Morrow signs deal for Norway battery plant shipments

Morrow Batteries has signed a logistics services agreement with Rhenus Norway for delivery of production equipment for its Norwegian battery cell factory, marking the starting point for Morrow’s operations through the deep water port of Eydehavn in Arendal, the company announced on January 11.

Lars Christian Bacher, who took over as CEO of Morrow on December 1, said the agreement includes the establishment of a new logistics hub.

“We are teaming up with an innovative and flexible agent. Rhenus Norway has developed a solution combining sea freight, integrated European locations han- dling and last-mile services in Arendal, tailored for this highly demanding logistics project,” Bacher said.

Norwegian prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre laid the cornerstone of Morrow Battery’s battery cells gigafactory on the country’s south coast in a ceremony last September.

Støre said Battery Factory

1, under construction in Arendal, was essential to his government efforts to make Norway an “attractive host country for sustainable and profitable activity along the entire battery value chain”.

Morrow has teamed up with Siva — the Industrial Development Corporation of Norway — in establishing a joint company to build the 30,000m2 plant in four phases with construction company Veidekke, at a cost of NOK400 million ($38 million).

Energy Vault in potential 700MWh

‘green hydrogen’ long duration BESS

Energy Vault Holdings is working with US utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) on plans to build a battery plus ‘green hydrogen’ long-duration energy storage system (BH-ESS) that will have a minimum capacity of 293MWh, the partners announced on January 5.

The system’s capacity could eventually be expanded to 700MWh.

The move comes after Energy Vault chairman and CEO Robert Piconi said in a third-quarter earnings update on November 14 that the introduction of green hydrogen into its technology portfolio “further validates our technical differentiation with our energy management software platform and the market for hybrid short and long duration integrated systems”.

Piconi said the company was positioning itself as the only energy storage company offering “a hardware agnostic portfolio of both short and long duration storage solutions, bringing innovative gravity, green hydrogen and hybrid solutions to the market for the first time”.

The system for PG&E, if given the go-ahead by the California Public Utili- ties Commission, would be owned, operated and maintained by Energy Vault on a one-acre site. It would be the first project of its kind and the largest utility-scale green hydrogen project in the US, the company said.

BH-ESS includes a hydrogen fuel cell powered by electrolytic hydrogen derived from renewable energy sources. Green hydrogen, also called renewable hydrogen, is produced through the electrolysis of water. The process is powered entirely by renewable energy.

The system will replace mobile diesel generators typically used by PG&E during broader grid outages to maintain its microgrid serving downtown and the surrounding area of the Northern California City of Calistoga.

Construction is to begin in the fourth quarter of 2023 with commercial operation by the end of second quarter of 2024.

Regional P&G VP Ron Richardson said: “This breakthrough collaboration provides a template for future, renewable community-scale microgrids that successfully integrate thirdparty distributed energy resources, which is expected to cost customers less than the benchmark set by state regulators based on the alternative use of mobile diesel generators.”

Last May, Energy Vault said it had broken ground on its first gravity-based energy storage system in China.