Powin Energy, the Oregon-based energy storage developer, is expecting to see an uptick in non-recourse financing following a landmark project this month.

The company secured construction financing for an 8.8-megawatt/40.8-megawatt-hour battery plant in Stratford, Ontario, from Brookfield Renewable Partners, one of the largest independent renewable energy businesses in the world. 

“Securing non-recourse financing is a critical step for energy storage assets themselves, as well as the broader market,” said Geoffrey Brown, Powin Energy president, in a press release. “We believe that closing a deal of this nature with a well-respected group like Brookfield is indicative of market maturation and Powin’s future prospects.”

While the non-recourse funding model is commonplace in most renewable energy markets, the track record is more limited in energy storage. Only a handful of deals have made headlines.

Last year, for example, another Ontario project based on flywheels and lithium-ion batteries and built by Convergent Energy and Power was funded through a non-recourse finance package from CJF Capital and SUSI Partners’ Energy Storage Fund I.

“The facility reflects a non-recourse, third-party project financing structure for energy storage assets in a sector dominated by on-balance-sheet financing,” noted Convergent in a press statement.

Previously, non-recourse finance had helped fund Australia’s first utility-scale integrated solar and battery project, built by Conergy with backing from Norddeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale.

And in 2015, half the money for the Jake and Elwood battery storage projects developed by Renewable Energy Systems Americas came from non-recourse senior secured project financing debt.

Brown said he thought many energy storage projects since had been difficult to fund through non-recourse debt because of the nature of their contracts.

Following the Stratford deal, though, Brown told GTM he expected non-recourse funding to become the norm for energy storage projects with clear, fixed revenue streams.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Historically, the vast majority of the world’s power has been consumed as quickly as it is made, or it’s wasted. But climate change has made governments interested in renewable energy, and renewable energy is variable—it can’t be dispatched on demand. Or can it? As research into utility-sized batteries receives more attention, the economics of adding storage to a grid or wind farm are starting to make more sense.

But grid-tied energy storage is not new; it has just always been limited to whatever resources a local power producer had at the time. Much like electricity production itself, storage schemes differ regionally. Power companies will invest in batteries that make sense on a local level, whether it is pumped storage, compressed air, or lithium-ion cells.

Looking at the kinds of storage that already exist is instructive in helping us see where storage is going to go, too. Lots of the latest battery projects merely build on engineering that has been in service for decades. To better see our way forward, we collected a number of images and diagrams of the world’s biggest energy storage schemes.

Pumped storage

Pumped storage is possibly one of the oldest forms of modern grid-tied energy storage, and it certainly packs the most punch as far as megawatt-hours delivered.

The way it traditionally works is simple: the system has a bottom reservoir of water to draw from and a top reservoir that’s topographically higher than the bottom reservoir. When there’s not a lot of demand for electricity, you use that power to “charge” the battery by pumping water up to the top reservoir. When demand for electricity is high, that reservoir can be drained via a hydroelectric generator, back down to the bottom reservoir.

In the future, Germany is looking at using old coal mines for pumped storage, and some German researchers have been working on building giant concrete spheres that can function as pumped storage containers after they’re placed on the ocean floor.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Having been subject to discussion for years within the academic sphere, energy storage projects have become a topic of high interest to energy sector focused investors in recent years.

Decreasing cost curves, changing regulatory environments within the energy markets such as deregulation and shifts away from subsidised renewables to market pricing modes, and evolving software capabilities, are increasing investor confidence in energy storage investments and result in increased demand for investment opportunities.

While this seems to be true especially for more mature renewable energy markets like Europe, the United States and several others, investors are facing the problem that energy storage projects as investments are – in most cases – discussed on a very abstract basis. Only considering the “big picture” and seeing the project as a future pillar of the energy market leaves out details such as the complexity coming with energy storage investments in practice.

In my opinion, the propensity to drastically reduce complexity by discussing energy storage as high-level topic has developed based on two major factors:

Firstly, energy storage is still a new topic in the market compared to the long history of energy generation and transmission. Hence, while accumulators and especially batteries seem to be part of consumers’ lives ever since, the discussion about energy storage as a viable part of the electricity market structure is relatively trendy and new. In addition, due to the high diversity of technology types and their evolution, economies of scale and market consolidation (as seen currently in the photovoltaic market) are not yet reached. This leads to different potentials, resulting in an ultimate mess of investment cases. Supported by the fact that storage investments are often declared as a “venture capital topic”.

Second, the high variety of different operational modes results in a high density in varying underlying business models. This depends heavily on local electricity market structures, including installed generation capacities, energy balance, share of renewables and subsidy situation.

In summary, the combining factors of a high density of different technology types and development stages as well as the high variety of different usage types have led to a situation where energy storage is often considered only as party of the big picture, thus not helping investors in getting viable information most relevant to them.

Click Here to Read Full Article

The Indian energy storage industry hopes a 28-megawatt-hour battery plant in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands will kick-start a utility-scale market that has been slow to emerge.

“This will help open up opportunities for such hybrid projects in India,” said Dr. Rahul Walawalkar, executive director of the India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA), after Indian EPC provider Mahindra Susten this month won the project tendered by state-owned coal mining company NLC India.

“With the development of a local ecosystem and skills training, we are confident that solar and storage will continue to have accelerated adoption in India in coming years,” Walawalkar said. “This should also help companies that are considering setting up manufacturing in India.”

IESA has a vision of making India a global advanced energy storage systems manufacturing hub by 2020, he said. Given India’s track record on utility-scale energy storage, the aim is ambitious, to say the least.

Prior to the Andaman and Nicobar project, the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) and NTPC, India’s largest power utility, had already launched three other utility-scale energy storage tenders in the country.

However, “all these tenders, with aggregate capacity of 35 megawatt-hours, have been scrapped without any reasons being given,” noted analyst firm Bridge to India in a blog post.

“Our view is that storage will need three [to] four years of techno-commercial advancements before finding scale in India,” wrote the organization. 

The lack of progress on utility-scale storage in one of the most important renewable energy markets in the world is due to a mix of pricing challenges and lack of technical expertise, according to Bridge to India.

Click Here to Read Full Article

While the global transition of energy systems away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy, electrification and distributed energy solutions is being increasingly accepted as inevitable, that does not mean that it is either easy or simple.

There are few regions in the United States where this is more true than in New England. While the overall region lags well below the national average in terms of solar and wind deployment, several states have pushed bold policies and are at times among the national leaders in terms of sophisticated approaches to system transformation.

Yesterday’s New England Solar and Storage Symposium by Greentech Media took a deeper look at the policy and market conditions of the region, without shying away from the very real challenges that New England faces.

Distributed solar in the crosshairs

For renewable energy, geography matters. New England has a wet climate with poor year-round solar radiation, and is one of the most densely populated regions in the United States. Both population pressures and an over-representation of affluent residents who are not used to seeing energy infrastructure has hindered land-based and even offshore wind.

And while the clouds, the density and historical settlement patterns also present challenges to large-scale PV projects, New England has excelled in deployment of distributed solar. Massachusetts and Vermont in particular boast some of the highest levels of residential and commercial installations on a per-capita basis in the United States.

This has been backed by aggressive policies, and one entire panel was dedicated to Massachusetts’ SMART program, a declining block grant incentive program designed to replace Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) and facilitate Governor Charlie Baker’s goal to deploy an additional 1.6 GW of solar on top of the 1.6 GW under the previous program.

Click Here to Read Full Article

With costs plunging, Portland General Electric Company (NYSE: POR) is prepared to pursue a lot more energy storage than the puny amount required under an Oregon mandate.

In its quarterly earnings call on Friday, the utility told analysts it will soon propose spending between $50 million and $100 million on 39 megawatts of energy storage.

Oregon legislation passed in 2015 requires PGE and Pacific Power, the state’s big investor-owned utilities, to acquire at least 5 megawatt-hours each of energy storage, with a limit of 1 percent of their 2014 peak loads.

PGE’s 2014 peak load was 3,866 megawatts, so at 39 megawatts it would be maxing out the opportunity.

How many megawatt-hours 39 megawatts translates to will depend on the nature of the proposed systems — some could provide short-term grid support services, others longer-duration energy storage.

With their costs falling rapidly, lithium-ion batteries are the dominant storage technology today, and some systems now going in can operate at full power for four hours (in other words, a 1 megawatt system can deliver 4 megawatt-hours of electricity).

PGE spokesman Steve Corson said details of the company’s plans would be made public when it files a proposal next week with the Oregon Public Utility Commission, but he outlined a wide range of possible projects.

Click Here to Read Full Article

A new housing development in suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul will use grid-interactive electric thermal water heaters to enable the Midwest’s first community energy storage project.

Country Joe Homes’ Legacy 2 development in Lakeville is building 79 homes over the next two years. Each home will have 80-gallon water heaters manufactured by Steffes Corp.

The sophisticated water heaters will allow Great River Energy (GRE) and Dakota Electric Association — the cooperative providing electricity to the development — to use them as community storage capable of integrating the state’s growing wind and solar resources.

“The water heaters behave as a battery and absorb energy, mainly at night, but they can be turned on and off in a moment’s notice,” said Gary Connett, Great River Energy’s director of member services.

“The game-changer for us is this variable generation in our future and here today. Renewables and more photovoltaics means all of a sudden we need something more dynamic than the water heater of the past,” he said. “This is where this grid-interactive water heater has benefits.”

While the utility’s current water heater program offers customers two options to charge water heaters in return for better rates on their bills, the Legacy 2 development’s water heaters allow real-time charging and energy storage, Connett said.

Water heaters can represent as much as 40 percent of a household’s energy use. Being able to nimbly control water heaters will allow Great River Energy to offer sophisticated energy services to the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, the regional grid operator.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Indian Discom (distribution company) Tata Power Delhi Distribution Limited (Tata Power-DDL) and German government-owned entity GIZ have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to work jointly on promoting rooftop solar, energy storage systems, EVs and smart grid initiatives.

The two bodies plan to research and conduct studies on these areas and organize capacity building programs jointly for channel partners, project developers, financial institutions, government departments, distribution utilities, and public sector undertakings (PSUs).

Another aim is to promote standardised rooftop PV systems for the broader Indian public by the year 2022. GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit), is a development agency focusing on consulting and capacity building activities in areas including rural development, sustainable infrastructure, energy and climate change. 

Praveer Sinha, CEO and managing director, Tata Power–DDL, said: “The collaboration with an institution like GIZ will provide impetus towards adoption of clean, efficient and smart technology in the utility space. We are confident that the collaboration will help us to learn and achieve a greener and sustainable solutions. usage of energy efficient technology is a unique and cost-effective solution to our consumers to optimize operational efficiency and thereby help us to provide them value added services.”

Joerg Gaebler, principal advisor, GIZ said, “We expect the collaboration with Tata Power-DDL will help us in designing and implementing tailored solutions by developing a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by distribution utilities in promoting mature clean technologies like rooftop photovoltaics.”

The governments of India and Germany are already closely aligned in energy maters and the two are collaborating on enhancing the Indian grid’s ability to absorb renewable power.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Eos Energy Storage has installed and commissioned a 1MWh Eos Aurora battery system at a wastewater treatment plant in Caldwell, New Jersey.

This system will serve as a main component of utility Public Service Electric and Gas Company’s (PSE&G) on-site energy storage microgrid that will help keep the facility operational during extended power outages.

The microgrid system includes an Eos Energy Storage system, along with an 896kW solar PV system designed and installed by Advanced Solar Products. Siemens Energy Management integrated the Eos Aurora system, solar facility, and existing diesel generator — utilising Eos Znyth technology as the base of the microgrid. Znyth use zinc hybrid cathodes, which Eos claims makes its batteries 30% to 40% lower cost than comparable lithium-ion systems.

The company is shipping its systems this year for US$160 per kWh and once it scales up into larger utility-scale systems, Eos says it could give solar-plus-storage projects an LCOE of below 10 cents per kWh. Utility Engie is testing Eos Znyth batteries, stacked into Eos’ ‘Aurora’ branded grid-scale systems, in Brazil, while Eos also has an agreement to collaborate with engineering giant Siemens on developing energy storage systems with AC power conversion and controls.

The Caldwell wastewater treatment plant microgrid stands as part of a 3MW portion of PSE&G’s Solar 4 All program — a plan that looks to develop projects that mesh solar with other technologies to strengthen the electricity grid.

Todd Hranicka, director of solar energy at PSE&G, said: “One of the goals of our Solar 4 All program is to help support the growth and development of solar and related industries in New Jersey. So we were especially happy to include the battery technology from a fellow New Jersey company like Eos into a project that helps make our electric system and a piece of critical infrastructure more reliable and resilient.”

Construction of the storage system was a joint undertaking between Advanced Solar Products, Eos, and Siemens Energy Management.

Click Here to Read Full Article