Tesla has a reputation for installing large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) worldwide to help with the transition to sustainable energy. Its most recent project is in the Canadian province of Alberta, where Tesla has installed the country’s largest BESS with the help of TD Asset Management.

The project consists of “up to 60 MW of Tesla Megapack Batteries, providing energy balancing and grid frequency regulation services that support Alberta’s growth in sustainable energy,” a press release from TD Asset Management said.

The project started in September 2020, with TD providing its initial investment to bring the first 20 MW battery storage project to the site in Alberta. It is set to be operational by December 2020. It will ultimately be managed by the TD Greystone Infrastructure Fund’s power investment platform, known as WCSB Power Holdings LP, who will construct and operate the final two 20 MW Megapacks.

Additionally, TERIC Power Limited, an Independent Power Producer that operates out of Calgary, has been given the tasks of engaging in the design and management of the Project.

Ultimately, the goal of most BESS projects is to alleviate the stress on the grid, which is usually powered by less-sustainable sources of power. According to the Canadian Energy Regulator, 91% of electricity is produced from fossil fuels in Alberta. “Approximately 43% from coal and 49% from natural gas. The remaining 8% is produced from renewables, such as wind, hydro, and biomass,” the analysis said.

In times of high energy consumption, the grid can have too much stress upon it and can cause homes or businesses to experience power outages. When this occurs, a backup is needed to keep the lights on. Usually, BESS projects are where the bottleneck is solved.

However, the adoption of sustainable energy is becoming more notable globally. In addition to the Big Battery project in South Australia, which Tesla also commissioned, the Gateway Energy Storage project is also geared toward servicing a massive market: about 80% of California and a small part of Nevada.

California’s Self-Generation Incentive Program has a history of costly, unintended consequences that reveal flaws in the program and in human behavior.

Here’s another big incentive program problem:

Much of the $612 million “equity” and “equity resiliency” incentive for low-income, vulnerable customers and critical facilities in high-risk fire threat areas or those affected by public safety power shutoffs has been used up by customers using electricity for well pumps at second-homes, according to reporting in RTO Insider.

As pv magazine has reported, the Equity Resiliency incentive level is set at $1,000/kWh, which is enough to almost completely cover the installation of a storage system. The Equity Budget incentive was raised to $850/kWh and is directed at low-income customers in disadvantaged communities, and institutions, agencies and small businesses in disadvantaged communities.

But instead, “We were seeing some second-home residents receive the hefty grants, which pay the full cost of battery storage and solar cells to charge the units,” said CPUC Commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen, quoted in the same RTO article.

“More than eight months after the decision took effect, the state’s three large investor-owned utilities haven’t started reaching out to medically vulnerable customers,” Rechtschaffen said. “Instead, developers of storage systems have targeted households with wells, regardless of income, and scooped up much of the funding that was supposed to last through 2024.”

The SGIP
The SGIP is a long-time, generous subsidy established by California’s PUC to support distributed energy resources, contribute to GHG emission reductions, demand reductions, and reduced customer electricity purchases. It provides one-time, upfront rebates for distributed energy systems on the customer’s side of the utility meter.

The lucrative program has gone through enormous changes since its creation as a peak-load reduction program after the California energy crisis in 2001. The old program was heavy on generation and had an inordinate fondness for fuel cells.

The 2020 SGIP is a different animal — it’s a stark response to California’s wildfires and Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) with 80% of its SB 700 funds devoted to energy storage, along with a marked emphasis on providing resiliency for vulnerable Californians in vulnerable locations.

Panasonic and Service Finance Co. have unveiled PowerOn, a new home energy storage financing program exclusively for Panasonic EverVolt certified installers that enables them to offer 100% financing to homeowners who buy a complete energy storage system including EverVolt battery storage and Panasonic brand solar modules.

The PowerOn program offers affordable payments for homeowners and speedy payment to installers. Homeowners will be able to use any federal tax credits and local incentives to lower their payments and pay down loans faster through refinancing. All promotional loans offered through the PowerOn program include competitive finance terms.

“The interest in energy storage systems has never been higher,” says Mukesh Sethi, director of solar and energy storage at Panasonic Life Solutions Company of America. “One of the key missing ingredients has been nationwide energy storage financing that is easy to access and affordable for homeowners. With PowerOn, any Panasonic EverVolt certified installer can increase sales by selling turnkey energy storage systems with a low monthly payment.”

The PowerOn program provides multiple, flexible, no-money-down financing options to enrolled Panasonic EverVolt certified installers that they can offer to homeowners, including:

• Transparent pricing – no hidden fees
• No interest/no payment options, up to 18 months
• Short- and long-term, low payment options
• Combination solar/energy storage financing
• Competitive annual percentage rates

Service Finance Co. has an easy to use dealer portal, online application and mobile app, which offers rapid four-click customer approvals and high approval rates.

Our talk with Guido Dalessi, CEO and one of Elestor‘s early investors, is squeezed in between two important performances. At an online conference in London, he tells the world about the importance of flow batteries for energy storage. Half a day later, there is a similar request from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. Energy storage is hot, that much is clear. “Everyone is now aware that the energy transition will never succeed without the option of storage,” says Dalessi. “Now it’s high time for the government to prepare the market for this development.”

From all the different active materials that could theoretically be used to design a flow battery, Elestor selected hydrogen and bromine. This leads to a number of advantages, says Dalessi: “The choice of hydrogen and bromine is purely motivated by Elestor’s mission to build a storage system with the lowest possible storage costs per kWh. Hydrogen and bromine are available in abundance worldwide. Delivery can, therefore, not be dominated by a small group of suppliers – unlike lithium, cobalt, and vanadium.”

The company, which is located at Industriepark Kleefse Waard in Arnhem, now employs 24 people of eight different nationalities. They are mainly scientists and engineers from the chemical and mechanical engineering fields. For its efforts, the company has already received many awards, such as last year’s Pearl Award. Dalessi looks back on it with great pleasure. “It’s not that you can directly measure what such an award does to your company, but this award is especially dear to me because it didn’t need to be preceded by a pitch or anything like that. It came entirely from The Economic Board’s appreciation of us, not influenced by the pitching qualities of someone from Elestor.”

But it doesn’t stop at eternal fame, there was also appreciation in terms of money. Last year, Koolen Industries (from owner Kees Koolen, former CEO of booking.com and early investor in Uber) joined EIT InnoEnergy, Enfuro, and Dalessi BV as investors. Since then, the company got the space to expand the team and build the first systems on a real scale. A few of these are still in the pipeline before entering the commercialization phase.

Does that mean that the step to the market is getting closer?

“Market interest has actually been there from the start, and it’s only growing. We are now talking to a few large companies and expect to be able to close a major deal soon. But before that happens, we will have to prove that our systems are stable. That requires testing, a lot of testing. After all, you don’t know what you’ve built until the endurance tests have been completed. The first 6 of 22 test stations to be built run 24/7 to test the lifespan of 10 to 15,000 cycles and all kinds of other properties. With this, we test the heart of the system, the membrane stacks. We invested heavily in these test facilities in 2020, because only in this way do we know what we really built and can we give the market performance guarantees. The tests also speed up the optimization process.”

Fluence, a leading integrator of large-scale energy storage systems, has acquired grid software startup AMS.

The deal hands an exit to AMS investors, including former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who bought into the startup’s early vision of turning commercial buildings into flexible grid assets. After winning pivotal utility contracts in California, AMS ran up against the capital constraints of managing a multi-year infrastructure buildout as a venture-backed company. In 2017, it pivoted to software to dispatch grid assets more profitably in competitive markets.

That’s the expertise Fluence bought. The joint venture between AES and Siemens already provides software to its battery customers to govern system safety and performance, and to dispatch according to market rules and interconnection constraints. But the AI-backed real-time trading algorithm AMS built will help Fluence customers make more money on their projects, said Fluence CTO Brett Galura.

“Energy storage is really the first truly dispatchable digital asset on the electric grid,” Galura said in an interview Wednesday. “We knew that the best way to continue to add value would be to continue to add more digital capabilities.”

That alignment echoes a partnership from 2019, when integrator NEC Energy Solutions teamed up with AMS competitor Stem to offer wholesale market assistance to storage customers. But those companies did not merge, and NEC ES recently decided to stop pursuing new business.

The goal of these pairings is to make battery plants, and clean energy plants more broadly, more profitable and efficient in power markets, thereby hastening the acceleration of a lower carbon power grid.

A battery software start-up company spun out of one of the largest research groups for energy storage at RWTH Aachen University in Germany recently secured €2.3 million in seed funding to commercialise and expand a platform that aims to take a lot of the “hassle” out of operating energy storage systems.

Dr Kai-Philipp Kairies, a battery scientist and former research programme leader and technical consulting department head at the industry-focused university, is now CEO of ACCURE. The company uses both laboratory and operational data to determine and forecast the health of batteries, allowing customers to analyse and monitor the best ways to use those assets and to gain transparency on how long they will last in the field under a range of usage parameters.

Dr Kairies spoke to us for our recent tech deep dive into Tesla’s Battery Day and we also took the opportunity to learn more about ACCURE and what it aims to do. From working at the heart of the University at Aachen’s “amazing battery technology ecosystem,” Kairies and his colleagues realised that mobility and energy companies and grid operators alike were “all facing very similar challenges, based on the fact that batteries are pretty complex”.

ACCURE manages more than 200,000 battery modules out in the field, including residential storage for one of Germany’s major providers, E3DC, utility-scale storage systems and electromobility: not just electric cars and their chargers, but also electric ships too.

What are some of the key challenges that you said your customers are facing, based on the “complexity” of batteries and their operation?

Designing an energy storage system is a very lengthy and difficult process and then operating it the right way – that would be manageable, but most system integrators have at least two, three, or four suppliers of battery modules.