ESS targets expansion in Europe and beyond

US-headquartered iron flow battery storage company ESS intends to establish a commercial foothold in Europe, and as Batteries International went to press in Asia too. John Shepherd reports.

Oregon iron flow battery energy storage company ESS believes there is no better time to be staking a claim to emerging business opportunities in Europe.

Just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, ESS announced on March 16 it was expanding its operations into Europe, to meet what it saw as strong demand for long duration energy storage.

ESS’ Europe director Alan Greenshields, whose appointment was announced as part of the expansion, is clear-eyed about the challenges in raising the profile and sales of flow batteries, but insists that all the signs are encouraging.

“Why, if flow batteries are such a good idea, is their market share currently about zero?” he says.

“It’s because it’s really not featured and people say lithium is the only thing that’s going to work because it’s proven in getting way down the cost curve.”

But as Greenshields says, it’s only been 15 years or so ago that lithium was getting the “it will never work and never be cheap enough” treatment.

In terms of flow batteries, he says the need has been recognized for a long time, but “like all things in this sector, there are only three things that matter: cost, cost and cost”.

Greenshields, who stepped down from the chairmanship of Innolith in 2020 and has held several boardlevel positions at battery technology companies, says he was previously a flow batteries sceptic, “because the numbers didn’t make any sense to me, particularly when you consider the fact that vanadium is expensive”.

But he says he saw the light after becoming convinced with what ESS was doing because the company was founded by people who “came out of the vanadium flow space to find a cheaper solution.”

ESS was founded in 2011 and formed a lab-scale battery before being awarded funding in 2012 by the US Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-e) to develop its iron, salt and water-based systems.

The company launched its ‘Energy Warehouse’ product line in 2017 followed by its next generation ‘Energy Center’ in 2021, which ESS says can be configured in different power capacities, starting at 3MW, with energy durations ranging from six to 16 hours.

Greenshields says that in addition to being “at least 10 times cheaper” than many other materials, the specific iron compound used, ferric chloride, has a low toxicity and environmental footprint “as well as being cheap”.

“We dissolve ferric chloride in water. This means the electrolyte is in a pH range where it’s not an aggressive material. Then, if you want to build a cost optimized battery, you don’t want to have to use Teflon material and stainless steel and that’s also a feature of the ESS system — the electrolyte is so benign you can build the system out of standard materials.

“Then ESS figured out the things going on in the battery that were inhibiting cycle life and came up with a unique technical and solid fix for it.”

That fix is a device ESS called the

THE ENERGY COMMUNITY MODEL RESURGES

Greenshields says there will be a move away from a centralized grid model for distributing power — microgrids will form around renewable generation and energy storage hubs. This will happen at an industrial level as well as a community one. “We’ll see companies saying they will install their own battery and solar but might also buy a wind farm nearby and use this under normal circumstances to minimize their energy imports and shelter costs from volatility in the market,” he says.

The energy community model could serve small towns well, with residents drawing power from battery systems charged up by renewables such as from nearby windfarms, rather than electricity generated from windfarms being sent directly to the grid and sent back out for use in communities at “massively elevated prices”, Greenshields says.

The model poses political rather than technical difficulties, he says. “For it to happen, everyone in that town or village would have to sign up to say we’re no longer buying our power from the power utility. Instead, it would become something like a cooperative. But there would have to be a legal framework otherwise you would get a percentage of people who would be worried and reluctant to do it.”

proton pump — a catalytic device that maintains the state of charge and battery health.

“We now have a system for flow batteries where the mathematics start to work, because the electrolyte has a marginal cost of only $20 per kWh. So you have this cost degradation curve which means if you build a 10 or 12hour battery with this technology, the electrolyte cost is tiny,” Greenshields claims.

He bats away questions about the potential cost of replacing other key equipment, such as pumps. “Unlike batteries, if a pump fails it’s a $100 dollar item that can be quickly changed, and that’s how everything in conventional power stations works. Components can be replaced.”

Greenshields says ESS offers an extended warranty for the first 10 years that includes not just this kind of maintenance, but also a performance guarantee underwritten by German multinational insurance specialist Munich Re.

ESS commissioned an automated (but not fully automated) assembly facility in Wilsonville, Oregon in 2021, where Greenshields says standard industrial robots are manufacturing plastic and metal parts, without the need for dry rooms, clean rooms, coating machines and large capital expenditure numbers required for lithium.

Wilsonville will have expanded capacity by eight times by the end of this year — which Greenshields says will be the “blueprint for production” the company intends to establish in Australia next year, followed by similar production operations in Europe.

ESS commissioned a 50kW/400kWh Energy Warehouse system at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego in 2019. The flow battery is integrated into a microgrid with a CleanSpark microgrid controller and provides up to eight hours of storage to enable back-up capabilities for critical loads.

In August 2021, ESS announced its Energy Warehouse had been selected to be integrated with a solar system to provide backup power to a data destruction company in Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, 17 of the company’s Energy Warehouse systems, with a combined capacity of 8.5MWh, are to be deployed to support a solar farm in Spain under an agreement with Enel Green Power.

Greenshields believes Europe is “now at the forefront” of where energy storage projects will be ramped up. He is also convinced that ESS’ flow battery technology will be part of that push.

“The US has been making steady progress on storage in places like California, but Europe now has to move at lightning speed. There was always a higher political commitment for storage and renewables here, but slower response times in terms of getting all EU states to agree on a project.”

But if there has been inertia in the political energy required to commit to powering the Europe of the future, it has been swept away by what has taken place in Ukraine, Greenshields says.

“Long duration energy storage is now back on the agenda and we have the breakthrough the world has been looking for in batteries.”

According to ESS, Europe is expected to require up to 20TWh of longduration energy storage if it is to meet UN climate change goals of Grid NetZero by 2040. “You’ll see most storage shifting to 12 hours and you’ll see a growth in corporate microgrids,” he says.

Greenshields says that in the light of Europe’s power supply concerns, energy generation and storage is now being recalculated in how many cubic metres of natural gas will this displace. “Solar and storage is a great displacement for natural gas,” he says.

“Following on from the debate about carbon, it’s been turbocharged by the political reality that Russia has started turning the gas off.”

Now countries just want to “put their heads down and get things done in a move to wind and solar with storage.”

Greenshields reckons that there is room for other technologies, such as green hydrogen. “You have lithium for short duration, long duration storage from ESS in the middle for intra-day and green hydrogen as the carbon free replacement for natural gas for strategic safety reserves.

His view is that those who want to use green hydrogen will nevertheless still need batteries but overall “we are now in an emerging but potentially massive market for batteries.

“ESS fulfils the original aspirations of flow batteries and the reason is simply cheap electrolyte. Cheap to produce and cheap to handle.

“Long duration energy storage is the answer to how we are going to get our grids to net zero.”

“Long duration energy storage is the answer to how we are going to get our grids to net zero.”

Alan Greenshields, Europe director, ESS

ESS MOVES INTO ASIA-PACIFIC TOO …

ESS announced on August 11 a strategic partnership with Energy Storage Industries Asia Pacific to distribute and manufacture iron flow batteries utilizing ESS technology in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania to meet demand for long-duration energy storage in the region.

Under the terms of the agreement, ESS will initially supply 70 complete 75kW/500kWh Energy Warehouse systems to Energy Storage Industries in 2022 and 2023.

Concurrently, ESI will construct a manufacturing facility in Queensland, Australia, equipped to conduct final assembly of ESS systems from 2024 onward. Systems manufactured at the Queensland facility will utilize “core component kits” supplied by ESS including battery modules, proton pumps, and other unique components.

Core component kits will continue to be manufactured in Wilsonville, Oregon. The ESI manufacturing facility is designed to reach a production capacity of up to 400MW of energy storage annually.