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ENERGY STORAGE NEWS
Bill Gates-funded aqueous air battery start-up attracts another $70m
Form Energy, the US startup that previously received funding from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures organization, confirmed to Reuters on November 12 that it has received another $70 million to develop its stationary aqueous flow batteries — which it says dispatch power for days, not hours.
While remaining secretive about the investors in this latest funding — details of which the company says will be forthcoming — the firm did release a Solving the Clean Energy and Climate Justice Puzzle report in July 2020. In this it laid out how its aqueous-air technology could cost effectively replace nearly all fossil-fuelled peaker plants in New York State. It said the technology would enable the city of New York to meet its goal of carbon-free electricity by 2040.
Although giving no details of its chemistry other than describing it as ‘aqueous-air electrochemical energy storage’, Form Energy’s modelling said that where capex on lithium-ion storage is between $85 and $95/kWh, its technology would be between $3.75 and $4.
It says where lithium-ion has the duration of more than an hour, its long-duration storage would provide up to 200.
In May 2020, Form Energy announced a pilot with Great River Energy, a utility in Minnesota, to deploy its first 1MW commercial installation with duration of 150MWh.
“The electrical grid is increasingly supplied by renewable sources of energy,” said Great River vice president Jon Brekke. “Commercially viable long-duration storage could increase reliability by ensuring that the power generated by renewable energy is available at all hours to serve our membership.
Lithium battery recycler closes undisclosed funding to develop and expand internationally
Li-Cycle, the Canadian lithium-ion battery recycling company, has closed a series C equity funding round to develop its New York commercial hub and move into international markets, the firm said on November 18.
Details of the financing were not given other than to say Moore Strategic Ventures, the Delaware, US asset management firm, had led the round.
“This is a market that requires significant development — specifically when it comes to handling the incoming tsunami of spent lithium-ion batteries,” said CEO Ajay Kochbar.
Kochbar is not wrong. The problems with recycling lithium batteries from both a technical and cost perspective are well known.
In its Green Chemistry 2020, No. 22 Critical Review, the Royal Society of Chemistry says that lithium batteries should be designed with recycling in mind.
The review talks about lead batteries, which have ‘a simple design, a low-cost recycling process, a structured collection programme and a significant environmental impact if not recycled’.
“Achieving the same for lithium-ion batteries is difficult, due to the more complex cell design and cell chemistry. The lack of any standardization of cells and
Highview breaks ground in UK plans to work on giga-scale cryogenic storage in Chile
Cryogenic energy storage developer Highview Power said on November 6 it had broken ground on its 250MWh CRYOBattery installation in Manchester, UK, the company’s first commercial system.
The project won a £10 million ($12.5 million) hand-out from the UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy’s ‘Storage at Scale’ competition, and is being installed at a decommissioned thermal power station.
In October it said it had agreed to work with Chilean power generator Energia Latina SA (Enlasa) to develop giga-scale energy storage systems in Chile, which would be equal to nuclear and thermal power in terms of performance.
Highview’s system is called the CRYOBattery. It uses insulated, lowpressure vessels to store cooled liquid air which, when exposed to ambient temperatures, re-gasifies rapidly and expands 700fold in volume, driving a turbine and generating electricity.
Highview claims it can provide four hours to four weeks of energy and its systems have a life span of more than 30 years.
“Chile has one of the best solar irradiations in the world and the deployment of solar power together with the national decarbonization strategy require longduration energy storage to provide the needed energy balance to achieve a sustainable grid,” says Highview. the predominance of cells from small portable devices means that initial recycling approaches will be more similar to solid municipal waste, producing streams of lower purity,” the review says, and calls for more homogenization within the industry to address some of these problems.
According to a recent study by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the Boston Consulting Group, the world’s economy is only 8.6% circular — a far cry from politicians’ projections.
“Without sustainable and economically viable lithium battery recycling, we believe it’s likely that electric vehicle proliferation will be substantially hindered,” says Kochbar.
Li-Cycle says its ‘spoke and hub’ technology, which does not use a smelting process, is a low-cost, environmentally safe process that can recycle all types of lithium-ion batteries with a recovery rate of up 95% of all materials.
The resulting supply of materials was critical for the burgeoning battery sector, said Moore Strategic Ventures’ senior managing director James McIntyre.
Australia to get second mega battery from Tesla and Neoen
Neoen, the French renewable energy provider, and carmaker Tesla agreed on November 5 to install a second mega battery in Australia. This will be more than twice the size of the Hornsdale Power Reserve, which they installed two years ago in South Australia and expanded by 50% this September to 150MW/214.5MWh.
The ‘Victorian Big Battery’, near Melbourne in the state of Victoria, will have a power output of 300MW and a storage capacity of 450MWh.
Energy company AusNet Services is also working on the design of the battery, which should be operating by the end of 2021.
These batteries could seem small fry when compared with plans by New South Wales, whose state government has just published its Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap. In this it pledges to deliver 12GW of transmission capacity by 2030, supported by storage.
“The roadmap continues our commitment to developing renewable energy zones, though the establishment of a transmission development scheme,” says the government’s plan.
“The scheme and the three renewable energy zones will also be supported by an electricity infrastructure investment safeguard, providing support for private investment in new generation, long-duration storage and firming projects, including pumped hydro energy storage.”
With the Hornsdale plant reportedly saving customers around A$14 million ($10 million) in 2019, the news will be welcome to Australians, who have to pay some of the highest bills for their power in the world.
Bushveld deploys VRFB battery to power 10% of vanadium mining work
A solar-plus-vanadium battery storage system will provide up to 10% of the energy requirements of a vanadium mine and processing plant in South Africa, developer Bushveld Minerals announced in an update on November 11.
The VRFB, which is being supplied by the Austrian company Enerox, will be part of a microgrid at the Vametco Alloys mine, which Bushveld says produces around 3,000 tonnes a year. The roughly 25 tonnes of the vanadium oxide required for the battery will be supplied by the mine.
The Vametco plant, in the North West Province of South Africa, is owned by Bushveld, which has hired technology firm Abengoa to put an energy management system in place to control the microgrid.
“This project is part of Bushveld’s strategy to demonstrate both the superior technical merits of long duration VRFB systems when paired with renewable energy, while providing a commercial return to the company’s shareholders,” said Bushveld.
“It will also use locally mined and beneficiated vanadium, showing how VRFB energy solutions can create more local value to South Africa than any other
A consortium led by energy firm Envision has been awarded a research grant by the island’s Energy Market Authority and Keppel Offshore & Marine Digital to deploy the first floating energy storage system for Singapore, the EMA said on October 26.
The 7.5MW/7.5MWh ‘floating living lab’ will have enough capacity to power more than 600 four-room apartments and if successful it could be replicated across Singapore, the EMA said.
“Besides supporting Singapore’s energy needs, the developed solution will have multiple applications such as supporting areas with intermittent power supply, and rapid deployment to provide emergency power for places or remote islands affected by power disruptions,” said Chris Ong, CEO of Keppel O&M.
“It can also be deployed on hybrid or fully electric vessels to significantly reduce carbon emissions.”
The $10 million grant will be used to pay for a battery stacking technology, which is the first of its kind in the island nation, reducing the physical size of the footprint required by up to 40%, the EMA said. “This project will pave the way to overcome our land constraints, and set the blueprint for similar deployments in the future,” said EMA chief executive Shih Chun Ngiam.
“We hope to continue co-creating more of such energy solutions with the industry as we work towards a more sustainable energy future for Singapore.”
“As Singapore’s hot and humid environment can affect the performance of the ESS, the testbed will use an innovative liquid-cooling solution that uses seawater to cool the battery cells and enhance the lifecycle of the ESS,” said the EMA.
The deployment is scheduled to be operational in 2023. storage technology.
“The hybrid mini-grid project will supply just under 10% of Vametco’s electrical energy consumption at any one time and will demonstrate the technical and commercial capability of hybrid mini-grids using solar PV and VRFB technology. Technically, the system will be able to operate independently or jointly, either as standalone systems or as a fully functional mini-grid installation.”
“The project demonstrates the commercial viability of solar plus VRFB storage solutions for commercial and industrial scale applications,” said Bushveld Minerals CEO Fortune Mojapelo.
“This is occurring at a time when stationary storage deployments are gathering momentum and when in South Africa the government is making concerted efforts to lower regulatory hurdles for self-generation for commercial and industrial applications.
Some estimates predict the market for VRFBs will reach $4.8 billion by 2027, which would show a CAGR of 54% between 2020 and 2027.
US DoE releases storage roadmap alongside Act that pledges $1bn
The US Department of Energy set out its goals for energy storage with a strategy outlined in its ‘Energy Storage Grand Challenge Roadmap’ (ESGCR), released on December 21, alongside a storage Act that pledges $1 billion for the sector.
The ESGCR is a follow-up to the Grand Challenge announced in January 2020, which ‘seeks to create and sustain American leadership in energy storage’, and emphasizes the need to develop domestic manufacturing and supply chains.
“The roadmap includes an aggressive but achievable goal: to develop and domestically manufacture energy storage technologies that can meet all US market demands by 2030,” the DoE says.
“The roadmap’s approach includes accelerating the transition of technologies from the lab to the marketplace, focusing on ways to competitively manufacture technologies at scale in the US, and ensuring secure supply chains to enable domestic manufacturing.”
The strategy is based on three concepts: ‘Innovate Here, Make Here and Deploy Everywhere’, and among its ambitions are to level the cost of storage for long-duration stationary storage applications to $0.05/kWh, a 90% reduction from 2020 to 2030.
It also aims to reach $80/ kWh for battery packs by 2030 for a 300-mile EV, which would be 44% less than the current cost of $143/kWh.
The 155-page ESGCR groups storage technologies into three focus areas: bidirectional electoral storage (stationary and mobile); chemical and thermal storage; and flexible generation and controllable loads.
It also identifies five ‘tracks’ to drive advances in R&D under the headings Technology Development, Manufacturing and Supply Chain, Technology Transition, Policy and Valuation and Workforce Development.
Separately, the US Congress in December passed a law authorizing $1 billion to be spent over five years on R&D and demonstrations in energy storage technology.
The Better Energy Storage Act establishes a research programme for grid-scale energy storage systems among other purposes.
As well as setting out targets for storage duration, recycling, storage in rural areas and improving grid reliability, the act will ‘support research and development of advanced manufacturing technologies that have the potential to improve the US competitiveness in energy storage manufacturing’.
CAISO approves second hybrid resource model to fill transmission system shortfalls
CAISO — California Independent System Operators — approved a proposal formally suggested on November 12 and passed a week later that would allow hybrid storage resources to provide energy and ancillary services to the network. The aim is to contribute to transmission system reliability given that CAISO anticipates a potential shortfall of capacity to meet system net load peaks over the next few years. This is because of the decommissioning and retiring of the natural gas generation plants.
“To address this shortfall, storage resource developers have submitted a significant number of interconnection requests and are moving quickly to fill the 3,300MW procurement mandate from the California Public Utilities Commission prior to 2023,” says Mark Rothleder, chief operating officer.
“To meet this need, the ISO anticipates a significant amount of new storage generation capacity in California alone in 2020,
World’s largest battery officially begins operations at Moss Landing, California
If it’s the biggest on the planet, it’s got to be Texan! Texas-based energy firm Vistra on January 6 said it had switched on the largest lithium-ion battery storage facility in the world, the Moss Landing facility in Monterey County, California.
The 300MW/1,200MWh system is not even up to capacity yet, with a further 100MW/400MWh due to be added by August 2021 in Phase 2 — and if required, ultimately it has the potential to be stepped up to 1,500MW/6,000MWh.
The system, developed in cooperation with the utility Pacific Gas and Electric Company, has been installed at the existing Moss Landing power plant. It uses existing transmission lines to improve grid stability and fill the ‘reliability gap’ created by intermittent renewables, Vistra CEO Curt Morgan said.
“A battery system of this size and scale has never been built before,” he said.
Now in Phase 1, the battery system can power around 225,000 homes at peak electricity periods, using stored excess electricity from the grid generated during peak solar output hours. 2021 and 2022.” Under the hybrid resources initiative, ISO management says it has developed two market models for generation with different technology types located behind the same interconnection.
The first option is the ‘colocated’ resources model and was approved by the ISO board in July. Under this model the resources behind the interconnection have separate resource IDs and are separately dispatched through the ISO market even though they may have a shared commercial interest.
The second option, which the ISO has just approved, is a model for hybrid resources, where the generation resources are modelled under a single resource ID.
“The hybrid model allows for the underlying resources to be managed by the resource operator as opposed to the ISO,” says Rothleder.
UK to install one of the world’s biggest batteries
InterGen, the Scotlandbased energy company, announced on November 30 that it had been given the green light by the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to install a 320MW/640MWh battery on the Thames Estuary in Essex, southeast England.
It will have the potential to expand to 1.3GWh and while it could power up to 300,000 homes for two hours when fully charged, its main function will be to provide grid stabilizing services, InterGen said.
This will dwarf the UK’s largest battery to date, a 50MW/75MWh battery in South Yorkshire owned by Gresham House Energy Storage Fund.
In July, BEIS removed the obligation to seek government approval for battery installations larger than 50MW, and at more than six times that size, the InterGen battery is taking advantage of the simpler procedure.
It is also staying under the upper limit, which was set at 350MW.
UK prime minister Boris Johnson in November revealed a ‘Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution’, and although grid-scale battery storage was not mentioned specifically, point 7 said buildings should be made more energy efficient.
Point 1 says the number of offshore wind turbines should be quadrupled to power every home, and because wind and solar sources of power result in a more unstable grid, this presents further opportunities for gridscale battery storage.
The nearest comparable is the Tesla and Neoen’s battery in South Australia, the Hornsdale battery, which is 100MW/129MWh. The two firms agreed in November to work on a second battery in the state of Victoria that will be 300MW/450MWh, thus three times larger than Hornsdale.
Fluence snaps up advanced Microgrid Systems
Energy storage technology firm Fluence said on October 15 it had bought Advanced Microgrid Systems, the digital intelligence platform that provides optimized bidding software for utility-scale storage and generation applications.
The purchase is being hailed as a combination that will help utilities and developers optimize their storage assets to make more money, improve grid reliability and efficiency and drive the move towards more sustainable, resilient power systems.
The deal comes a year after the two companies struck up a partnership.
“This acquisition provides customers with data-driven insights that maximize the value and performance of generation and storage assets to make the entire grid smarter,” said Brett Galura, chief technology officer with Fluence. “AMS and Fluence’s technologies together will act as a force multiplier, maximizing asset value by combining Fluence’s deep experience operating batteries in the field with AMS’s ability to optimize market participation,” said Fluence.
Fluence, which is owned by Siemens and AES, operates more than 2.4GW of energy projects worldwide.
SER Capital snaps up three battery projects in Texas
LG Chem will supply the batteries for three storage projects in Texas that have been bought by private equity firm SER Capital Partners, the investment firm said on October 22.
Details of where the storage projects will be located were not divulged, other than describing them as ‘near renewable wind projects whose output is frequently congested’. In total they will supply 30MW of power, SER said.
First utility-scale ESS installed in Singapore by Wärtsilä
Singapore’s Energy Market Authority has agreed to install the country’s first 2.4MW/2.4MWh utilityscale ESS by the Finnish energy firm Wärtsilä, working with Asian utility SP Group, it said on October 22.
The move is another step towards Singapore’s goal to install 200MW of energy storage from 2025.
The system will be used in the wholesale electricity market to mitigate intermittent power from solar-generated sources, and it will also reduce peak demand.
As a testbed, the system will be able to evaluate the operating circumstances in a climate as hot and humid as Singapore’s.
“We expect this first battery system in Singapore to enhance grid stability by providing the quick response and flexibility needed when integrating solar power into the grid,” said Frank Phuan, CEO of Sunseap, a local solar energy firm also working on the installation.
Harmony Energy agrees second battery project with FRV in the UK
UK developer Harmony Energy is to begin a second battery storage project in the UK with Spanish renewable energy firm Fotowatio Renewable Ventures (FRV).
It is also the second time it will use Tesla Megapack lithium batteries and the carmaker’s Autobidder AI software to trade and control its performance.
The new Contego project began before Christmas in West Sussex, and once completed next year will be one of the largest battery storage plants in the UK, at 34MW/68MWh.
It will be connected to the UK Power Networks distribution network, adding the capability to store energy from renewable sources as the UK, along with much of the world, tries to shift away from fossil fuel sources of energy.
Contego is much larger than the first project installed by the two firms, which is in Dorset and has a capacity of 15MWh.
The UK is keen to increase its battery storage capacity, and in July removed planning barriers to batteries of more than 50MW in power.
The UK National Grid estimates that by the end of 2025, battery storage capacity could be up to 2.3GWh in the UK, two and a half times that recorded at the end of 2019, which was 0.88GWh.
French battery giant Saft opens ‘energy storage hub’ in China
Saft, the international battery maker, has opened
Lithium-ion battery price drops to lowest ever in 2020
The price of lithium batteries dropped to its lowest ever in 2020, a report by BloombergNEF claimed on December 16, citing a 13% drop on 2019 figures.
For the first time, BNEF said, battery packs were selling for less than $100/ kWh for e-buses in China, although the volumeweighted average price for e-buses there was slightly higher, at $105/kWh.
The market average was $137/kWh hour in 2020, which means that over 10 years, the price per kilowatt hour has dropped by 87% in real terms from $1,100 in 2010.
In battery electric vehicles, the lower $126/ kWh pack price means that the battery portion of the total cost of a vehicle was 21%, dropping to $101/kWh by 2023, BNEF’s 2020 Battery Price Survey said.
“It is at around this price point that automakers should be able to produce and sell mass market EVs at the same price (and with the same margin) as comparable internal combustion vehicles in some markets,” said BNEF.
“This assumes no subsidies are available, but actual pricing strategies will vary by automaker and geography.”
BNEF also said that new cathode chemistries and falling manufacturing costs would drive prices down in the near term.
Calling the price drop a ‘historic milestone’, James Frith, BNEF head of energy storage research and lead author of the report, said within a few years the average price in the industry as a whole would pass this point.
“What’s more, our analysis shows that even if prices for raw materials were to return to the highs seen in 2018, it would only delay average prices reaching $100/kWh by two years — rather than completely derailing the industry,” he said.
“The industry is becoming increasingly resilient to changing raw material prices, with leading battery manufacturers moving up the value chain and investing in cathode production or even mines.”
an energy storage hub in Zhuhai, China, which means its energy storage systems are now made on three continents — Europe, the US and Asia — it said on November 10.
The hubs do not simply make batteries; in line with the other two, in Bordeaux, France, and Jacksonville, US, the Zhuhai plant will offer ‘an integrated approach to energy storage’, with every step of the process taken care of from initial concept to delivery and grid connection.
This sets the energy storage hubs apart from its battery-making facilities, which are in operation in several countries around the world.
SCE and Sunrun to promote residential batteries in bid to boost grid resilience
Southern California Edison, one of the largest electric utilities in the US, on November 19 said it had signed a contract with solar and battery storage provider Sunrun in an effort to stabilize the grid with solar-powered home batteries bundled together in a kind of virtual power plant.
Under the agreement, SCE will send signals to Sunrun during highdemand events such as extreme heat, and Sunrun will dispatch energy from thousands of home-based Brightbox solar-powered battery systems installed in the territory, boosting the overall power capacity of the grid by 5MW.
The home batteries, which Sunrun will start installing at the end of 2020 with a view to completion by August 2023, will also provide back-up to the households in which they are installed if there is a black-out. They will be paid for by those who choose to install them — with no upfront costs and what Sunrun says are low monthly payments.
SCE to bring portfolio to 2GW battery storage capacity
Southern California Edison, the second largest utility in the US, has added another 590MW of battery energy storage capacity to its portfolio ‘to further enhance the region’s electric system reliability needs’, the utility said on December 7.
All of the batteries are lithium-ion and include three utility-scale projects plus one 5MW behindthe-meter pilot system.
It brings the state’s total of storage capacity planned to come online by 2023 to more than 3GW — which will almost double its existing operational capacity of 4.3GW (according to figures from the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems).
Of that figure, just over 2GW will be battery storage, which includes the 770MW/3GWh procured by the utility in May.
“Bringing more utilityscale battery storage resources online will improve the reliability of the grid and further the integration of renewable generation resources, like wind and solar, into the grid,” said William Walsh, SCE vice president of energy procurement and management.
The new projects include a 325MW ‘Desert Peak’ project by NextEra Energy; a 200MW project named ‘Crimson’ by Recurrent Energy; a 60MW ‘Eldorado Valley’ project by 174 Power Global/ Hanwha Group; and a 5MW behind-the-meter system by Sunrun.
In its Pathway 2045 white paper, published in November 2019, SCE sets out a road map of how to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.
It emphasizes the need to decarbonize the electricity sector and electrify transport and buildings coupled with energy efficiency, as well as use low-carbon fuels to electrify applications such as industrial and heavy-duty long-range movement of goods.
“In 25 years’ time, three quarters of lightduty vehicles, two thirds of medium-duty vehicles and one third of heavyduty vehicles will need to be electric,” the white paper says. “And by 2045, almost three quarters of space and water heating will also need to be electric.”
SCE has about five million customer accounts, it says, in a 50,000 square mile (80,500 square kilometre) area.
