European Union adopts Net Zero Industry Act to support clean energy manufacturing sector

Under the Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA), member states of the EU will be required to apply non-price pre-qualification criteria and award criteria for renewables projects, including responsible business conduct, cybersecurity, data security and the ability to deliver the project fully and on time.

These new criteria will need to apply to at least 30% of the volume auctioned in the member states every year, and industry leaders are optimistic that this will encourage the adoption of more renewable power projects.

The act also regulates the purchase of net zero technology products, including solar modules, as member states of the EU can only source 50% of the modules in auctions from a single country per year.

In addition, both the European Parliament and Council agreed on fast permit-granting processes. In the future, the time limit for permitting construction or expansion of manufacturing projects with a capacity of larger than 1GW will be 18 months. For projects smaller than 1GW, the time limit will only be 12 months. However, shorter deadlines will be set for strategic projects.

The regulation will also promote the development of net zero acceleration valleys, defined by as territories that “concentrate several companies involved with a certain technology”. These valleys aim to create clusters of net zero industrial activities, increasing the attractiveness of the EU as a location for manufacturing activities and further streamlining the administrative procedures for setting up net zero manufacturing capacity.

The agreement is provisional and needs to be endorsed and formally adopted by the EU Council and the European Parliament institutions.

Trade association Solar Power Europe said that “it is good news” that the act will be revised in coming years, but reiterated the need for immediate actions to safeguard the European solar manufacturing industry.

“But let us be very clear: while landing the NZIA sends a strong signal to EU solar manufacturers, it doesn’t negate the need for emergency support. Manufacturers have weeks left to survive, this emergency requires urgent action from EU and national authorities,” added Acke.

The European Parliament voted to adopt their position of the NZIA legislation on 21 November 2023, which will seek to onshore manufacturing for renewable energy technologies like solar PV, battery energy storage and wind to the EU. Our sister site PV Tech has been covering the news and related articles can be read here.

This story first appeared on PV Tech.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 9th annual Energy Storage Summit EU in London, 20-21 February 2024. This year it is moving to a larger venue, bringing together Europe’s leading investors, policymakers, developers, utilities, energy buyers and service providers all in one place. Visit the official site for more info.

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VIDEO: Lessons in BESS manufacturing quality, learned from 30GWh+ of factory inspections

In the past six years, CEA has performed factory quality audits on over 30GWh of BESS projects, employing a multi-faceted approach to target these issues. The team’s findings at each manufacturing stage highlight common quality issues that may cause commissioning delays, excessive degradation and even thermal events and fires.

In this webinar, CEA’s BESS experts share:– The most common issues seen in the factory, their typical root causes, and– what steps can be taken during the manufacturing process to prevent these issues.

Speakers:

George Touloupas, senior director, technology & quality, Clean Energy Associates

Chi Zhang, senior energy storage engineer, Clean Energy Associates

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You can also register to watch the webinar from the on-demand section of the site, which will also enable you to access presentation slide deck, as well as all other Energy-Storage.news webinars.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 9th annual Energy Storage Summit EU in London, 20-21 February 2024. This year it is moving to a larger venue, bringing together Europe’s leading investors, policymakers, developers, utilities, energy buyers and service providers all in one place. Visit the official site for more info.

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Axpo commissions first BESS in Sweden

It is the first from Axpo in Sweden and was acquired in-development from developers RES and SCR in March 2023. That acquisition was followed shortly by a solar-plus-storage project with a 25MW BESS acquired from developer SENS, among the more active in the Swedish market.

Axpo Group’s head of batteries & hybrid systems Frank Amend said: “We will continue to expand our storage activities over the next few years. The importance of large storage capacities is crucial in the course of the energy transition.”

The firm did not reveal the technology providers for the project.

The grid-scale energy storage market in Sweden has accelerated substantially in the past few years with high prices in the ancillary service markets and 200MW is expected to come online in 2024, according to flexibility services provider Flextools in a recent interview (Premium access).

Another IPP, France-headquartered Neoen, launched construction on the country’s largest BESS at 93.9MW/93.9MWh earlier this month.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 9th annual Energy Storage Summit EU in London, 20-21 February 2024. This year it is moving to a larger venue, bringing together Europe’s leading investors, policymakers, developers, utilities, energy buyers and service providers all in one place. Visit the official site for more info.

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Victoria’s SEC, Equis Australia get AU$400 million for NEM’s first 4-hour battery storage project

Construction has already begun on the project, expected to cost a total of AU$1 billion. That includes AU$249 million already committed to it by the SEC, a state-owned entity set up last year by the Victorian government to direct investment into 4.5GW of renewable energy and energy storage.

This was largely aimed at reversing a stagnating trend of energy investment in the state, which the government said was part of the legacy of energy sector privatisation by previous administrations. MREH was the SEC’s first committed investment, announced last year soon after the state government granted key planning approvals.

Equis Australia said this morning that the pair have raised a non-recourse debt financing package from a syndicate including Societe Generale, Standard Chartered, Export Development Canada, and Westpac.

The MREH Debt Financing syndicate will fund one MREH A3, one of the three separate 200MW systems. MREH A3 will have 800MWh capacity and the asset’s operation in the NEM is going to be managed by the SEC, connected to the network via a 500kV transmission line.

Thought to be the largest debt financing package raised to date for a grid-scale BESS project in Australia, Equis claimed it as a “landmark” transaction. It is also the first financial close of a 4-hour duration BESS which will be connecting to the National Electricity Market (NEM).

According to the development partnership, it is also strategically very important for Victoria, given that it will be the only battery resource in the state capable of supporting three of the multi-gigawatt mixed technology Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) developments planned by the government.

This is due to its location at the confluence of key transmission routes, said Equis, which itself is a developer of transmission infrastructure.

Duration, scale ‘enabled by public-private equity partnership’

Having previously remarked that the public-private partnership with Victoria’s new SEC was key to enabling the project’s grand scale, Equis co-founder and managing director David Russell said the developer has found the equity partnership model “to be a very effective vehicle for government industry collaboration to bring forward renewable energy projects”.

“We think this model should be considered by other state governments because it allows their investments to earn sustainable returns that can be reinvested in further renewable energy initiatives.”

The company further noted that SEC’s involvement enabled the developer to go for 4-hour duration rather than the more typical 2-hour duration seen in the NEM recently. It was first announced with the shorter planned duration of 2-hours by Equis in late 2022. BESS suppliers to MREH will be Tesla and Samsung.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 1st Energy Storage Summit Australia, on 21-22 May 2024 in Sydney, NSW. Featuring a packed programme of panels, presentations and fireside chats from industry leaders focusing on accelerating the market for energy storage across the country. For more information, go to the website.

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Redflow in California: grant award and NTP for two projects totalling 21.6MWh

The 15MWh order from system integrator Faraday Microgrids appears to be the first phase of a 20MWh project that was announced last year with grant funding from the California Energy Commission (CEC), part of a US$330 million package for long-duration energy storage (LDES). It will be deployed for the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians.

This phase includes Redflow’s 200kWh modular storage solution Energy Pod and non-recurring engineering work, amounting to US$9.23 million in revenues (excluding duties and US sales tax). Shipment of the batteries is expected later in 2024 with commissioning in early 2025; it isn’t clear if the project has been reduced in size or if the remainder will be ordered later.

Redflow and Faraday Microgrids have collaborated on a second large-scale project in California, at 34.4MWh. That project received grant funding from the Department of Energy’s LDES programme (roughly the same size as the CEC’s) in September 2023 and will be deployed at a hospital in Madera.

The company’s technology offers durations of between two and 12 hours.

Fourth CEC-funded California project for Redflow

The new, 6.6MWh order also comes from a project that has been selected for CEC grant funding from a different scheme, the Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) programme. Submitted by consultancies Prosper Sustainably and Microgrid Initiatives in partnership with Redflow and system intergrator Ameresco, it will see the resiliency project deployed for the Barona Band of Mission Indians in San Diego. (Ameresco put Redflow on its list of technology suppliers in March 2023.)

The project was one of three out of 12 to be recommended for grant award by the CEC following a competitive solicitation and has now entered grant terms negotiations.

Redflow CEO and managing director Tim Harris commented: “Subject to completion of the grant award process, this would be Redflow’s fourth multimegawatt hour project in California involving the CEC as a funding partner, and would again demonstrate that Redflow’s LDES technology is flexible to operate, allowing 100% depth of discharge without impairing BESS capacity or lifespan, and achieving MWh-scale battery hibernation for resilient clean energy operations, aligned with California’s decarbonisationgoals.”

Energy-Storage.news interviewed Harris in June 2023 about the 20MWh CEC-funded project in California for a Premium article.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 5th Energy Storage Summit USA, 19-20 March 2024 in Austin, Texas. Featuring a packed programme of panels, presentations and fireside chats from industry leaders focusing on accelerating the market for energy storage across the country. For more information, go to the website.

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Friday Briefing: UK BESS revenues in tricky spot, but the past is a different market

According to the latest analysis from our colleagues at Solar Media Market Research, operational capacity in the UK is expected to reach 7.3GW and 11.6GWh by the end of 2024. While its European friends and neighbours are starting to accelerate their efforts, it remains likely the UK market will remain on a strong trajectory, as Solar Media analyst Mollie McCorkindale told us recently.

However, it will likely not have escaped your attention that amid this buildout, battery storage revenues in the UK – or more specifically in the parts of the UK that comprise the Great Britain (GB) grid of England, Scotland and Wales – are in something of a lull.

In October last year, Energy-Storage.news heard from industry sources that while some saturation of the ancillary services markets that had since the market opened in 2016 comprised the bulk of activity and revenues for battery energy storage system (BESS) assets was expected to bite in 2023, the resulting drop in revenues had been sharper than most had anticipated.

This is largely thought to be because as the ancillary services revenues for applications such as frequency regulation dropped, energy trading and arbitrage had been expected to pick up the slack, which for various reasons, has not quite materialised as healthily as many would have liked.

A tale of three listed funds

We are now in the thick of quarterly results and financial updates season for Q1 2024 for most listed companies, which gives the industry a valuable barometer of where the market has been heading and what those companies expect to see in the year ahead.

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has three pure-play energy storage funds listed on it: Gresham House Energy Storage Fund, Harmony Energy Income Trust, and Gore Street Energy Storage Fund.

Gresham House provided a trading update ahead of its full-year 2023 results release in April, covered by this site on 1 February. The fund said its assets had been exposed to the UK market’s “weak revenue environment”. While its pipeline buildout will progress this year, taking it from 740MW to 1,072MW, it told investors not to expect any fresh project announcements during 2024.

Just a day later, 2 February, Energy-Storage.news reported that Harmony Energy Income Trust too had announced significantly lower revenues in 2023 versus the previous year. Again, this came as part of an update, rather than a full results release, which is expected later this month.

Finally, Gore Street Energy Storage Fund echoed the same sorts of concerns a few days ago regarding the UK market. Gore Street, which has diversified into Texas’ ERCOT, California’s CAISO and the grid-connected BESS markets of Germany and Ireland, said that its international portfolio was the main driver of its “stable revenue and profit profile” that means it may be able to pay a dividend to shareholders where Gresham House may not.

In short, as explained by Gresham House, BESS assets could have a big role to play in the balancing of the GB grid via, appropriately enough, the Balancing Mechanism run by system operator National Grid ESO.

However, due to high skip rates – batteries being overlooked in favour of legacy generation assets, largely natural gas – the Balancing Mechanism (BM) participation of BESS assets remains much lower than it could, and should, be.

‘UK has opportunities to earn revenues throughout the year’

At the Energy Storage Summit EU which will be hosted by our publisher Solar Media in London later this month, it’s likely the current UK environment for BESS revenues and the challenges associated will be major talking points. Or perhaps for some, it might be the elephant in the room to avoid. Either way, it’s the reality.

Does that really matter? Of course, it does in the short and perhaps medium term. It makes everything trickier, especially given the macroeconomic conditions of high inflation and expensive borrowing around the market.

It would certainly not be fair or apt to trivialise that. However, in the grand scheme of things, the GB grid’s fundamental direction is towards higher penetration of renewable energy and higher electricity demand based on increasing electrification of transport, buildings, and heat.

That means the fundamental drivers for energy storage will remain and amplify. National Grid ESO for its part is making changes to accommodate that need.

Our webinar with battery storage optimiser and trader GridBeyond last month, ‘Do higher risks mean higher returns for battery storage investors,’ the conversation between panelists Scott Berrie from GridBeyond, Zenobe Energy head of commercial products Charles Pearce and Fig Power CEO Henry Easterbrook inevitably turned to this topic.

You can watch the webinar in full here via our YouTube channel, or you can register on-demand to also receive Scott’s presentation materials.

Taking the example of ERCOT in Texas, where some assets had made revenues equivalent to several months if not years of forecasted returns in a matter of days as the unregulated market struggled to cope with extreme weather conditions, I asked the assembled panelists what they believed constituted reasonable or realistic revenue expectations for BESS.

“Texas is probably the extreme example but I think it provides a bit of an analogue for the longer-term returns on the battery asset, and clearly when we’re forecasting these we forecast these in a nice smooth sort of long-term trend,” Zenobe’s Pearce said.

“But in reality, you’ll probably start will see more volatility on these prices over the long term, which will average out to that to justify the business investment, hopefully.”

The UK at the moment is “probably seeing a low period of returns,” but Zenobe expects to see the spikes in volatility throughout the course of an investment that justifies the business case, Pearce said.

And while assets in ERCOT may see those occasional revenue jumps that mean big unexpected windfalls, GridBeyond’s Scott Berrie said that participation in ERCOT is also taxing for BESS assets in that availability to respond to those market spikes and signals is critical.

“Availability is very, very key in that [ERCOT] market, that your asset is available to make that money otherwise you’re going to have a very bad year,” Berrie said.

“The good thing about the UK market is because it’s matured, there’s actually opportunity throughout the entirety of the year.”

Fig Power’s Henry Easterbrook meanwhile said that the early days of the UK’s ancillary services boom-driven market could be analogous to ERCOT, the dynamics today are quite different.

The market is skewed due to its continued reliance on natural gas to balance the system, which Easterbrook said: “won’t be the same going forward”.

“Just the availability of an ageing gas fleet and the commercial challenge of building anything new which is going to preclude anything really coming on [to add to that fleet] means there’s going to be a completely different dynamic,” Easterbrook said.

“Batteries will provide some of the services that, historically have been… narrowing spreads that have been closed by gas, will be an opportunity for batteries that we haven’t seen yet.”

Happy Friday!

7 days of ESN Premium

In case you missed them… click the headlines to read the following Energy-Storage.news Premium articles:

The challenges for European lithium-ion gigafactories and the role ESS demand will play

Lawyers from Herbert Smith Freehills discuss the challenges for the nascent European gigafactory ecosystem in light of heavy competition from the US and China, alongside the role that energy storage system (ESS) demand will play.

Resource adequacy: The ‘significant changes’ expected in California’s main driver of utility BESS procurement

Attorney Seth Hilton discusses “a new dynamic for energy storage resources” around resource adequacy in California’s CAISO market.

Higher BESS energy density means additional noise and fire safety considerations

While more energy-dense BESS units mean packing more into smaller footprints, they may have additional implications for noise and fire safety, a developer source told Energy-Storage.news.

Wärtsilä sees ‘favourable demand environment’ for energy storage as strategic review continues

Wärtsilä’s energy storage division saw a 20% year-on-year increase in sales and a 31% increase in order intake from 2022 to 2023, with the company board in mid-consideration of the business unit’s future.

Netherlands’ largest BESS owner SemperPower on commercial model, grid and development challenges

We catch up with SemperPower, developer and owner of the two largest BESS projects in the Netherlands, discussing its commercial model, challenges, grid, regulations and more.

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EDF to optimise UK solar-plus-storage project

It comes a week after panellists at Solar Media’s Solar Finance & Investment Europe (SFIE) event in London said that optimising co-located BESS was “much more complicated” than standalone projects and that “few companies could do it well” (Premium access).

EDF has also signed an agreement to offtake the physical energy produced by the solar farm over the next ten years, and will use its Powershift platform to optimise energy returns from the project, following its use at a number of other sites in the UK.

Stuart Fenner, director of wholesale market service commercial at EDF, said: “We are very pleased that we have been chosen to deliver trading, optimisation and offtake services for one of the UK’s largest co-located solar and battery sites. This unique deal exemplifies the innovation needed to address our energy challenges, which will help to secure green energy for the future and deliver on our commitment to help Britain achieve net zero.”

See the full version of this article on Solar Power Portal.

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Romania relaunches call for investment in battery storage for solar photovoltaic facilities

A technical guide for selection criteria has been issued, with the call including funding for purchase of equipment and its installation, as well as construction of BESS assets. Bidders have until midnight on 21 March to respond to the call.

€79.6 million (US$85.7 million) in funding is available for the BESS projects. The call has been relaunched by the Ministry after an initial launch in 2023 had been expected to see projects selected by the end of last year. That original call had been for around 620MWh or more of storage, as announced by the Ministry of Energy in November 2022.

Funding has been enabled by the European Union (EU), through the bloc’s recovery and resilience planning facilities.

The national recovery and resilience plan (NRRP) of Romania was approved in a revised form in November 2023 that placed greater emphasis on clean energy technologies and green economic transition than its previous version. The new version took the clean energy funding requests from 41% of funding requested to 44.1% and brought it in line with the REPowerEU scheme for energy independence and transition.

Our sister site PV Tech has covered Romania’s solar PV market extensively.

Second call

The Ministry also announced a €199 million call to support Romania’s battery and solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing sectors, also funded through the NRRP, with €149.25 million for new battery production, assembly and recycling facilities.

At least 2GW of annual production, recycling or assembly of batteries per year will be brought online by that same 2026 mid-point, the government hopes. That could include any combination of electrode or electrode component production including recycling, and assembly of electrodes in batteries and testing and conditioning of batteries, again including recycling.

Meanwhile, the remaining €49.75 million is intended for new projects in Romania that would add solar PV cell and module (panel) production, assembly and recycling capacity to the tune of at least 200MW per year by mid-2026.

Bids could include any combination of polysilicon or wafer production, or assembly of finished cells and modules, including recycling.

Calls are open to any size of company that has appropriate experience with the technologies in line with the European Union’s CAEN codes for classification of economic activities in the fields of materials recycling, battery and accumulator manufacturing and manufacture of other electrical equipment.

These calls come just a few days after the EU committed to higher renewable energy and emissions reduction targets for 2040, which while not explicitly setting targets or strategies for energy storage, acknowledged that storage capacity will be a key element of achieving those goals.

They also come just as Germany, one of the EU’s economic leaders, is formulating its own national energy storage strategy. It will be interesting to see if similar avenues are taken by many other EU states, particularly in light of a scathing assessment by the Energy Storage Coalition that their National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) are falling short in that regard.

Romania is a little bit of an early adopter by standards of many central and eastern European (CEE) countries, having got its first grid-scale BESS installation online in 2018.

However, much funding including State Aid unlocked by the EU over the past couple of years will be directed towards clean energy efforts across the continent that include millions for storage projects in countries including Bulgaria, Slovenia and Hungary, with the latter winning approval for €1.1 billion in state aid to support large-scale storage projects in June last year.

At last year’s Energy Storage Summit Central and Eastern Europe, hosted by our publisher Solar Media, representatives of energy storage system integrator Fluence said that although the CEE market is at a very nascent stage, it holds the potential to ‘leapfrog’ other markets. Poland is thought to be especially advanced among markets in the region.

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Ingeteam providing PCS for Grenergy’s ‘world’s biggest BESS’ in Chile

Located in the Chilean Atacama desert, the Oasis de Atacama project, which has the largest capacity of any storage project in the world, will be built in five phases and is expected to be fully operational in 2026 with an installed solar capacity of 1GW and 4.1GWh of storage capacity.

Ingeteam has been operational in Chile for over ten years and has supplied its technology for 68 solar power plants.

Last month, Grenergy signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) for the fourth phase of the project, for which the development will see the company add 260MW of new solar capacity, alongside 1.1GWh of new storage capacity.

See the original version of this article on PV Tech.

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The challenges for European lithium-ion gigafactories and the role ESS demand will play

Thomas Herman, of counsel at law firm Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF), is nonetheless bullish on the potential of European gigafactory projects, pointing to various underlying factors, whilst admitting they have substantial challenges ahead.

“Europe is interesting because it has plenty of automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that can provide long-term bankable offtake agreements for projects, which can help them get financing,” Herman tells Energy-Storage.news.

“The European market also benefits from proximity to reliable power sources, good transportation systems, skilled labour pools and strong public backing for these projects, including through various subsidies through funds.”

OEMs driving gigafactory investment

Backing from automotive OEMs is the cornerstone of these projects. Some energy storage systems (ESS) integrators have moved to secure offtake from future gigafactories in Europe – Fluence from Northvolt, Powin from Freyr, and Nidec from Verkor, for example – but these aren’t enough to build a business case.

“Given the capex involved in a gigafactory project, you cannot build a gigafactory based only an offtake from an energy storage company,” says Herman.

“Instead, projects are having a main anchor OEM for the bulk of its capacity and then contracting with others (which could be an energy storage company) for the excess. BESS in Europe is still fairly underdeveloped relative to the UK. Financing will be done on the basis of automotive OEM offtakes.”

One interesting counter-example was the apparent intention of the buyer of failed UK gigafactory firm Britishvolt to pivot away from the automotive sector to making batteries for ESS, and a McKinsey partner discussed the pros and cons of this approach with Energy-Storage.news at the time (March 2023, Premium access).

This wasn’t specifically mentioned by Herman, but another point to consider alongside the potentially lower size of an ESS companies offtake is their generally relatively lower bankability rating compared to automotive OEMs, which are much larger.

Even assuming a developer has the necessary bankable offtake partners, there are significant challenges around the financing process itself, securing the necessary raw materials and the obvious question of competitiveness of their battery products once they do enter the market.

Competitiveness with the US and China

The biggest question is whether lithium-ion batteries produced in Europe will be competitive in the European and global markets, given the US is paying producers US$35 per kWh produced as a tax credit, while production in China is already cheaper.

Automotive OEMs in Europe are driving gigafactories’ business case in Europe through long-term offtake agreements and, Herman explains, they are making the bet that, although EU-made batteries might be more expensive, eventually the premium that cars made using them can garner will offset that.

“There are a lot of subsidies into gigafactory projects which will help,” says Herman. “OEMs are also betting that, at some point, environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria will become a criteria for applying premiums to specific cars, and so cars produced with European batteries become competitive compared to Chinese cars.”

“But for now, it’s true that this market is being built as we speak. OEMs have to play on two levels. They are entering into contracts with established battery makers in China and South Korea for their current models while also investing with a long-term view in battery production in Europe or through partnerships or offtake agreements.”

Energy-Storage.news asked Herman if the business case for gigafactories in Europe is now less strong than two years ago, to which he says: “The gigafactory business case has struggled, but these projects take time to develop. The business case continues to evolve but, at some point, it needs to be set in stone and that’s a difficulty.”

“Its been wagered that the gigafactory projects currently in development will come online quickly enough. The construction schedules are very tight. Lithium-ion is the tech being used right now and OEMs have been designing their cars around this tech.”

Financial and material challenges

The other big challenge is intimately tied to the above market dynamics and is the fact that OEMs, by backing these projects, are finding themselves in unfamiliar territory by doing so.

“One of the biggest challenges is the financing. Lenders are keen to ensure the gigafactory company can benefit from a bankable long-term offtake agreement with the OEM. This can create a disconnect, as OEMs are not used to the extensive bankability requirements in the project financing space,” Herman says.

“When negotiating the offtake agreements, banks and investors may consequently have contrasting views and priorities to the OEMs. The challenge becomes reaching an agreement that works for both sides.”

There are also challenges around securing raw materials for lithium-ion production such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite. As is the case in project financing, Paul Morton, another partner at HSF, explains that this a new space for automotive OEMs.

“Securing access to key raw materials is the challenge for gigafactory projects but also the OEMs,” says Morton. “There security of supply challenge is compounded by the politics around where those are and who is controlling them. Both production and processing is often controlled by a small number of countries, particularly China.”

“OEMs are looking at increasingly complex and longer-term offtake agreements to secure those volumes, and investment structures that these types of companies have not historically been involved in.”

On top of that, Morton notes that a “constellation” of stakeholder pressure around sustainability and ESG has arisen in the last few years.

“There is also a constellation of stakeholder pressures on sustainability, including management of human rights and environmental risks throughout the supply chain, traceability and carbon footprint for car and battery manufacturers that are having a big impact on the way they can procure minerals,” says Morton.

“Five years ago an offtake contract may have been much shorter and simpler, but now supply chain due diligence obligations (to not only identify but mitigate against environmental and human rights risks) require more complex relationships between seller and buyer. It’s a very different world to be operating in for both producers and offtakers.”

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 9th annual Energy Storage Summit EU in London, 20-21 February 2024. This year it is moving to a larger venue, bringing together Europe’s leading investors, policymakers, developers, utilities, energy buyers and service providers all in one place. Visit the official site for more info.

Continue reading