Irish state-owned utility Electricity Supply Board (ESB) has kicked off the year by signing a deal over two storage projects with a combined capacity of nearly 100 MWh. With the agreement, the utility enters the club of Irish utility-scale battery owners for the first time. The company said it would further expand its storage project portfolio in the future.

Ireland, which features significant wind capacity, has become a hotspot for grid-scale storage development in Europe. The country features 40% renewable energy capacity and it’s looking to increase that figure to 75% over the next years — a shift that requires significant battery storage capacity.

In this vein, ESB will develop a 60 MWh system in Dublin, and an additional 38 MWh storage system at the Aghada Generating Station in Cork. The aim is to provide storage capacity in times of high wind conditions and stability in low wind times. The Irish state utility is working with energy storage solution company Fluence and EPC service providers Powercomm Group and Kirby Group to realize the two projects.

“Fluence has extensive experience delivering energy storage for the Irish electric grid, from the country’s first battery energy storage project to the fastest system response time in the world,” said Paul McCusker, vice president of EMEA for Fluence. “We look forward to working with ESB on projects that will help Ireland meet its ambitious clean energy goals and provide a more flexible, reliable and sustainable power system.”

The Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility, the world’s largest utility-scale battery energy storage system, is now online. The 300 megawatts/1,200 megawatt-hours lithium-ion battery storage system is located on-site at Vistra’s Moss Landing Power Plant in Monterey County, California. Construction is already underway on Phase II, which will add an additional 100 MW/400 MWh to the facility by August 2021, bringing its total capacity to 400 MW/1,600 MWh.

Vistra, a power generation company that handled the project, says that, as the country transitions to a clean energy future, batteries will play a pivotal role and this project will serve as the model for utility-scale battery storage for years to come.

Phase 1 is housed inside the power plant’s refurbished former turbine building and spans the length of nearly three football fields. The system is made up of more than 4,500 stacked battery racks or cabinets, each containing 22 individual battery modules, which capture excess electricity from the grid, largely during high solar-output hours, and can release the power when energy demand is at its highest and solar electricity is declining, usually early morning and late afternoon.

Phases I and II of the Vistra Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility are backed up by long-term resource adequacy contracts with Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E).

Cranes are a familiar fixture of practically any city skyline, but one in the Swiss City of Ticino, near the Italian border, would stand out anywhere: It has six arms. This 110-meter-high starfish of the skyline isn’t intended for construction. It’s meant to prove that renewable energy can be stored by hefting heavy loads and dispatched by releasing them.

Energy Vault, the Swiss company that built the structure, has already begun a test program that will lead to its first commercial deployments in 2021. At least one competitor, Gravitricity, in Scotland, is nearing the same point. And there are at least two companies with similar ideas, New Energy Let’s Go and Gravity Power, that are searching for the funding to push forward.

To be sure, nearly all the world’s currently operational energy-storage facilities, which can generate a total of 174 gigawatts, rely on gravity. Pumped hydro storage, where water is pumped to a higher elevation and then run back through a turbine to generate electricity, has long dominated the energy-storage landscape. But pumped hydro requires some very specific geography—two big reservoirs of water at elevations with a vertical separation that’s large, but not too large. So building new sites is difficult.

Energy Vault, Gravity Power, and their competitors seek to use the same basic principle—lifting a mass and letting it drop—while making an energy-storage facility that can fit almost anywhere. At the same time they hope to best batteries—the new darling of renewable-energy storage—by offering lower long-term costs and fewer environmental issues.

In action, Energy Vault’s towers are constantly stacking and unstacking 35-metric-ton bricks arrayed in concentric rings. Bricks in an inner ring, for example, might be stacked up to store 35 megawatt-hours of energy. Then the system’s six arms would systematically disassemble it, lowering the bricks to build an outer ring and discharging energy in the process.

This joule-storing Jenga game can be complicated. To maintain a constant output, one block needs to be accelerating while another is decelerating. “That’s why we use six arms,” explains Robert Piconi, the company’s CEO and cofounder.

What’s more, the control system has to compensate for gusts of wind, the deflection of the crane as it picks up and sets down bricks, the elongation of the cable, pendulum effects, and more, he says.

Dave Barry said it best when summarizing 2020: “This was a year of nonstop awfulness, a year when we kept saying it couldn’t possibly get worse, and it always did. This was a year in which our only moments of genuine, unadulterated happiness were when we were able to buy toilet paper.“ 

Luckily for many companies in the solar and storage industry, our products and services were in high demand; from a revenue perspective, 2020 was not as bad as it could have been. As businesses and employees consider the long-term benefits of continued at-home working, the demand for inexpensive and reliable behind-the-meter energy supplies is likely to be even higher in 2021. And a favorable political environment will help. So here are my predictions for solar and storage for 2021. 

1. All roof orientations are fair game for solar. Module efficiency has increased from about 13 percent to over 20 percent in the last 20 years. Coupled with the commensurate 10x price reduction, it now makes economic sense to install modules on all unshaded roof orientations. The days of ignoring northerly sloped rooftops are gone.
2. Buildings will be designed to be carbon-negative. Higher module efficiencies mean that buildings under two stories in height can be designed to be carbon-negative, that is, generating more energy than they operationally consume. The percentage of rooftops covered with solar will increase as a result.
3. Skill levels for solar and storage contractors will increase. The additional features and configuration options of an integrated solar and storage system require higher skill levels to implement. Gone are the days when installers only needed to connect a black, a red and a green wire to get a system to operate properly. Installers must be savvy with building electrical wiring, CAT 5/6 communication wiring, various wireless communications protocols, desktop and cellphone applications, and dozens of inverter/battery configuration options. Conventional electrical and roofing training is only a stepping stone for solar and storage installers.
4. The module-level power electronics duopoly will continue. Inverters from SolarEdge (power optimizers) and Enphase (microinverters) have become the standard on over 75% of rooftop installations. Patent protection on these components, coupled with manufacturing scale and National Electric Code rapid shutdown requirements, have created a significant barrier to entry for competing products. Nevertheless, technology marches forward, so leaders must continue their innovation efforts to stay ahead.

An auction for solar-plus-storage held in Israel by the country’s Electricity Authority (PUA) awarded 609MW of solar PV alongside 2.4GWh of energy storage.

The tender process concluded shortly before the end of 2020, awarding distribution grid-connected solar capacity paired with four hour duration energy storage at a clearing price of 17.45 Shekel cents per kilowatt-hour (US$0.0544/kWh). A total of 55 bids were received, from 10 companies, totalling 870MW of solar capacity – of which 33 bids from seven companies were accepted, totalling 608.95MW of solar energy and more than 2,400MWh of storage.

The Green Energy Association of Israel sent Energy-Storage.news an English language press release (the PUA website has only listed in Hebrew thus far), noting that the PUA was able to carry on with the auction process despite disruption from the coronavirus pandemic. The auction followed a previous tender held in the summer months of 2020 for distribution-connected solar-plus-storage.

While the first tender saw 168MW of solar and 672MWh put Israel “on the map”, Michael Salomon, CEO at consultancy Clean Horizon told Energy-Storage.news today, the massive award in the more recent auction puts Israel on trajectory to surpass the 2GW / 8GWh of energy storage it needs by 2030 to support a goal of sourcing 30% of its electricity from renewabled by 2030, requiring the deployment of 12GW of solar.

In a webinar hosted last November by this site together with Clean Horizon, head of PUA’s regulatory department Yossi Sokoler said that the 8GWh figure was not a deployment target as such, but the amount of storage that PUA had modelled as being necessary to support the renewable energy target.

The Qatar Investment Authority  is investing $125 million into energy storage systems integrator and power management tech developer, Fluence, in a deal that will value the company at over $1 billion.

The joint venture between the American independent power producer, AES Corp. and the German industrial conglomerate Siemens,  was already worth $900 million prior to the transaction, according to Marek Wolek, the vice president of strategy and partnerships at Fluence.

With the new cash, Fluence will look to develop and acquire software and services that can expand the company’s offerings to its core clients among utilities and independent power project developers, Wolek said.

And it might not be too long before the company seeks additional liquidity from the public markets, Wolek said. He noted that the QIA is already backing the battery company QuantumScape,  which was acquired by a special purpose acquisition company in late November and whose shares have been on a meteoric rise ever since.

After the QIA investment, AES and Siemens will remain majority shareholders. Each will hold a 44% stake in the company after the investment.

“We believe the global problem of climate change can only be tackled by leveraging the combined capabilities of technologists and investors from around the world,” said Manuel Perez Dubuc, Fluence’s chief executive officer, in a statement. “We see  energy storage as the linchpin of a decarbonized grid and adding QIA to our international shareholder base will allow Fluence to innovate even faster and address the enormous global market for large-scale battery-based energy storage.” 

One of six founding members of the One Planet Sovereign Wealth Fund Initiative, QIA is a multibillion dollar investment vehicle that has significant stores of capital to continue its support of climate tech companies like Fluence.

Fluence has already deployed roughly five gigawatts of energy storage and management systems to a wide array of customers, according to Wolek.