development, we applaud President Biden’s decision today on a crucial issue facing the solar industry: Section 201 tariffs,” comments American Clean Power Association CEO Heather Zichal. “The decision to extend the 201 exclusion for bifacial modules is a win for jobs and a win for the President’s climate agenda. The President’s decision to extend the tariffs, applicable to monofacial solar cells and modules, gives the domestic solar manufacturing industry four more years to adjust to import competition as intended by the statute.”  

As part of the tariff’s history, in January 2018, the President issued Proclamation 9693, imposing a safeguard measure for a period of four years that included both a TRQ on imports of certain CSPV cells, not partially or fully assembled into other products, provided for in subheading. In addition, there was an increase in duties (safeguard tariff) on imports of CSPV cells exceeding the TRQ and all imports of other CSPV product. Proclamation 9693 exempted imports from certain designated beneficiary countries under the Generalized System of Preferences from the application of the safeguard measure.

Effective June 13, 2019, the USTR excluded bifacial solar panels that absorb light and generate electricity on each side of the panel and that consist of only bifacial solar cells that absorb light and generate electricity on both sides of the cells (bifacial modules).

On October 10, 2020, the President issued Proclamation 10101, in which he determined that the domestic industry has begun to make a positive adjustment to import competition, as shown by the increases in domestic module production capacity, production, and market share.  It also revoked the exclusion of bifacial modules from application of the safeguard measure on the basis that it had impaired and was likely to continue to impair the effectiveness of the safeguard action. In addition, it adjusted the safeguard tariff for the fourth year of the safeguard measure from 15% to 18% on the basis that the exclusion of bifacial modules from application of the safeguard tariffs had impaired the remedial effectiveness of the 4-year action proclaimed in Proclamation 9693, and to achieve the full remedial effect envisaged in that action.

The United States Court of International Trade then held up on November 16, 2021 in Solar Energy Industries Association et al. v. United States (SEIA) that the President acted outside of his statutory authority in issuing Proclamation 10101, and enjoined the government from enforcing that proclamation.  This injunction had the effect of reinstating the exclusion of bifacial modules from the safeguard tariffs and lowering the fourth-year safeguard tariff to 15%.  On January 14, 2022, the Government filed a notice of appeal of SEIA to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Read the full Proclamation here.

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