Australia – pv magazine USA

New battery sizing approach for virtual synchronous generators, control-based grid-forming inverters

Emiliano Bellini — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 14:36:51 +0000

A group of researchers has outlined a new methodology to determine the minimum power rating of energy storage systems (ESSs) used for emergency under-frequency response. The ESS size must be calculated to maintain the frequency within the standard operating range.

From pv magazine Global

A group of researchers at the Edith Cowan University in Australia has proposed a new methodology to determine the optimal size of large inverter-connected energy storage systems (ESSs) planned for emergency under-frequency response.

“Delivering the necessary response with minimal ESS capacity is advantageous for power system planning and operating a fleet of partially discharged ESS units,” the scientists said, noting that the proposed solution is also feasible at low costs. “Characteristics such as rise time, overshoot, and settling time of active power response can be controlled by adjusting specific parameters.”

In the paper “Optimizing grid-forming inverters to prevent under-frequency load shedding with minimal energy storage,” published in the Journal of Energy Storage, the researchers explained that ESS active power capacity can be used to minimize under-frequency load shedding (UFLS) schemes, which are generally activated during low-frequency events, shedding predetermined loads to prevent further frequency drops.

“Since UFLS events are rare, some transmission system operators do not require maintaining headroom to cater for large disturbances,” the research team said. “Thus, using ESS for emergency under-frequency response is a cost-effective option. Additionally, delivering the necessary response with minimal ESS capacity is advantageous for power system planning and operating a fleet of partially discharged ESS units.”

The academics also explained that the novelty of their work consisted of determining a battery’s minimum power rating for both virtual synchronous generators (VSGs) and droop control-based grid-forming (GFM) inverters. The ESS size, they specified, must be calculated to maintain the frequency within the standard operating range.

“The ESS size is optimized to prevent under-frequency load shedding following a trip of a large generator by maintaining frequency within frequency operating standard (FoS),” they also emphasized. “The calculation of control parameters and ESS size determination considers the multi-step duration and thresholds provided by the FoS. UFLS protection settings are designed based on the FoS and sizing ESS to achieve a fixed frequency will not provide the optimum ESS size.”

The proposed approach is based on a Hill climbing algorithm, which is a classic optimization technique in artificial intelligence that takes inspiration from climbing to the peak of a mountain. It works by increasing the elevation value to find the peak of the mountain or the best solution to a given problem. It terminates when it reaches a peak value where no neighbor has a higher value.

The group investigated a case study of a power system implemented via DIgSilent PowerFactory software.

The simulation showed that for GFM inverters, a decrease in the active power droop coefficient increases the active power output. This increase, however, is limited by current inverters’ constraints. As a result, the scientists suggest maintaining the active power droop coefficient at a value that can prevent instability resulting from inverters’ limitations while maximizing the active power output.

As for VSGs, they suggested maintaining the acceleration constant, which can reportedly strike a balance between the rate of change of frequency (RoCoF) and power oscillations. They noted that the acceleration time constant of the VSG controller is proportional to inertia and increasing it enhances inertia.

“For the case considered in this study, the minimum energy storage power rating for the virtual synchronous generator control is 85 MVA, while for droop control, the minimum storage capacity is 89 MVA,” the scientists concluded. “The results of this study should be helpful for power system planners to better harness the capabilities of energy storage systems.”

Buildings can offer gigawatts of new peak capacity as ‘batteries’

Ev Foley — Wed, 08 May 2024 14:37:29 +0000

Modeling shows that shifting just one-third of the electricity consumption of commercial and institutional buildings in Australia to the middle of the day, coinciding with peak solar supply, would create almost 12 GW of new peak capacity in the National Electricity Market.

From pv magazine Australia

The researchers behind the new “Buildings as Batteries” paper claim that a load shift in Australia to the middle of the day would save AUD 1.7 billion ($1.1 billion) per year. They claim it would also add additional peak capacity equivalent to 52% of Australia’s existing coal-generation fleet and significantly reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions from electricity.

The Australia Institute (TAI) and Buildings Alive prepared the report, which shows that changing the timing of electricity usage and using buildings as thermal batteries could significantly enhance Australia’s energy security, with minimal intervention and investment. A similar logic could be applied to buildings here in the U.S.

TAI Executive Director Richard Denniss said Australia’s electricity market has a “supply and demand problem” with a lot of cheap, clean renewable energy supply in the middle of the day and much demand toward the end of the day, when the market relies on coal and gas generated electricity.

“Luckily for everyone except the owners of the coal-fired power stations, it is relatively easy to shift a lot of electricity demand from late afternoon to the middle of the day,” he said. “Our research shows big commercial buildings are particularly good at shifting their daily electricity demand around, to take better advantage of the cheap, clean power that is so abundant in the middle of the day.”

The paper cites an example of a large office tower in Sydney, where the building managers were told that electricity demand would likely be extremely high on a hot summer day in 2019. In response, the internal temperature set point of the building was lowered by 1 degree from 8.30 a.m. to 2 p.m. The figures show that the building used more electricity earlier in the day and reduced demand by 200 kW relative to forecasts from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

“The building effectively operated as a battery with capacity of at least 800 kWh,” the report said. “We estimate this led to savings of AUD 111 and 221 kg CO2e in emissions in just one day in just that one building. A battery of that size would cost around AUD 500,000. Extrapolating across Australia, if 33% of the energy buildings use in the late afternoon in summer were shifted to the middle of the day, that would deliver new peak capacity in the energy market of almost 12 GW.”

In 2019, a precooled Sydney building reduced their demand for electricity by 200 kW.

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Image: The Australia Institute

The report said that if a government program to develop the demand side in the National Electricity Market was launched this year, it could organize load shifting in 30% of Australia’s institutional grade office buildings by 2025, rising to 90% in 2027.

The researchers said that such a program, which would deliver about 2.6 GW of flexible capacity by the end of 2026, could be secured through relatively minor changes to building management practices, such as cooling large office buildings earlier in the day and then allowing their temperature to rise back to normal levels across the afternoon.

The researchers warned that changes to policy and regulation would be required, as current efficiency ratings systems are holding back the adoption of new technologies by failing to recognize the financial, emissions and grid stabilizing potential of smart, grid-interactive buildings.

Buildings Alive Chief Executive Officer Craig Roussac said the solutions to this problem exist already, and the country just needs to start using them.

“If we don’t harness the potential of smart, grid-interactive buildings, Australians will pay the price through higher network costs, more expensive electricity and increased carbon pollution,” he said. “Australia has had world-leading building efficiency ratings systems in the past, but they have not evolved. Most buildings can double their energy demand at times of the day when it’s abundant and halve it when networks are constrained. This is a massive service they can offer.”

Demand Management in Queensland addresses lower and negative troughs in demand arising due to high levels of solar.

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Image: Energex

The report recommends a range of policies to support load shifting and demand response, including having NABERS develop and implement an updated building efficiency rating system that recognizes the potential of these measures.

The researchers also said that governments should implement demand flexibility in their own buildings and work with energy innovators and the property sector to accelerate development of load shifting and broader demand response. They also said federal government agencies like ARENA and the CEFC could help by soliciting for related project proposals and through concessional finance.

The report said it would be necessary for the electricity market operator, regulators and rule makers to ensure that load shifting can compete in the wholesale demand-response market.

Nextracker to use local steel in 480 MW Queensland project

Jonathan Gifford — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 14:47:45 +0000

In the Australian leg of its global strategy, US-based tracker supplier Nextracker will use locally produced steel for a major project.

From pv magazine Australia

With an eye to local job creation, shorter supply chains, and reduced carbon emissions from transportation, Nextracker is continuing to use locally produced steel for some major projects. The latest in the strategy is the 480 MW Aldoga Solar Farm in Queensland, which will use Bluescop steel torque tubes, produced in Brisbane.

Nextracker announced the deal at an event in Brisbane on Thursday, March. 15. The event was attended by local politicians, steel industry representatives, and Nextracker management.

The local supply deal involves Nextracker, Orrcon Steel, Bluescope, and Baojia. It involves “critical steel components” being produced at the BlueScope steel coil at Orrcon Steel’s Salisbury Tube millin Brisbane. The toirque tubes will then be finished by Baojia – which works with Nextracker on a global basis.

The supply deal will underpin a decision to open a new steel manufacturing line. It will be equiped to produce 50,000 tonnes of torque tubes a year – a PV capacity of 2.5 GW.

“This foundation strengthens Nextracker’s commitment to deliver energy security to Australians with a local supply chain and new manufacturing jobs to make clean energy affordable and accessible. We support Queensland’s Energy and Jobs Plan and applaud their ambitions to create jobs for the clean energy economy,” said Peter Wheale, Nextracker GM for Australia, Southeast Asia, and New Zealand.

Thursday’s opening ceremony was attended by the Queensland Minister for Energy Mike de Brenni; Tania Archibald, Chief Executive BlueScope Australian Steel Products; Tony Schreiber, Chair of the Australian Steel Institute and General Manager of Orrcon Steel and Peter Wheale, General Manager of Nextracker Australia, Southeast Asia, New Zealand.

Rival tracker supplier Array Technologies announced in February that it would establish a manufacturing line in Australia. The decision was made on the back of project supply wins, including the 102 MW Glenrowan Solar Farm.

In announcing the supply deal, Nextracker pointed to Rystad Energy research that showed that the US tracker company had supplied 7.45 GW of projects in Australia – of a total fleet of 13.5 GW, making it the market leader. Other major projects Nextracker has supplied in Australia are the New England Solar Farm (521 MWd), Stubbo Solar Farm (520 MWd) and Western Downs (460 MWd).

Printed flexible solar cells for space applications

David Carroll — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 17:11:04 +0000

Printed flexible solar cell technology developed by Australia’s national science agency has been successfully launched into space as part of billionaire Elon Musk’s Space X’s Transporter-10 mission.

From pv magazine Australia

Eight mini-modules of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s (CSIRO) printed flexible solar cells were attached to the surface of Sydney-headquartered space transportation provider Space Machine Company’s Optimus-1 satellite which was sent into orbit today from the United States.

Australia’s largest private satellite yet, Optimus-1 is one of the 53 payloads launched into space as part of American spacecraft manufacturer Space X’s Transporter-10 rideshare mission launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The 270-kilogram Optimus orbital servicing vehicle is to be deployed in an orbital slot where it will then commence its full testing campaign. Part of that will be an investigation of the CSIRO’s printed flexible solar cells that were attached to the surface of the satellite.

The CSIRO is exploring the potential of printed flexible solar cells as a reliable energy source for future space endeavors with the organization’s Space Program Director, Kimberley Clayfield, saying a major challenge in the development of spacecraft is low-mass, high-efficiency power systems.

“CSIRO’s printed flexible solar cells could provide a reliable, lightweight energy solution for future space operations and exploration,” she said. “If the space flight test reveals similar performance as we’ve shown in the lab, this technology offers significant advantages over traditional silicon-based solar.”

CSIRO Renewable Energy Systems Group Leader Dr Anthony Chesman said CSIRO-developed perovskite cells have the potential to transform spacecraft power systems and enable new possibilities for future space missions.

“Our perovskite cells have been achieving incredible outcomes on Earth and we’re excited that they’ll soon be showcasing their potential in space,” he said, adding that in situ testing would secure information on the performance of the cells as they orbit the planet. “We will get information on how the panels are holding up under the extreme conditions in space and data on the efficiency they achieve,” he said.

Chesman said the team had already undertaken pioneering research on the likely performance of the cells in a space environment.

“Based on our research we expect our printed flexible solar cells will stand up to the effects of cosmic electron and gamma radiation which can compromise the performance and integrity of traditional solar cells,” he said. “We are also confident these cells will outperform traditional cells in cases where sunlight hits them at non-optimal angles. The feedback we receive from the satellite will provide valuable insights into the practical application of our technology and inform future technology development.”

U.S. draft rules may disqualify Australian critical minerals from IRA subsidies

Bella Peacock — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 14:07:02 +0000

A number of critical mineral producers will likely be ineligible for U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) subsidies, as the US government has published draft rules forbidding access to enterprises with stakes held by Chinese investors.

From pv magazine Australia

New draft rules from the U.S. Department of Energy state that enterprises “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction” of China, Russia, North Korea or Iran, will not be eligible for subsidies under the nation’s USD 369 billion ($550 billion) IRA, nor the USD 550 billion Infrastructure and Jobs Act.

The upper limit of both direct stakes or “cumulative” investment is 25%, according to the draft guidance.

China is far and away Australia’s biggest trade partner, including for lithium and other critical minerals. China’s dominance in the sector has meant that a number of Australian projects have substantial Chinese ties. These ties come in the form of Chinese project ownership, investment, and off-take agreements.

For instance, Western Australian project Greenbushes, which produces most of Australia’s lithium, is owned by Chinese company Tianqi and U.S. giant Albermarle. Tianqi also holds a majority stake in the Kwinana lithium hydroxide refinery, which produced Australia’s first commercial quantities of battery-grade lithium hydroxide in 2022.

To continue reading, please visit our pv magazine Australia website.

Fortescue continues U.S. expansion with new clean energy manufacturing plant

David Carroll — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 18:30:41 +0000

Australian mining and green energy major Fortescue has revealed plans to establish a new clean energy technology manufacturing plant in the United States, as it looks to take advantage of the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

From pv magazine Australia

Fortescue has announced it will invest almost AUD 54 million ($35 million) to kickstart a major manufacturing facility in the United States that is expected to serve as a hub for the production of automotive and heavy industry batteries, hydrogen generators, electric vehicle fast chargers and electrolyzers.

Fortescue said the manufacturing facility is being developed in the state of Michigan as part of the company’s plan to rapidly expand its US presence as a direct result of the IRA.

The IRA, which is aimed at ramping up onshore production of renewable energy, electrification and the development of clean energy industries such as green hydrogen, offers subsidies, grants and tax breaks to businesses to establish clean energy projects in the United States.

Fortescue’s new manufacturing center is expected to benefit directly from IRA tax credits for battery modules, offering approximately $10 USD per kWh.

Fortescue Executive Chairman and founder Andrew Forrest said the IRA has changed the US from a laggard to a world leader in clean energy, demonstrating that countries which incentivize green energy place an “economic engine” firmly inside their economies.

“The IRA makes the United States the most attractive place in the world for green energy and green manufacturing projects,” he said.

“Fortescue is putting the United States at the forefront of our global strategy, with the incentives on offer, a win for both the US and the wider Asia-Pacific region.”

The company said the Michigan facility, projected to employ up to 600 people in its initial phase, will serve as a major hub for Fortescue’s production of batteries, fast chargers, and hydrogen generators and electrolyzers.

“Michigan and the United States are extremely attractive places to manufacture, given the skilled workforce, existing supply chain and incentives from state and federal governments, including the Inflation Reduction Act,” Fortescue Energy Chief Executive Officer Mark Hutchinson said.

The new manufacturing facility is one of three clean energy projects Fortescue has planned in the US.

Fortescue is targeting a final investment decision this year for the Phoenix Hydrogen Hub, an electrolyzer and liquefaction facility in Arizona. Stage one of the project is planned to include an 80 MW electrolyzer and liquefaction facility capable of producing up to 12,000 tons of liquified green hydrogen annually.

Fortescue is also planning to construct a large-scale green hydrogen production plant near in the state of Washington. The Centralia project has been selected as part of the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub to receive funding from the US Department of Energy. The project is currently in the design stage with a final investment decision yet to be taken by the Fortescue board.

Mitigating residential duck curve via solar pre-cooling

Emiliano Bellini — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 19:00:25 +0000

Solar pre-cooling consists of using residential PV systems to run air conditioners to pre-cool residential and commercial buildings. It offers benefits in terms of mitigating low minimum demand in electricity networks, flattening the grid’s net demand profile, and reducing electricity bills.

From pv magazine global

Researchers in Australia have looked at how rooftop PV generation used to run air conditioners (AC) to pre-cool residential and commercial buildings may improve cost savings for households, while mitigating the so-called duck curve.

The proposed solar pre-cooling concept, which the scientists developed in previous research, considers the thermal mass of buildings as a virtual battery that could be used to shift or shave peak demand caused by AC systems. It can be implemented in all kinds of buildings that have an AC unit and can be more beneficial if the surplus PV generation during the day is used to pre-cool the building instead of importing electricity from the grid. The AC unit is switched on before peak demand hours with lower thermostat setpoints to pre-cool a household’s thermal mass and indoor air.

“In our previous study, we only simulated pre-cooling,” the report’s lead author, Shayan Naderi, told pv magazine. “The novelty of our new work consists of using measured AC demand, PV generation, and household load profile, and clustering households based on their load shape. We also calculated the benefits of solar pre-cooling for different groups of households and building types.”

The analysis considered the feed-in tariffs (FITs) that are currently paid in Australia for residential rooftop PV generation, three different categories of residential building types dubbed 2-, 6-, and 8-star homes representing old, new, or renovated houses, respectively, and their net demand profiles. For each star rating, three different construction weights were simulated for Adelaide, Melbourne, Sidney, and Brisbane.

The analysis also considered maximum demand reduction, minimum demand mitigation, peak import reduction, self-consumption improvement, and cost savings. It was carried out with a dataset provided by monitoring and energy management services provider Australia-based Solar Analytics Pty. Ltd, which includes hourly data for net demand, AC demand, and PV generation of 349 households during the period from December 1, 2018 to February 28, 2019.

“The temporal pattern of PV generation and household demand are contributing factors to solar pre-cooling potential,” the researches emphasized. “There is a significant difference between the overall magnitude of average hourly AC excluded net demand profiles across the houses.”

They identified four dominant clusters of AC excluded net demand profiles across the 349 households and said only one of the clusters, representing only 3% of the households, does not provide solar pre-cooling technical and economic potential. “The other three clusters, representing 97% of the solar homes analyzed, have a duck shaped AC excluded net demand and offer demand profile improvement through solar pre-cooling,” they said, noting that these results are achieved regardless of the building’s energy efficiency.

The improvement of ‘flattening’ demand profile is mainly due to minimum demand mitigation, with a maximum PV system capacity of 4 kW. The action of solar pre-cooling, meanwhile, was found to be mainly limited by AC size and surplus PV generation, and not by the thermal comfort of occupants.

The research’s findings were revealed in the paper “Clustering-based analysis of residential duck curve mitigation through solar pre-cooling: A case study of Australian housing stock,” published in Renewable Energy. The research group comprises scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW).

U.S. Inflation Reduction Act poses threat for Australia in green hydrogen race

David Carroll — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 16:23:28 +0000

Former Reserve Bank of Australia Deputy Governor Guy Debelle has warned that the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) poses a “material threat” to Australia’s push to become a green hydrogen superpower.

From pv magazine Australia

Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) Director Guy Debelle said that the sheer scale of the IRA threatens to overwhelm Australia’s renewable energy advantages, drawing investment dollars out of the country and locking up potential export markets.

Debelle, formerly FFI’s chief financial officer and now serving as a director of mining giant Fortescue’s green energy branch, said that Australia is well positioned to take advantage of growing demand for the zero-emissions fuel. However, it needs to act quickly or risk being left behind in the race to grab a share of the global green hydrogen market, he added.

Debelle said Australia’s renewable energy advantages make it an ideal location to generate green hydrogen. He also highlighted that Australia has a long history as a reliable energy exporter to nations such as Japan and South Korea but said the enormity of the IRA threatens to snap up those markets.

“I think it’s a material threat to us in terms of those export markets,” Debelle said. “There’s a real risk that with the US getting their headstart on us through the Inflation Reduction Act they are going to lock up a fair chunk of the Japanese and Korean markets. We have great potential here in Australia and we have great comparative advantage but … if you throw upwards of a trillion dollars at something, that tends to buy a comparative advantage. I think it’s a really serious risk that by the time we get our act together, that market won’t be there for us.”

The Australian government has been overt in its ambitions to establish a green hydrogen sector with Energy Minister Chris Bowen describing it as “the heart” of the government’s vision for the country as a renewable energy superpower.

Bowen’s ideal is backed by the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water which in the latest annual “State of Hydrogen” report, says that Australia has the foundations to become a global leader in green hydrogen.

Australia’s announced pipeline of major announced green hydrogen projects totals more than 100 projects worth an estimated $153 billion (AUD 230 billion) or more of potential investment. This represents close to 40% of all global clean hydrogen project announcements.

However, the department warns that most of the announcements in this pipeline are yet to reach final investment decisions. It noted that Australia already lags other key global players in the number of large projects that have moved from planning to implementation. Debelle said that these bottlenecks must be addressed quickly or Australia risks getting left further behind green hydrogen.

“The Inflation Reduction Act got legislated last August, the details are going to be put in place this August,” he said. “Once that’s there, then you’re going to see projects hitting the ground in the U.S. pretty much straight away. Those projects are happening and they’re starting this year, not next year, this year. We need to start soon.”

Debelle said the federal government’s budget announcement of a program to scale up development is “a good start,” but said it must rolled out quickly and must be accompanied by a clear strategy for it to have any chance of success.

“What we’ve got to realize here is that we were starting a long way behind,” he said. “We’ve got to be careful that we don’t sort of take too long to follow through on the announcements. The sooner we can see the details of the Headstart program and move forward with them the better.”

The Hydrogen Headstart program will provide revenue support for investment in renewable hydrogen production through competitive production contracts. The federal government said the funding would “help bridge the commercial gap for early projects” and put the country on track to develop a gigawatt of electrolyzer capacity by 2030 via two to three “flagship projects.” Those supported projects are expected to become operational by 2026-27.

“We can’t match the IRA across the board but I think a more targeted response to it … is achievable particularly if we think about it as an investment in the future,” Debelle said. “It’s not just money out the door, it’s investment.”

Renewables generation predictability can improve profitability

Ryan Kennedy — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 18:53:26 +0000

A study from the University of Adelaide shows how improved predictability can improve the operation of solar assets.

A difficult challenge in the renewable energy sector is the ability of operators to reliably predict the amount of power generated.

A study by researchers at the University of Adelaide, Australia looked to quantify the effect of predictability on the profitability of renewable assets. It found that low predictability can reduce up to 10% of a solar facility’s revenue. The findings were published in Patterns.

Owners of solar and wind assets often sell their energy to the market ahead of time, before it is generated, however there are sizeable penalties for underperformance. Renewable plant operators bid conservatively, below their actual prediction, to dodge the imbalance penalties, which results in green and cheap energy spillage or curtailment. This can add up to millions of dollars in lost revenue each year.

Even in a real-time market where participants can bid only a few minutes to hours before every dispatch interval, prediction errors of renewable generation can lead to significant financial penalties.

“Peaks and troughs are the reality of this form of power generation, however using predictability of energy generation as part of the decision to locate a solar or wind farm means that we can minimize supply fluctuations and better plan for them,” said Sahand Karimi-Arpanahi, a PhD candidate at the university.

The data showed that optimal location for project siting changed when the predictability of generation was considered. Potential revenues at sites were increased when more predictable locations were selected. The researchers offered a case study in Australia as an example.

The predictability of solar energy generation is the lowest in South Australia (SA) each year from August to October while it is highest in New South Wales (NSW) during the same period, said the researchers. Four studied renewable plants in SA lost more than 20% of their energy market revenue in 2020 due to Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) charges related to the difference between the actual production level of renewable plants and their commitments.

In the event of interconnection between the two states, the more predictable power from NSW could be used to manage the higher uncertainties in the SA power grid during that time, making for a more profitable operation of renewable assets.

Image: Patterns

“The average predictability of renewable generation in each state can also inform power system operators and market participants in determining the time frame for the annual maintenance of their assets, ensuring the availability of enough reserve requirements when renewable resources have lower predictability,” said Dr. Pourmousavi Kani, a participant in the research.

As most conventional power plants are expected to retire in the next few years in Australia, the market rules have been changing to ensure reliable grid operation. Such changes mean that if renewable plants’ output is not predictable, they must hold sufficient additional capacity to respond to the unpredictable generation changes and meet their forecasts. While the U.S. trails Australia in terms of renewable energy generation share, the study shows the importance of including predictability in calculating the value of renewables increases as renewable market penetration grows.

Array Technologies expands solar tracker manufacturing to Australia

David Carroll — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 17:00:23 +0000

U.S. solar tracker supplier Array Technologies plans to set up a factory in Australia, after winning a contract to supply trackers for a 102 MW solar farm in the Australian state of Victoria.

From pv magazine australia

Array Technologies says it will establish a manufacturing facility in Australia, after being tapped to supply locally manufactured trackers to the 102 MW Glenrowan solar farm.

The massive solar project is being developed by Pacific Partnerships, a subsidiary of Sydney-based construction firm Cimic Group. The company said its Australian factory will initially supply ground-mounted tracker systems for the Glenrowan array, but will eventually provide trackers for other new solar installations in Australia.

Array Technologies Chief Executive Officer Kevin Hostetler said the factory will bolster the company’s presence in the Australian marketplace and help spur economic growth in the region.

“This decision will help us meet the growing demand for renewable energy utilities, expedite project schedules, and have long-lasting economic benefits for Australia,” he said.

The Glenrowan solar farm, which is being developed on a 245-hectare site, is one of six large-scale energy generation and storage projects to have won supply contracts under the state’s second renewable energy target auction (VRET2). Together, the projects will deliver 623 MW of new generation and up to 365 MW/600 MWh of new energy storage.

Array Technologies said it is the first tracker supplier to win a contract under the VRET scheme, which is designed to grow renewable energy manufacturing capacity in the state and help the Victorian government meet its commitment to power all of its operations with renewable energy by 2025.

The VRET2 scheme is part of the state government’s plan to drive significant investment in all six renewable energy zones located across Victoria. The Victorian government has estimated the scheme will support the creation of 920 direct jobs and attract AUD 1.48 billion ($1.02 billion) in new renewable energy projects in the state.

“Generating new investment in renewable energy will have lasting benefits for Victoria’s economy, making energy delivery across the state more reliable and affordable,” said Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio.

The construction of the Glenrowan solar farm has already started, with the project expected to commence operations by the end of 2023. It will connect to the existing nearby Glenrowan Terminal Substation. It is expected to generate electricity equivalent for approximately 45,000 Australian homes.

Powin, BlackRock start working on world’s largest battery

Beatriz Santos — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 15:42:52 +0000

US battery specialist Powin and US investment firm BlackRock have started work on a 909 MW/1,915 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) in Australia. Construction is set to begin in 2023 and will finish by mid-2025.

Powin and BlackRock have started working on what they describe as the world’s most powerful battery. BlackRock-owned Akaysha Energy is now developing the 1.9 GWh Waratah Super Battery Project north of Sydney.

The company was contracted to deliver a battery with a guaranteed continuous power capacity of at least 700 MW and a guaranteed useable energy storage capacity of at least 1,400 MWh. Powin has now announced that it will supply 909 MW of power equipment and 1,915 MWh of annual storage capacity.

Powin will provide 2,592 units of its modular Centipede BESS platform. Its EKS Energy subsidiary will deliver 288 power conversion systems. Construction is expected to start in 2023, with a targeted completion date in the middle of 2025. The BESS is expected to act as a “shock absorber” for Australia’s electricity grid, as part of a system integrity protection scheme (SIPS).

“This flagship SIPS project will unlock latent transfer capacity in the existing transmission system, help integrate renewable energy, and maintain grid reliability by acting as a ‘shock absorber’ if disruptions such as lightning strikes or bushfires interrupt the flow of electricity,” Powin said in a statement. “The proposed WSB Project will ensure Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong have access to more energy from existing generators while reducing the risk of power disruptions.”

Akaysha Energy won a bid to deliver the energy storage project in October. It will be built on the former grounds of the 1,400 MW Munmorah coal-fired power station.

Bluetti unveils modular energy storage system at IFA 2022

bluetti — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 16:00:37 +0000

Among the innovations on display by Bluetti was the new solar-powered generator, the EP600+B500

Last week Bluetti showed off its latest innovations at IFA in Berlin, Germany. Its offering included the AC500+B300S combo, AC200 series, and the long-rumored solar system-EP600+B500 three-phase system that features a 6kW inverter and maximum 79kWh LFP battery capacity.

The modular design of EP600 significantly shrinks the overall weight and size. The system weighs 123.4 pounds and measures 25 inches by 12.8 inches by 13.3 inches. Packed with a 6000 W bi-directional inverter for AC input and output, the system provides AC power at 230/400V to easily run almost any household electric appliances, the company reports. Besides, the EP600 also supports up to 6000 W solar input from 150V to 500V range and has a reported 99.9% MPPT solar efficiency.

As an expansion battery, B500 is tailor-made for the EP600 system. It features 4,960 Wh ultra-durable lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells, an aluminum alloy appearance, and is the same size as EP600. Every EP600 supports up to 16 battery modules to reach a total 79.3kWh capacity, which Bluetti says can cover all power needs at home or off-the-grid for days or even over a week. EP600 and B500 can be stacked to save space inside or out.

What sets the EP600 apart from other solar generators is the hybrid inverter at the heart of the system. This simplifies operation because, as Bluetti explains, it is operated by simply plugging the solar panels into the generator. , which means all you need to do is plug solar panels into the solar generator. No solar inverter or MPPT controller is required.

Bluetti reports that the EP600 and B500 system will be available by the end of the fall in Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The pre-order is expected to start before November on BLUETTI’s official website. You may subscribe here to get an early bird price and stay up to date with the latest news on Bluetti’s new solar power system. According to James Ray, marketing director for Bluetti, the combination of the EP600 and B500 will sell for less than $9,500.

Note that as a three-phase 230V/400V system, this EP600 and B500 system is not applied to countries with 100-120V utility grid voltage. Another whole home power system is currently under development for those living in the United States and Japan.

Redflow targets US market with lithium-ion battery alternative

David Carroll — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 12:47:25 +0000

Australian battery manufacturer Redflow is determined to capitalize on what is describes as an emerging demand for non-lithium-based energy storage technology, announcing it has teamed with United States-based renewables developer Empower Energies to deploy solar and flow battery solutions in North America.

From pv magazine Australia

Queensland-headquartered redox-flow battery specialist Redflow and clean energy project solutions firm Empower Energies have signed a Letter of Intent to develop integrated solar and zinc-bromine flow battery solutions for the North American commercial and industrial (C&I), remote community micro grid, and utility markets.

Redflow said the energy storage solution architecture was developed through the two companies’ joint engagement with a large US-listed corporate which is interested in deploying solar and flow-battery storage technology at one of its commercial campuses.

Redflow chief commercial officer Mark Higgins believes the co-developed solution, featuring the company’s 10 kWh zinc-bromine flow battery module which can be combined to provide commercial and utility scale battery solutions, will not only serve the large US-based corporate well but also meet the needs of a variety of customer segments across North America.

“The integrated solution we’ve developed in partnership with Empower Energies represents a unique, innovative, and stress-tested alternative to the status quo solar and lithium-ion solution,” he said.

“Our integrated offering provides a safer, rugged, more sustainable and cost competitive alternative to lithium-ion batteries and solar, and our batteries don’t materially degrade over their useful life, unlike lithium-ion.

“The uniquely safe zinc bromine chemistry has no risk of thermal runaway, making our solution better to deploy in urban and suburban environments where safety is a paramount consideration. Also, our hibernation mode enables our batteries to be used for back-up power and resilience deployments in a very cost-effective manner versus lithium.”

Patrick Corr, chief strategy officer at Empower which has completed more than 200 MW of clean energy projects in the US and has more than 800 MW of solar and storage projects currently in development, said its partnership with Redflow would provide a viable alternative to lithium-ion technology for North American customers.

“We’ve found that our integrated solar and flow battery solution is of particular interest to certain C&I customers looking for energy shifting, peak shaving and other daily cycling applications for their corporate campuses, reducing energy costs and enabling on-site carbon reduction safely,” he said.

The collaboration with Empower comes after Redflow earlier this year unveiled its third-generation zinc-bromine module energy storage offering.

Redflow said the new Gen3 battery represents a major advancement over the company’s Gen2.5 battery, incorporating a new stack design, updated electronics with increased functionality, a new tank design and cooling system.

The new product implements a single 10 kWh electrode stack while the design includes a bi-directional DC-DC converter built into the battery control module, allowing flexibility of energy flow of 0-60 volts. The individual modules measure 861mm x 747mm x 400Wmm and weigh in at 240kg with electrolyte. The scalable design means it can be adapted for a wide range of applications, from small commercial installations to multi-MWh storage systems.

“The launch of our Gen3 battery is a monumental milestone in Redflow’s growth strategy,” said Higgins, who is president of the company’s North American operations. “The combination of our new Energy Pod products with the Gen3 battery provides the platform for Redflow to capitalise on the demand for large-scale, medium to long-duration energy storage systems that we’re seeing emerge around the world.

“We see huge potential for Redflow’s technology in the US and other markets like Australia.”

Grid experts call for a national initiative to facilitate a high-DER grid

William Driscoll — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 12:35:32 +0000

To reach the full potential benefits of distributed energy resources (DERs), a national initiative is needed to transition efficiently to a high-DER electricity system, says a task force of grid experts convened by the nonprofit group ESIG.

Current work by states to advance the use of distributed energy resources (DERs) is “piecemeal” and “inefficient,” as “each state has to essentially reinvent the wheel,” says a report from the Distributed Energy Resources Task Force of the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG).

To achieve the full grid benefits and pollution reductions that DERs can provide, the report says a national initiative on DER integration is needed.

Such an initiative could foster a transition to a high-DER electricity system, through “ongoing changes” in multiple areas, namely DER interconnection to the grid, distribution and transmission planning, data access and communication, distribution system operations, utility regulation, retail rates for electricity, and electricity markets.

The task force considers DERs to include not only distributed solar and storage, but also electric vehicles and responsive load.

States including California and New York are developing their own distribution-level solutions to DER integration, the report says, but such state-by-state work “will lead to a proliferation of disparate standards, terminology and approaches” to DER integration that will “generate confusion and increase costs,” and yield lower DER benefits to customers.

The first goal of a national initiative would be to identify “near-term, least-regrets” actions. As a first step toward that goal, the report recommends a process of establishing a “core set” of models for distribution system and market operations, based on a detailed mapping of grid functions to different actors in these different models. The report mentions California’s high-DER proceeding, which is considering these issues.

The report says that models for distribution system operators (DSOs) could include, at one extreme, a DSO managing its local distribution area, with a single transmission-distribution interface to ensure reliable real-time operation in coordination with the regional grid operator or other transmission system operator (TSO). At the other extreme, a TSO would extend its network model and operational capabilities into distribution systems and be responsible for all distribution system and market operations. The report also describes possible hybrid models between those two extremes.

After “near-term, least-regrets” actions were identified, the ESIG task force recommends “a structured dialogue” around DER integration challenges that will require more time to resolve.

Insights from the United Kingdom and Australia

A national initiative on DER integration could draw insights from similar initiatives in the United Kingdom and Australia, says a second report by the same ESIG task force, which describes those initiatives.

The UK initiative analyzed five different models for the types of services that distribution system operators (DSOs) would provide, using “the Smart Grid Architecture Model methodology and a licensed Enterprise Architect tool.” That led to identification of eight “no-regrets functional and system requirements for DSOs, independent of the market model.” The UK initiative is ongoing.

The initiative in Australia, a country with “world-leading uptake” of rooftop solar, was modeled on the UK project and used several of the same consultants and analytical tools. The initiative identified three “least-regrets” actions that distribution network service providers would need to implement “under any future conditions.” The initiative was conducted over three years and is now complete.

An earlier ESIG report outlined minor “no regrets” changes to distribution planning and operations, to enable owners of distributed solar and storage to participate in wholesale markets.

ESIG is a nonprofit organization that “marshals the expertise of the electricity industry’s technical community to support grid transformation and energy systems integration and operation,” the group says in its reports.

The ESIG report on a national DER initiative is titled “The Transition to a High-DER Electricity System: A National Initiative on DER Integration for the United States,” and is accompanied by a fact sheet. The ESIG report on initiatives in the UK and Australia is titled “Lessons Learned for the U.S. Context: An Assessment of UK and Australian Open Networks Initiatives.“

US and Australia sign energy agreements to mitigate over-reliance on China

Bella Peacock — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 13:30:02 +0000

Speaking at the Sydney Energy Forum, leaders from the United States and Australia have highlighted the importance of not only transitioning to renewables, but of ensuring the supply chains used to make the technologies do not remain as concentrated as they are today.

From pv magazine australia

Australia has signed a series of new clean energy partnership agreements, including the ‘Net Zero Technology Acceleration Partnership’ with the US, the ‘Minerals Security Partnership’ which includes political allies from across the world, as well as an agreement between the chief science agencies of Australia and the US, the CSIRO and NREL respectively.

Speaking at the Sydney Energy Forum on Tuesday, US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm focused on the importance of secure supply chains to the clean energy transition, especially in light of the current global energy crisis spurred by Europe’s over-reliance on Russia and the invasion of Ukraine.

“We’ve seen what happens when we rely too much on one entity for our source of fuel, and we don’t want that to happen – so to diversify those energy sources and to link up with partners is part of our energy security,” Granholm said.

With few hard details in the agreements, it seems as though the moves at this stage are more of a formal recognition of a joint goal, especially in response to recent geopolitical events. The US and Australia did, however, point to of a number of technological focal points.

‘Greatest peace plan’

Granholm described the transition to renewables as “the greatest peace plan of all” since countries cannot be “held hostage” over access to the sun or wind. “They have not ever been weaponised, nor will they be,” she said.

Australia currently imports around 80% of its solar panels from China – which also controls the vast amount of materials processing for other renewable technologies. While this has led to incredible depressions in the price of these technologies globally, the International Energy Agency’s executive director Fatih Birol noted the country’s near monopoly was “something that we all need to think about.”

Net zero technology acceleration partnership

Signed by Granholm and Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, the Australia – United States Net-Zero Technology Acceleration Partnership seeks to accelerate the development and deployment of zero emissions technology, as well as growing cooperation between the two countries in terms of critical minerals supply chains.

“With today’s partnership, our two countries will work together to unlock critical advances in long-duration storage, grid integration, clean hydrogen, direct air capture, and critical minerals and materials – providing an essential opportunity to export the innovations that will accelerate the global clean energy transition,” Granholm said.

Officials from the US and Australia agreed to meet within three months to make further progress relating to the agreement, presumably to set out more concrete goals.

Minerals security partnership

This global partnership is specifically aimed at ensuring the security of critical minerals supply chains. Australia has now joined the partnership which includes the US, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the European Commission.

Left to right: CSIRO’s Bronwyn Fox and NREL’s Peter Green, with Australian Energy Minister Bowen and US Energy Secretary Granholm.

" data-medium-file="https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2022/07/CSIRO-NREL-2-600x800.jpeg" data-large-file="https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2022/07/CSIRO-NREL-2-900x1200.jpeg" />

Left to right: CSIRO’s Bronwyn Fox and NREL’s Peter Green, with Australian Energy Minister Bowen and US Energy Secretary Granholm.Image: CSIRO

CSIRO & NREL

At the forum, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific, Research, and Industry Organisation (CSIRO) and the United States National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

“Under the agreement, CSIRO and NREL will initially focus on four areas of strategic importance to Australia: hydrogen, global power system transformation, plastics, and an accelerator/incubator program for small and medium sized enterprises that has the potential to transform our global energy future,” NREL’s Chief Research Officer, Dr Peter Green, said at the signing yesterday.

The agreement was also signed by CSIRO Chief Executive Dr Larry Marshall. “Importantly, through CSIRO’s shared national labs, it paves the way for new opportunities for Australian science institutions to partner with US national labs and industry to lead on cutting-edge research that will lower the cost of net zero energy technologies at a global scale,” Dr Marshall said.

Canadian Solar sells two Australian solar farms to US interests

David Carroll — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 12:30:09 +0000

Chinese-Canadian PV heavyweight Canadian Solar has for an undisclosed sum offloaded two of its Australian utility scale solar power projects with a combined generation capacity of 260 MW to an offshoot of United States renewable energy giant Berkshire Hathaway Energy.

From pv magazine Australia

Solar module maker and project developer Canadian Solar announced it has completed the sale of the 150 MW Suntop and the 110 MW Gunnedah solar farms in regional New South Wales (NSW) to CalEnergy Resources, a subsidiary of United Kingdom-based electrical distribution company Northern Powergrid Holdings which is in turn owned by Berkshire Hathaway.

The Suntop Solar Farm, near Wellington in central northern NSW, and the Gunnedah Solar Farm, west of Tamworth in the state’s north-west, were acquired by Canadian Solar in 2018 as part of a deal with Netherlands-based renewables developer Photon Energy.

Canadian Solar said both solar farms, which have a combined capacity of 345 MW(dc), have reached substantial completion and are expected to generate more than 700,000 MWh a year, avoiding more than 450,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions annually.

The Gunnedah Solar Farm was among Australia’s top performing utility scale solar assets in June with data from Rystad Energy indicating it was the best performing solar farm in NSW.

Canadian Solar said both the Gunnedah and Suntop projects are underwritten by long-term offtake agreements with Amazon, one of the largest multinational technology companies in the world. The United States-headquartered multinational signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) in 2020 to buy a combined 165 MW of output from the two facilities.

In addition to the sale of the projects, Canadian Solar said it has entered into a multi-year development services agreement with CalEnergy, owned by US investment titan Warren Buffet, that provides a framework for the companies to work together to build out Canadian Solar’s growing renewable energy pipeline in Australia.

“We are delighted to work with CalEnergy in Australia to grow their renewable energy portfolio,” Canadian Solar chairman and chief executive officer Shawn Qu said in a statement. “The sale of these projects in NSW paves the way for a strong collaboration between our respective companies.

“In Australia, we have now brought seven development projects to NTP (notice-to-proceed) and beyond and continue to develop and grow our multi-GW solar and storage pipeline. I look forward to continuing to contribute to Australia’s decarbonization and renewable energy growth ambitions.”

Canadian Solar has a pipeline of projects totalling approximately 1.2 GWp and Qu said he intends to grow the company’s solar projects and solar module supply businesses in Australia, while expanding into other C&I sectors in the region.

“We see a bright future ahead as Australia continues to expand its renewable energy market,” he said.

Solar panels keeping sheep fed during drought

John Fitzgerald Weaver — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 13:00:19 +0000

Two Australian farmers reported that their solar panels increased grazing quality during drought periods over a four year period, aligning with research suggesting solar panel microclimates might increase water retention, and grass production.

Two agrivoltaic installations in New South Wales, Australia are being credited with increasing the quantity and quality of fleece in sheep grazing at the facilities during a drought. Research has indicated that the partial shade offered by solar panels creates a microclimate that reduces evaporation and significantly boosts the production of vegetation in arid climates.

While these results are preliminary and anecdotal (and perhaps a tall tale from a fleece salesman down under), they offer potentially exciting field results that could be applied globally.

Graeme Ostini, a wool broker, says he’s been grazing his merino wethers (a variety of sheep) at a solar farm where sheep can graze under the modules. Ostini and other grazers say that over the past few years, these sheep have been ‘cutting an amazing amount of wool’.

Ostini said, “It is actually quite astonishing. Some of the sheep look fantastic. They’re growing exponentially and the wool cuts are in the top 5% in the district.” Ostini has been grazing sheep at the site for four years now.

At a separate site, a Tom Warren runs about 250 merino ewes and wethers on 54 hectares of land, land that he also leases to a solar developer.

Sheep on Mr. Warren’s farm were able to graze through years of drought, in part due to condensation from the panels.

Image: Tom Warren

Warren claims that while his wool yields remained the same, the quality of his wool improved significantly due to reduced contamination. The panels did more than provide shade for the sheep and grass: by slowing evaporation, they also prevented dust from contaminating the wool.

Mr. Warren noted that the solar panels condense water that drips onto the grasses and provide an additional source of water, increasing the carrying capacity of the land by around 25%. Warren also noted that, by leasing his land to the solar farm and grazing his sheep there, his income had increased.

The higher quantities of grass available for grazing were not surprising. Dr. Elnaz Hassapour Adeh, a researcher at Oregon State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, found that several key grazing grasses were able to significantly increase their output mostly due to significantly increased water efficiency – by 328%.

In total, the researchers found that areas that were partially or fully covered by solar panels increased their biomass production by 90%.

Ultracapacitor sonar seeking a 100% solar and wind grid

John Fitzgerald Weaver — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 16:50:07 +0000

Reactive Technologies uses an ultracapacitor to send signals into the grid that help managers determine the level of system inertia, supporting power grid stability, and they’re coming to the United States.

Reactive Technologies is expanding into the United States, and has recently won recognition from BloombergNEF as one of its 2022 Pioneers. In late 2021 they connected their first unit to the UK grid. The company describes its technology as “sonar for the power grid”.

Reactive starts by installing a shipping container full of gear that sits behind an ultracapacitor. This grid connected unit injects small, specific, bursts of energy — signals one might call them — into the power grid. The company listens to how the signals are distorted using in-house designed ‘measurement units’ strategically located on the grid.

The company’s Grid-Sonar software suite then collects the distortion data, and calculates the power grid’s system inertia, as well as other parameters. This information is then delivered to the grid operator’s management platforms so they can more discretely deploy grid supporting resources, and avoid turning on an entire coal plant to service a ‘tiny wobble’ that could be fixed with a much smaller and faster battery.

The company connected their first unit to the grid in the United Kingdom to support National Grid in October of 2021. In general, National Grid has been active in the budding “green inertia” space.

Grid stability is becoming a greater concern for operators in many markets as we transition into this brave new world. Recent events in California and Texas, which affected solar power generation heavily, bring this topic into even greater focus.

Solar-plus-storage has been running large off-grid solar power projects for decades, providing ample evidence that full size power grids could be run by the same technology.

Sonnen first made whole communities capable of going off-grid over a decade ago in Europe, and since 2017 in the United States. First Solar also proved its ability to provide grid forming services from modules in 2017. With ongoing inverter research, the full suite of solar gear (modules, inverters, and batteries) will be ready to run the grid very soon.

AEMO, the manager of Australia’s heavily renewable energy power grid, is investing significant time into solar inverters and batteries doing this work. The Philippines recently installed its first grid stability battery. The US’ PJM region also has a lot of energy storage grid services experience.

Keeping close to what we already understand, four ‘synchronous condensers’ were installed on Australia’s grid, allowing for more than a gigawatt of wind and solar to and avoid frequent curtailment, and to be almost fully utilized. These were the first units installed in the very advanced Australian renewables marketplace.

Synchronous condensers are very large metal flywheels that spin at 50 or 60 revolutions per minute, stabilizing the electromagnetic fields of the grid. These units are powered by electricity, rather than the steam from burning gas or coal. The hardware has been around for many decades, but is not needed on fossil heavy grids, since fossil generators already have spinning resources built in.

The large infrastructure investment firm, Quinbrook, recently installed the first synchronous condenser in the UK. Additional units will be deployed at three more UK sites this summer.

Goldman Sachs invests $250 million in Hydrostor to advance long-duration energy storage projects

Anne Fischer — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 15:56:41 +0000

The investment is planned to support development and construction of Hydrostor’s 1.1 GW, 8.7 GWh of Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage projects that are well underway in California and Australia, and help expand Hydrostor’s project development pipeline globally.

Hydrostor Inc. today announced a preferred equity financing commitment of US$250 million from the Private Equity and Sustainable Investing businesses within Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

Hydrostor, a Canadian company with patented advanced compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) technology designed to provide long-duration energy storage, uses proven components from mining and gas operations to create a scalable energy storage system that can store energy from 5 hours up to multi-day storage where it is needed. Hydrostor has projects worldwide in various development stages for providing capacity of over 200 MW each.

Read “Hydrostor to develop 1 GW of long duration energy storage in California”.

Goldman Sachs will fund its investment in tranches tied to project milestones to match Hydrostor’s capital needs and accelerate project execution. The financing will also support Hydrostor’s global development and marketing initiatives, including expansion of its project pipeline and capabilities in markets with significant near-term demand for flexibly sited long-duration energy storage.

Curtis VanWalleghem, Hydrostor CEO noted that this investment by Goldman Sachs is transformational for the company and “validates the competitiveness of our proprietary A-CAES solution as well as the strength of our pipeline of potential projects.” Hydrostor welcomes to its board Charlie Gailliot, Sebastien Gagnon, and Gunduz Shirin from Goldman Sachs.

Charlie Gailliot, Partner and Head of Energy Transition Private Equity Investing within Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said: “As the world continues transitioning to sustainable and renewable energy sources, the need for utility-scale long-duration energy storage is clear, and Hydrostor’s A-CAES solution is well positioned to become a leading player in this emerging global market.”

Last year Hydrostor received CA$4 million ($3.19 million) from Natural Resources Canada’s Energy Innovation Program and Sustainable Development Technology Canada to pursue its development of a 300-500 MW Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) facility in Ontario.

Read “Hydrostor wins funding for 500 MW of advanced compressed air energy storage”.

OpenSolar updates 3D design and sales software

Ryan Kennedy — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 19:07:31 +0000

The company worked with PVEL and NREL to test and validate its free design product.

OpenSolar released the 2.0 version of its free rooftop solar design and sales software platform.

OpenSolar said it worked with PV Evolution Labs (PVEL) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to test and validate the design product.

OpenSolar’s rooftop design tool uses 3D modeling.
Image: OpenSolar

NREL compared OpenSolar’s remote 3D tool with assessments made on the same roof by SunEye, the global leader in hand-held shade assessment, and found that the OpenSolar accuracy was within a 3% margin of error.

PVEL was tasked with evaluating the tool’s assessment of pitch and scale. OpenSolar’s model was accurate to within 1.3 feet in its assessment of scale. The tool also assessed pitch to within 4 degrees of accuracy 97% of the time.

The company’s energy modeling system, or the estimated production based on key inputs like pitch, azimuth, and shading, is based on NREL’s System Advisor Model (SAM). When compared with SAM, PVEL found that OpenSolar’s model is consistent with standard engineering practices. Its production figures were found to within 0.2% of SAM estimates, and within 2% of PVsyst model estimates.

“Our assessment of OpenSolar’s software confirms that its implementation of the SAM energy production model engine is accurate and in line with industry standards for residential and commercial projects and its 3D ray tracing calculations of beam shading are as good or better than other available products,” said Ryan Desharnais, chief technical officer of PVEL.

Startup Saturday: Greening the freight shipping chain for solar

Ryan Kennedy — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 12:56:56 +0000

Also starting up: Aussie startup claims a 25.54% silicon cell efficiency record, and Energy Vault exits startup status with a $1 billion offer.

This week on Startup Saturday we have three companies making potentially disruptive innovations in solar and energy storage.

PVpallet rethinks solar shipping

PVpallet, which recently netted a $1 million investment from Iowa-based ISA Ventures, looks to inject another layer of environmental-consciousness into the solar supply chain with reusable, recyclable solar panel pallets made from discarded plastic.

The startup looks to address the “true cost” of a traditional wood shipping pallet, including build costs, labor, transportation and handling, PV module breakage rates, and disposal costs.

PVpallets are stackable up to four high, potentially reducing warehouse space.

Image: PVpallet

PVpallets are made of discarded, recyclable plastic. The company said its design can accommodate 80-90% of the modules currently on the market.

The pallets are reusable around 20 times, and at the end of their lifecycle, they can be repurposed into new PVpallets. The pallets are stackable four high, which the company said can reduce warehouse space.

The pallets reached full-scale prototype Q1 2021, and production is expected to begin in September. Full production is planned for Q1 2022.

Silver-free cells

Sydney, Australia’s SunDrive has rocked the status quo, developing a silver-free solar PV cell while also pushing the world record of silicon cell efficiency to 25.54%.

A SunDrive cell.

Image: SunDrive

Silver is a core component in today’s solar panels, and panel manufacturing accounts for around 20% of the world’s annual silver consumption. Next-generation high-efficiency cells will require three times more silver than conventional panels.

SunDrive’s solution replaces the precious metal with copper, which is 100 times cheaper than silver, and abundant.

The company said it will produce panels locally in Australia as it ramps up, and will first enter the residential solar space.

SunDrive has attracted industry support with AUD 3 million ($2.2 million) provided by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

A startup no more

Gravity-based energy storage tower maker Energy Vault is set to jump from wide-eyed startup to publicly traded company as Novus Capital Corp said it plans to acquire the company for more than $1 billion.

The combined company will be known as Energy Vault Holdings and is expected to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “GWHR.”

Energy Vault’s product, as described in this pv magazine article, is a six-arm crane tower that lifts and stacks composite blocks with a grid-scale renewable energy powered motor. The blocks store potential energy, and when energy is needed to be discharged, the blocks are lowered.

An electric motor lifts and stacks large blocks, storing potential energy.

Image: Energy Vault

The result is a high-capacity, resilient storage application with the ability to meet both short- and long-term storage needs. The tower boasts 80-85% round-trip efficiency and a 35-year technical life. It suffers little to no degradation, an issue experienced in batteries.

The company said it has several customer agreements in place, and revenues could start to gravitate to its bottom line in 2022.

Relectrify closes multi-million dollar round of funding

Tim Sylvia — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 12:01:40 +0000

The company will use the funds to expand its team, as it looks to show off the innovation of its cell-level battery management system and inverter technology.

Relectrify, the battery technology startup that has gained notoriety for its cell-level battery management system (BMS)+Inverter technology, has announced the closing of a multi-million dollar round of funding from a consortium of global energy investors and energy companies.

According to Relectrify Vice President of Strategy and Business Development, Zezan Tam, the company will be using the investment capital to expand the commercialisation team, particularly in key markets in the US, EU and Asia, as well as committing some funding to the continual research and development process.

Tam explained that, because of the company’s Australian roots, global expansion and entry into worldwide markets has always been a foremost consideration at Relectrify. Bolstered by the strength of the company’s technology, Tam sees this expansion towards greater commercialization as an opportunity to prove that the Relectrify’s BMS+Inverter technology is applicable in any market, with any battery system.

A battery pack with opened covers showing Relectrify BMS+Inverter technology Image: Relectrify

“Our technology is a fundamental innovation on battery control,” explained Tam. “Typically in a battery, you have a number of cells in series, and those cells are controlled as a chain, so either the system is on or off, there’s no fine control. Our innovation is that we put power electronics on each and every cell, which means that we can turn cells on and off and control them and manage them individually.”

Tam went onto explain that the finer level of control leads to longer battery lifetimes and allows for the creation of inversion, allowing the product to act as an inverter as well. According to the company, the solution results in up to 30% increased battery lifetime at 30% lower cost of electronics.

What’s more is that, because the innovation is in battery control, rather than battery chemistry, the solution is chemistry and cell agnostic, and applicable to both novel and well established battery chemistries.

Right now, Tam shares that the company’s sweet spot is with large-residential and commercial and industrial projects, ranging from 15 kWh to a few MWh in capacity.

One such project is the company’s 60 kWh second-life battery storage system, run as a pilot in collaboration with utility American Electric Power and Nissan North America. This system combines repurposed batteries from Nissan Leaf vehicles with Relectrify’s BMS+Inverter technology.

Relectrify’s utility second-life battery pilot“In this pilot, we took a set of batteries that had come out of the equivalent of 4.5 electric vehicles, no testing, no sorting, put them straight into the unit, plugged our electronics in and our electronics unlocked the full capacity,” Relectrify cofounder and CEO, Valentin Muenzel, told pv magazine.

The system has undergone 500 charge and discharge cycles into and out of the grid, the majority at over 20 kW continuous power, for a total energy throughput in excess of 25 MWh. Over the course of testing, the pilot system achieved a round-cycle efficiency averaging approximately 88% AC-to-AC, including charge and discharge conversion.

The system is trending toward an expected lifespan of 3,000 cycles, surpassing the 2,000 that the Relectrify team predicted at the onset of the pilot. Muenzel also pointed out that the 3,000 cycle estimation is still a conservative one and that the actual figure could be higher still.

While the final funding figure has not yet been publicized, the funding round was led by venture firm Energy Innovation Capital, and brought in a host of new investors; including Japan’s Energy & Environment Investment; utility Energias de Portugal; and GS Futures, the corporate venture arm of South Korean conglomerate GS Group.

The round also included all existing investors, including Clean Energy Finance Corporation, as well as energy and mobility investors Peter Los and John Clifford, who also chairs Relectrify’s board of directors.

Green roofs can boost solar panel efficiency, study finds

David Wagman — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 13:08:11 +0000

The improvements are believed to stem from lower temperatures on the green roof.

From pv magazine Australia

The roofs of two adjacent office buildings in Sydney’s Barangaroo precinct in Australia have provided researchers a rare glimpse at the real-world effects of green roofs on solar arrays. The findings are substantial – in comparison to the conventional roof, the solar array fitted above beds of plants had an average daily power output 39 kW, or 13.1%, greater.

The study was led by Peter Irga from the University of Technology Sydney and funded by the City of Sydney Council, with research carried out on International House’s conventional array and Daramu House’s green roof array, known as a bisolar roof.

Both roofs generated substantial quantities of solar energy over the eight months they were studied, with the conventional roof yielding 59.5 MWh, while the green roof produced 69 MWh.

“Despite the similarities in build and location, the effect of urban geometry on solar irradiance on each rooftop is made evident outside of the hours during which the sun is near/at its solar peak… During these hours, the green roof produced an average energy output that was greater than the conventional roof by ~ 6 %. Prior to, and after these hours, the influence of urban geometry confounds the reportable efficiencies (-3.6 to 16 %)” the study read.

After correcting for these differences, the panels on the green roof were found to be, on average, 3.63% more efficient on any given day. Following on from that, over the eight-month study period the green roof produced an additional 9.5 MWh of green electricity.

This efficiency boost is thought to stem from the fact the green roof remained far cooler than the traditional concrete one during the day, meaning the panels did not overheat and therefore underperform. In some instances, the green roof was as much as 20°C cooler, with its temperatures also fluctuating far less in the evening.

Rare insight

While increasingly popular, there is currently a lack of research confirming the benefits of green roofs. Furthermore, “there is very little research that compares similar buildings which are exposed to similar environmental conditions by virtue of close proximity,” the study noted.

In addition, the significant increases in its solar array’s output, the green roof was also found to have a nine-fold increase in insect species diversity, as well as a four-fold increase in avian species diversity. It also saw reductions in some air pollutants, improved stormwater management, improved building insulation.

“For the size of the positive impacts generated relative to the costs, green infrastructure is perhaps the easiest and most efficient initiative we can make to help make our cities sustainable,” the study read.

The study’s authors described their findings as “substantial,” though they noted just two roofs were monitored.

Startup invents breakthrough non-toxic battery electrolyte that’s cheaper ‘by factor of 100’

David Wagman — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 13:24:33 +0000

It’s a breakthrough so simple that the Australian patent office needed convincing it counted as an invention.

From pv magazine Australia

About a decade ago, Professor Thomas Nann realized the key to achieving a zero carbon economy was not renewably generating electricity, which was already well on its way to undercutting fossil fuels, but rather energy storage – figuring out how to make these clean electrons dispatchable, able to be summoned on demand.

Professor Nann is today the Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Newcastle but became a chemist in his homeland, Germany.

In April, he launched startup Allegro Energy with two of his former students, Fraser Hughson and Rohan Borah. The startup seeks to commercialize its microemulsion battery electrolyte which, although mostly water by mass, has overcome the voltage limitations that typically hinder water-based solutions.

Battery electrolyte

Electrolyte sits between batteries’ anodes and cathodes, allowing ions to pass between the two conductors. In batteries, electrolytes are usually either water-based or use an organic solvent. Both these forms present their own issues. Organic solvent-based solutions, for instance, tend to have good electrochemical stability but are expensive and potentially toxic. With water-based or aqueous electrolytes, the issue is the solution only remains stable up to 1.23 volts, at which point the water splits into its separate hydrogen and oxygen molecules.

So when Professor Nann began training his attention on battery storage, he came up against precisely these issues which have puzzled researchers for decades. “At some point, I just thought ‘why not do both?’” Professor Nann told pv magazine Australia. That is, why not make an electrolyte with both water and solvent components in the form of a microemulsion. “We were completely blown away at how well it worked.”

Microemulsions

Of course, microemulsions aren’t quite as simple as adding dishwashing liquid and oil to water – rather, it’s the combination of water molecules with hydrophobic liquid, coupled with a surfactant which allows the two normally repellent solvents to bond. Basically the combination happens on such a ‘micro’ level it is not able to be split. “It’s thermodynamically stable,” Professor Nann said. “That makes them special and that’s why we can use them in a battery.”

When I asked why the concept had never been applied to battery storage, Professor Nann laughed – “that’s a really good question!”

“Actually when we submitted the patent in the first place, the patent officers came back to us and said ‘well, that’s too trivial’ and we made exactly that argument – why did no one else do that then?” he aid. “I think just no one has thought of that.”

The nub of Professor Nann and his co-founders’ discovery is that if you use a microemulsion as a battery electrolyte, you can overcome water’s pesky 1.2 volt barrier. “That’s kind of the secret sauce,” Professor Nann said.

“It’s very unusual – normally when you do research, you fail 99% of the time but that worked straight away,” he added. “It opened up a whole new world of research.”

(Read more.)

A breakthrough for p-type heterojunction cell performance?

Emiliano Bellini — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:56:04 +0000

Researchers developed a silicon heterojunction solar cell based on p-type gallium-doped wafers that they said has an efficiency of 22.6% and improved stability.

From pv magazine Global

A group of scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia and Russian heterojunction solar module producer Hevel Solar has developed a novel hydrogenation process that is claimed to have the potential to improve the stabilized efficiency of p-type heterojunction (SHJ) solar cell based on gallium-doped silicon wafers.

The solar industry usually applies n-type phosphorus–doped Czochralski–grown silicon (Cz–Si) wafers in the production of SHJ cells, as these ensure no susceptibility to the boron-oxygen light-induced degradation (B-O LID) that is typical for p-type boron-doped wafers and severely affects SHJ cell performance over time.

N-type wafers offer greater stability, but they are currently more expensive to produce than p-type wafers, which are the mainstream solution for the manufacturing of PERC cells. This means that using p-type wafers may potentially lead to a further cost reduction for the heterojunction technology, as wafer costs still represent 40% of a cell’s total cost.

In order to compete with n-type devices, however, p-type heterojunction cells will have to show improved performance.

“The same advanced hydrogenation techniques (AHTs) we use in mass production for solving LID and LeTID in p-type PERC solar cells can be used in p-type SHJ solar cells to solve B-O LID when using boron-doped p-type Cz wafers,” research co-author, Brett Hallam, told pv magazine. Even though the gallium-doped and n-type SHJ solar cells were stable in this work and didn’t need the process to improve stability, “we have shown that these same processes can improve the efficiency of gallium-doped and n-type SHJ solar cells by 0.4-0.7% absolute.”

The research group said that the expiration of Shin Etsu‘s gallium doping patent (US6815605B1) has encouraged the solar industry to adopt p-type gallium-doped Cz-Si wafers, which it describes as a potential mainstream solution for the SHJ segment for the next decade. (Read more.)

Electric vehicle battery materials factory to open in Tennessee

Ryan Kennedy — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 14:14:36 +0000

Novonix plans to retrofit a Chattanooga, Tennessee General Electric plant to produce 8,000 tons of anode materials annually for electric vehicle batteries and energy storage systems.

Australian EV battery materials company Novonix has announced its contract to purchase and retrofit a 400,000+ square foot plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee to accommodate their planned production of 8,000 tons of anode materials, a key feature in EV battery technology, as well as in battery energy storage.

Novonix said this phase of growth will support the production of anode materials that can supply lithium-ion battery packs for over 100,000 EVs.

The expansion plan will bring Novonix’s annual anode material production capacity to 10,000 tons annually by 2023. The company said it has major agreements underway with Sanyo Electric of Japan and Samsung of South Korea, both major international manufacturers of EVs and energy storage systems worldwide.

The anode material division of the Novonix parent company called Puregraphite has already been operating in Chattanooga since 2019. Puregraphite said it is the only qualified producer in North America of high-grade anode materials suitable for lithium-ion batteries for both electric vehicles and energy storage systems.

The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development said the project will create nearly 300 jobs, and the project represents an investment of approximately $160 million in the county.

Solaredge records pandemic progress despite tough final quarter

Max Hall — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 16:02:09 +0000

Full-year revenues nudged up despite tough comparisons with the end of 2019 for the final quarter of last year. The inverter maker expects to log revenues of $385-405 million in the current three-month window.

When Zvi Lando, chief executive of Israeli PV inverter company Solaredge said yesterday his company’s fourth-quarter results were “reflective of strength in the U.S. residential market and record revenues from outside of Europe and the U.S., led by Australia,” it is fair to assume he was referring to two encouraging developments.

However, the figures paint a picture of a tough fourth quarter, year-on-year, compared to the final three months of the Covid-free days of yore in 2019. What is beyond argument is that the inverter maker–which describes itself as a “smart energy” business after venturing into storage tech–achieved an impressive year of revenue progress on the 2019 results despite the global travails caused by Covid-19, and despite that tough end to the year.

Solaredge, which published its fourth-quarter and full-year 2020 results yesterday, shipped 1.36 GWac of inverters from October to December but nevertheless saw revenues fall to $358 million from the $418 million registered in the same period of 2019, just as the pandemic was stirring in China.

The figures

That meant gross profits in the last three months of last year came in at $110 million, from $143 million 12 months earlier just as R&D, sales and marketing and administrative expenses rose. Pre-tax profits in Q4 slumped to $24.8 million from the $61.6 million posted in October-to-December 2019, for a year-on-year fall in net income from $52.3 million to $17.7 million.

Far from capping a year of retreat, however, the close of 2020 failed to mask 12 months of revenue progress after Solaredge shipped 6.1 GWac of inverters in the period. That volume drove record annual revenues of $1.46 billion, mostly on the back of a record $1.36 billion raised from the sale of solar products, for a $300 million upside from the figure posted for 2019.

The revenue uplift was not sufficient to stave off an $18 million fall in gross profit, to $461 million, and rising R&D, sales and marketing and general administrative spending prompted a fall in pre-tax income, year on year, from $179 million to $164 million in 2020. That added up to a marginal fall in net income for last year, from $145 million in 2019 to $140 million. Not bad during a global health pandemic.

With Solaredge having freed up around $25 million in restricted bank deposits since the end of 2019, the company’s cash balance has risen from $224 million, at that point, to an $827 million warchest on December 31. The inverter maker secured more payments owed from its customers and piled up more inventory, year on year–further prudent actions during exceptional market conditions.

And the company was optimistic enough to predict a rebound in revenues from the fourth-quarter figures, with expectations of $385-405 million during the current three-month window, on the back of predicted solar income of $360-375 million.

Database lists 616,818 global sites for sustainable pumped hydro

Emiliano Bellini — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 14:28:06 +0000

Australian researchers said that oOff-river” pumped-hydro is not only able to overcome the typical topographical issues of conventional pumped-hydro but also is cheaper.

From pv magazine Global

Scientists from the Australian National University (ANU) have identified 616,818 locations worldwide that could be suitable for 23.1 million GWh of pumped-hydro storage capacity.

The sites relate exclusively to closed-loop pumped-hydro energy storage projects with little environmental impact due to their location away from rivers. The sites can be found through an open-source online platform managed by the Australian government.

The locations all are at altitudes less than 100 m above sea level and have sufficient height differences to enable potential energy storage between two water reservoirs.

“Off-river” pumped-hydro projects are also said to overcome the typical topographical issues of conventional pumped-hydro, as the size of reservoirs is relatively small, ranging from tens to hundreds of hectares. This limited size also reduces the need to manage large flood events and enables lower construction costs.

The enormous storage potential identified in the research should be mostly used for medium-term storage of intermittent PV and wind power generation. “The pumped hydro resource is well distributed at a regional and sub-regional level to support variable renewable energy deployment,” the academics explained.

Using just 1% of the identified sites in the atlas for pumped-hydro storage would be enough to support a global electricity system powered by 100% of renewables, according to the researchers. Currently, there are more than 180 GW of pumped-hydro storage systems in operation around the world.

The Australian group also emphasized that the levelized cost of storage (LCOS) for closed-loop, off-river pumped hydro is currently the lowest for storage of hours to days. The lowest energy storage cost is achieved in reservoir pairs with large head and large water-to-rock (V/R) ratios for the target storage capacity, they said.

The findings of the research were presented in the study Global Atlas of Closed-Loop Pumped Hydro Energy Storage, published in Joule.

Finding the ideal size for a quantum dot

Mark Hutchins — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 14:21:36 +0000

New research describes an algorithm that can calculate the ideal characteristics for a quantum dot to maximize cell efficiency.

From pv magazine Global

Quantum dots, crystal structures measuring just a few nanometers, are widely investigated for their potential to boost solar cell efficiencies by acting as a “light sensitizer” capable of absorbing and transferring light to another molecule. The process is known as “light fusion” and it enables an existing solar cell to absorb parts of the light spectrum with energy lower than its bandgap.

Most of the achievements made with quantum dots to date have been in conjunction with perovskite or organic PV semiconductors. Researchers have struggled to tune quantum dots to absorb the right wavelengths of light–and infra-red light in particular–to be compatible with silicon solar cells.

New research from Australia’s Centre for Excellence in Exciton Science, reports on an algorithm that can calculate the ideal characteristics for a quantum dot to maximize cell efficiency. Researchers used the algorithm to calculate that lead-sulfide quantum dots could set a new quantum dot cell efficiency record and ensure compatibility with silicon.

Details of the work are found in the paper Optimal quantum dot size for photovoltaics with fusion, published in Nanoscale.

More than size

The researchers found that size is a vital factor in the quantum dot’s performance, and that bigger does not always mean better.

“This whole thing requires understanding of the sun, the atmosphere, the solar cell and the quantum dot,” said Monash University’s Laszlo Frazer who worked on the paper. He compares the design of optimal quantum dots for particular light and solar cell conditions to the tuning of a musical instrument to a certain pitch.

Having worked to optimize the quantum dot’s ability to capture light more effectively, the next step for the researchers will be to look at the process where the dot transfers this light energy to an emitter.

“This work tells us a lot about the capturing of light,” Laszlo said. “Releasing it again is something that needs a lot of improvement. There’s definitely a need for multidisciplinary contributions here.”

The group also hopes to start building and testing prototype solar cells complete with quantum dot technology in order to better understand the performance and application of their theory.

Relectrify gets the most out of second-life battery systems

Tim Sylvia — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 14:30:49 +0000

After more than a year of testing, Relectrify has released interim results of a pilot that combines repurposed batteries from Nissan Leaf vehicles with proprietary inverter technology to create a battery system that has exceeded expectations.

After a year of functional and lifetime testing, Relectrify has released interim results of the company’s pilot system that combines repurposed batteries from Nissan Leaf vehicles with Relectrify’s BMS+Inverter technology.

The pilot, done in collaboration with utility American Electric Power (AEP) and Nissan North America, combines second-life batteries equivalent to 4.5 electric vehicles with cell-level battery management systems (BMS) to provide a high-efficiency AC output without requiring an inverter.

The resulting second-life storage system, clocking in at 60 kWh of storage capacity, creates grid-compliant AC waveforms by orchestrating a number of individual cell voltage contributions within a battery pack.

“In this pilot, we took a set of batteries that had come out of the equivalent of 4.5 electric vehicles, no testing, no sorting, put them straight into the unit, plugged our electronics in and our electronics unlocked the full capacity,” Relectrify cofounder and CEO, Valentin Muenzel, told pv magazine.

Project background

The pilot was originally born out of the Free Electron Program, a utility accelerator for startups where utilities work with energy startups to consider how their technologies can help the utilities’ business model. AEP took an early interest in Relectify and their technology.

Around the same time, Relectrify began working with Nissan and Nissan’s 4R Energy Japan subsidiary, with those two entities helping Relectrify to develop the technologies that make the system work.

The pilot began to come together a year later before finally being launched in December of 2019, marking the first time the technology had been taken out of a lab setting, according to Muenzel.

“This was the first time we took this technology out of the lab and into the real world,” Muenzel told pv magazine. “We expected that it would be installed and perform somewhat, but where we were unsure was how the lifetime of these batteries was going to look, what is the efficiency of these packs and, overall, how does it perform in a real-life setting, managed by someone other than us?”

Exceeding expectations

“The efficiency is higher than we thought and the lifetime is tracking better than we thought, particularly considering that the temperature these battery packs are in and the number of cycles they’re undergoing is a lot higher than you would see in most applications,” said Muenzel.

The entire pilot, thus far, has been conducted with the battery operating outside of optimal conditions, in order to prove the resiliency and safety of the system. This was done on purpose, with all involved parties wanting to be confident in these factors, considering that those are chief concerns with second-life batteries.

“We would much rather stress test these batteries, and know that they stand up in that, than put them under optimal conditions.”

Market application

While Relectrify technology is applicable to both new and second-life batteries, Muenzel expects that the two will end up having very different usage cases. He pointed out that a similar second life system would for example be particularly competitive in a backup power role, where the battery is being cycled once a week or less. The system would not be as well suited to something like frequency response, as it would quickly wear down due to the multiple daily cyclings.

However, in low-cycle backup scenarios, the pilot’s biggest advantage comes from the capital expenditure savings that come from using second-life batteries. The system also reduces the cost of battery management and inverter electronics up to 30%, according to Relectrify, with modular packs integrating the three-phase Relectrify BMS+Inverter, second-life battery modules and racking, priced from $150/kWh.

New ‘slide-in’ solar canopy tech from Australia

David Carroll — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 13:30:26 +0000

Australian design and manufacturing company PVDymanics has unveiled a solar canopy technology which can be used with both framed and frameless solar modules. The company believes its system can revolutionize the micro-grid market.

PVDynamics’ Series 100 solar roofing system incorporates PV panels which slide into position “quickly and easily” and are suitable for both framed and frameless solar modules.

Andrew Ferris, director of design and business development at PVDynamics, said the company had identified a gap in the market and had designed a solar mounting system suitable for a broad range of PV modules.

“We saw what was available in Australia and set out to create a solar mounting system … suitable for a wide range of solar panels,” he said.

“The challenge was to ensure the PVDynamics system be suitable for a wide range of different panel types, both framed and frameless, while being truly waterproof.”

Ferris said the design also addressed the risk of cell micro-cracking damage during installation and maintenance. While many of the existing mounting systems require installers to work over the top of solar modules, the Series 100 system includes a fully incorporated wiring and clip system which allows all fixing and wiring adjustments to be conducted from under the canopy.

“One of our fundamental goals was to develop a system which was quick to install,” Ferris said. “We achieved this by sliding the panels into position with all fixing and wiring easily completed from under the structure.”

The company said the system, which is manufactured in Australia, had been engineered for most terrain categories, including cyclonic, and had performed well in harsh conditions.

“We are really excited about our product having seen how well it performed … both during installation and then during weather events,” Ferris said.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) noted in its 2019 Future of Solar Photovoltaic report that solar canopy uptake was increasing steadily with carports and carparks chief among the applications.

Ferris said carparks were among the multitude of applications where the Series 100 system could be deployed.

“In the commercial context, solar canopies are increasingly being constructed over public parking areas at shopping centers, airports and hospitals,” he said.

“Considering the scope for solar micro-grid installations and the appetite for renewable energy, we believe the … system has huge potential.”

Australia makes another massive battery play

David Carroll — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 14:20:47 +0000

The state of Victoria is on track to host one of the world’s largest lithium-ion batteries. The 300 MW/450 MWh Victoria Big Battery will be constructed on the outskirts of Geelong.

Australia is once again looking to maintain its position as hosting the world’s largest battery storage system. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) said on Thursday that it has completed the System Integrity Protection Scheme (SIPS) procurement process on behalf of the Victorian government and has confirmed that Neoen has won the contract.

The French renewables producer will deliver the battery in collaboration with Tesla and network partner AusNet Services. It will also oversee its ongoing operation and maintenance.

Under the SIPS contract, which extends until 2032, AEMO will reserve 250 MW of the battery’s 300 MW capacity to operate in a control scheme to increase the capability of the Victoria to New South Wales Interconnector (VNI) and respond to unexpected network outages.

AEMO said the battery will provide an automatic response in the event of an outage, providing additional ways to ensure grid stability. The battery will also participate in the National Electricity Market (NEM) and support increased penetration of renewables in Victoria through network services such as fast-frequency control.

AEMO Managing Director and CEO Audrey Zibelman said the procurement process had attracted significant interest, and Neoen’s proposal was a standout.

“Neoen’s solution, developed with Tesla and AusNet Services, on a unit cost basis, was a significantly more cost competitive and attractive market response than other major battery developments in Australia,” she said.

“We are extremely proud to be launching a project of this scale and innovation in support of Victoria’s clean energy transition,” said Neoen Australia Managing Director Louis de Sambucy.

The Victoria Big Battery will be installed near the Moorabool Terminal Station near Geelong. It is expected to be operational by November 2021. It will be the largest battery yet constructed in Australia at twice the size of 150 MW/194 MWh Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia. Tesla and Neoen partnered on both stages of the Hornsdale battery project.

The Victoria Big Battery will rely on Tesla’s Megapack technology, which is also being utilized in Transgrid’s $44.9 million Wallgrove Grid Battery in Sydney.

Victorian Minister for Energy Lily D’Ambrosio said that the “humongous” system will be instrumental in helping the state reach its objective of 50% renewables by 2030.

“Victoria is embracing new technologies that will unlock more renewable energy projects than ever before – delivering clean, cheap, reliable power to all Victorians,” she said. “By securing one of the biggest batteries in the world, Victoria is taking a decisive step away from coal-fired power and embracing new technologies that will unlock more renewable energy than ever before.”

Clean Energy Council Chief Executive Kane Thornton said that the battery would play a significant role in the state’s accelerated transition to renewable energy.

“The battery … will provide key grid support services, particularly in peak periods should there be unexpected network outages,” he said. “Consumers will also benefit from low-cost power, with the battery able to store energy from clean wind and solar.”

Proposed $16B project combines world’s largest PV farm, largest battery, longest undersea HVDC cable

Eric Wesoff — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 18:52:20 +0000

Here's a high-level cost estimate of what transmitting solar power underneath an ocean might cost for the proposed $16 billion Australia–ASEAN power line.

The world has tremendous renewable energy resources, but often those resources are found far from population centers. For example, the best wind resources in the U.S. can be found in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, as well as throughout the sparsely populated central Midwest. Likewise, many of the world’s best solar resources can be found in sparsely populated desert regions.

The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has stated that large-scale deployment of renewable electricity generation will require additional transmission lines to relieve regional constraints.

In fact, there has been tremendous interest in linking up some of these rich renewable resources with population centers via transmission lines, but the costs are often prohibitive. These infrastructure projects are generally multibillion-dollar projects that must also win over approval from regulators and landowners.

Perhaps the most ambitious such project to date is the proposed Australia–ASEAN power line. This project would combine the world’s largest solar farm, the largest battery, and longest undersea electricity cable. Sun Cable, a Singapore-based company founded in 2018, is behind the proposed $16 billion project.

A 10-GW solar farm

The 10 -GW solar farm would cover 30,000 acres in Australia’s sunny Northern Territory. That is the equivalent of 9 million rooftop solar PV panels. The solar farm would be paired with a 30-GWh battery storage facility to enable round-the-clock dispatch of renewable power.

For perspective, the storage facility would be 155 times larger than Australia’s 193.5-MWh Hornsdale Power Reserve, currently the world’s largest operational lithium-ion battery. It would be 100 times larger than the world’s largest utility-scale battery, the 300-MWh sodium-sulfur battery at Japan’s Buzen Substation.

The high-voltage, direct current (HVDC) electric power cable will also be a major undertaking. The project currently envisions an 800 kilometer (km) overhead power line to transmit 3 GW to Darwin on the northern coast of Australia’s Northern Territory. From there, it would transfer to a 3,700-km 2.2-GW undersea power line to Singapore. Again, for perspective, this would be five times longer than the world’s longest undersea HVDC cable, the 720 km Norway-to-Britain North Sea Link that is scheduled to be online in 2021.

The project is scheduled to come online by the end of 2027. The project’s developers expect it to create up to 1,500 jobs during the construction phase, and up to 350 jobs during operations.

Challenges and costs

Given the interest in these types of projects, it is important to understand the challenges and ultimate cost of transporting renewable energy over long distances. The ability to do this economically has important ramifications from the Sahara Desert to the American Midwest to the Arctic.

To estimate the cost of the solar power produced by this system, we must make a few assumptions. The first is on the lifetime of the system. A general rule of thumb is that solar PV systems will last about 25 years. These systems can still produce power beyond that time frame, but significant degradation in the power output will occur by then.

Second, the amount of power produced over that time must be estimated. The capacity factor represents the percentage of energy generated over a period (normally a year) divided by the installed capacity. Because the sun’s output varies throughout the day and year – and according to location – the capacity factor for solar PV can vary from about 10% to 25%.

For example, if the 10 GW system could run at full output 24 hours a day, it could generate 24 x 365 x 10 = 87,600 GWh per year. Across Australia the average capacity factor for large-scale PV systems is estimated at 21%. Given the scale and location of the Sun Cable project, it’s not unreasonable to assume they could reach the upper range of 25% capacity factor.

In that case, over the lifetime of the system, it would produce 87,600 GWh * 25 years * 25% capacity factor = 547,500 GWh of power, or 547.5 terawatt hours (TWh).

There are also line losses to consider. Although direct current is a more efficient means of transmitting power over long distances than alternating current, some of the power transmitted is lost as heat. For DC, those line losses are dependent on the voltage of the line and the distance over which the power is transmitted. Most HVDC lines use voltages between 100 kilovolts (kV) and 800 kV. Given the power and distance traveled, the Australia-ASEAN Power Link will probably be on the upper end of that scale.

Siemens has stated that for 2.5 GW of power transmitted on 800 km of overhead line, the line loss at 800 kV HVDC is just 2.6%. Extrapolating that to the full length of the 4,500 km line would imply an overall power loss of 14.6%.

Thus, the overall delivered power could be estimated at 467.6 TWh. Then the simple levelized cost of the power produced from this project would be $16 billion divided by 467.6 TWh (which is equivalent to 467.6 billion kilowatt hours), or $0.034/kWh.

That is an attractive price, but it only provides a simple, low-end cost of the capital cost contribution to the project. This would need to be added to the ongoing maintenance costs – some of which could be significant if the undersea cable requires repairs – and financing costs. Available solar subsidies, which have also not been considered, could partially defray these costs.

***

Robert Rapier is a chemical engineer in the energy industry. Robert has 25 years of international engineering experience in the chemicals, oil and gas, and renewable energy industries, and holds several patents related to his work.

This article was originally published on The 4th Generation.

SolarEdge boosted by record solar revenues in Europe and strong residential growth

Jean Haggerty — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 14:32:19 +0000

Despite the pandemic, residential solar growth continues. Commercial solar, always the problem child, is having trouble coping with the virus.

SolarEdge Technologies reported that quarter-on-quarter revenues inched up 2% to $338.1 million in Q3, on the back of record solar revenues in Europe and significant quarterly growth in residential solar installations and sell-through in North America.

“In September sell-through reported by our distributors [in North America] was up 22% in residential and more than 40% up in commercial megawatts sold when compared to August, and [it was] at a level higher than the same month in 2019. As a result, current distributor inventory of our residential products are at a healthy level,” Zvi Lando, CEO of SolarEdge said. In light of this, the company anticipates 50% growth in residential sales in North America in Q4, he added.

The situation in commercial solar is more complex, however, and the European and North American markets are following a similar pattern.

“Initially, there was an expectation that commercial will overcome the pandemic at a faster pace, and as such, distributors and EPCs increased inventory during the first months of the pandemic. In actuality, commercial installations both in Europe and the U.S. – and even in Australia – are recovering slower than residential, and inventories in the channel are still high,” Lando said during yesterday’s Q3 earnings call.

Even though the commercial market has been slow during the pandemic, Lando said that he expects this segment to see significant growth as the market recovers in 2021.

Despite the onset of a second wave of the global pandemic in Europe, SolarEdge reported record solar revenues of $165.6 million in Europe in Q3, up from $144.3 million in the previous quarter.

During Q3, revenues generated from the sale of solar products from Europe represented 53% of SolarEdge’s $312.5 million in solar revenues. Although much of last quarter’s increase in Europe was due to strength in the Netherlands and Germany, traditionally strong markets for SolarEdge, the company also reported growth and record revenues in France, Poland and Switzerland.

The latest rounds of Covid-related lockdowns in Europe and all of the question marks around the pandemic are a concern, but SolarEdge is optimistic about next year, Lando said.

“During the first round of lockdowns in most of the world, residential continued almost without interruption,” he said. Throughout the first phase of the pandemic, Europe was installing at a higher rate than residential installation in 2019, he pointed out. Based on the signs that his company is seeing now, Lando thinks that this pattern will repeat during the current round of lockdowns in Europe, Australia and elsewhere.

For SolarEdge, the bigger restraint around the lockdowns is the ability to move people around. “That has definitely impacted [us], and [it] will probably be a couple of more months at least until that begins to ease,” Lando said. SolarEdge’s research and development activities have continued as planned, but pandemic-related travel restrictions have impacted the company’s certification and production target dates. “And we expect this will delay the release of our residential battery by several months,” Lando reported.

On a megawatt basis, in Q3 SolarEdge delivered 419 megawatts to the U.S., 708 megawatts to Europe and 254 megawatts to the rest of the world. Whereas residential products represented 49% of its megawatts shipped, commercial products were 51%.
Last quarter of SolarEdge’s top 10 solar customers represented 61% of its solar revenues. Two distributors alone accounted for more than 10% of the company’s quarterly revenues in Q3, Ronen Faier, SolarEdge’s CFO noted.

SolarEdge finished Q3 well positioned for growth; at the end of the quarter, its cash, cash equivalents, bank deposits, restricted bank deposits and investments stood at $1.2 billion, due in part to a convertible loan raised at the end of the quarter.
During the third quarter, SolarEdge generated $28.4 million in cash flow from operations.

Fluence acquires Advanced Microgrid Solutions, in bid to help customers monetize storage, renewable assets

Jean Haggerty — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 04:01:19 +0000

“Storage is the first truly digital asset that you can put on the electric network. That means the smarter we are with digital, the better job we can do powering the electric network,” Brett Galura, CTO at Fluence said, declining to disclose the acquisition’s price tag.

Fluence has acquired Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) as part of push aimed at helping its utility, developer and commercial and industrial customers optimize their energy storage and renewable assets.

AMS’s software and technology platform uses artificial intelligence, advanced price forecasting, portfolio optimization and market bidding to ensure that energy storage systems and other flexible generation assets are responding optimally to power market price signals.

“Storage is the first truly digital asset that you can put on the electric network. That means the smarter we are with digital, the better job we can do powering the electric network,” Brett Galura, chief technology officer at the energy storage technology solution firm, Fluence said, declining to disclose the acquisition’s price tag.

For AMS, which is currently active in the California Independent System Operator market and in Australia’s National Electricity Market, the acquisition increases its reach.

“As the market is growing rapidly, scale is important to us,” Seyed Madaeni, AMS’s chief executive officer and Fluence’s chief digital officer said. Fluence is a Siemens and AES company, and – as the new Fluence Digital business unit – AMS will be able to leverage Fluence’s global sales reach and make its software available around the world, he pointed out.

“One philosophy that we had at AMS that resonates with Fluence is technology agnosticism,” Madaeni said. “We don’t care who the manufacturer is… we do our best to monetize the asset,” he added.

According to Galura, Fluence and AMS’s technology will work together to provide customers with the data-driven insights that maximize the value and performance of generation and storage assets to help make the whole grid smarter. Whereas Fluence’s technology can be used to reduce balance of system costs, AMS’s AI-enabled software can help maximize the return on investment of energy storage.

“The use of a battery has a cost, and we have spent the last few years understanding the marginal cost of operations of energy storage system… For many companies, approaching the market side of things, they don’t have those cost insights,” Galura said. “Adding AMS’ visibility into the market-facing revenue side of things will deliver a complete and highly accurate picture of assets to customers that improves asset flexibility and maximizes ROI,” he added. Having granular insights on an energy storage system or a flexible generation asset’s marginal costs on a weekly, daily, hourly, minute or second of operations can be useful for gaining a clear picture of costs and pricing, and it can help customers optimize their assets, he said.

“[Storage and flexible generation] assets are critical elements of a modern, sustainable grid. The more that we can take advantage of these assets, the faster that we can transform. And the smarter the assets, the smarter the grid,” said Madaeni.
The acquisition follows a year-long partnership between the companies.

Morning Brief: Clean energy SPAC attack continues, Nextracker’s solar tracker design at Australia’s largest PV farm

Eric Wesoff — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 13:55:47 +0000

Also in the brief: David Crane's SPAC closes its IPO this morning at $230 million, Romeo Systems, a maker of lithium-ion battery packs for EVs is going public via SPAC, FERC OKs CAISO EV charging, storage updates

Nextracker’s solar tracker technology has been chosen for Australia’s largest solar farm, a 460 MW-peak installation in Queensland’s Western Downs. The independent power producer for the project is Neoen and the project’s EPC contractor is Sterling and Wilson. Installation of the trackers is due to begin in 2021. In testing conducted by Nextracker and verified by PVEL, Nextracker delivered up to 1% to 2% additional yield in bifacial applications compared to other traditional one-in-portrait trackers. Source: Nextracker

Climate Real Impact Solutions (CRIS), the first climate-focused special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), announces the formal closing this morning of its IPO at $230 million. CRIS is founded by David Crane, former CEO of NRG; John Cavalier, former managing partner of Hudson Clean Energy Partners; and Beth Comstock, 27-year veteran of GE. CRIS will identify, acquire and maximize the value of a company in the business of decarbonizing the residential, commercial or transportation sector; or in the business of removing CO2 already in the atmosphere. Source: CRIS

Romeo Systems, a maker of lithium-ion battery packs for EVs, is going public via a reverse-merger — merging with RMG Acquisition Corp in a deal worth $1.33 billion. Romeo specializes in EV battery systems for commercial vehicles. One key partner for Romeo is auto parts supplier BorgWarner, which owns a 20% stake in Romeo. The deal is expected to raise $384 million for Romeo. $150 million will come from The Heritage Group and Republic Services – the latter placed an order for 2,500 battery-electric garbage trucks from Nikola in August. Other companies in the EV arena – including Nikola, Fisker, Canoo, and QuantumScape – have gone public via a reverse merger this year or have announced plans to do so. Faraday Future, a Los Angeles-based EV aspirant, is seeking to go public via a SPAC deal, per comments by its CEO. Source: Reuters, Axios

FERC approved a CAISO tariff change to increase demand response participation by businesses offering on-site EV charging and a second change to improve accounting for the load-shifting capabilities of behind-the-meter storage resources. The ISO pays DR resources when they curtail load during times of high demand for electricity and strained supply. But a growing share of DR resources now include on-site load, generating capacity and batteries. In particular, the ISO said, a growing trend is providing EV charging at large energy customer locations, such as grocery stores, theaters and office buildings. ‘According to CAISO, EV supply equipment frequently operates under the same retail meter and account as their host facility,’ FERC said. ‘Thus, the entire facility must participate as a single metered resource even though the EVSE and on-site host load may have very different load profiles. Source: RTO Insider

Cutter Rail: Clenergy’s new mounting system just made for installers

Tim Sylvia — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 13:43:29 +0000

Solar industry participants have produced a new Australian-manufactured rail for PV modules that has been engineered to ensure safety and longevity, while catering to the needs of installers who work on residential and commercial rooftop projects.

It’s not often that solar installers are consulted on their requirements of the components they work with every day, but solar mounting manufacturer Clenergy has launched an entirely Australian made 4400 mm finished rail for solar modules, which had the input of a community of solar professionals dedicated to promoting quality in the industry and interested in a more local supply chain of equipment. A portion of sales of the Cutter Rail, a mounting engineered to accommodate the larger, higher-output solar panels now favored by the market, will also be funneled back into fostering the Solar Cutters group that contributed to its specifications.

Clenergy is an Australian company that specializes in the development, manufacturing and marketing of solar-mounting gear. Solar Cutters is a 2,500-member industry group, anchored in a Facebook page that provides rapid, experienced member feedback and assistance on curly problems encountered while installing solar panels on rooftops throughout Australia.

Some dedicated industry brands and manufacturers are welcomed on Solar Cutters, which derives its name from The Simpsons’ references to Stonecutters, and seeks to provide a sales-pitch-free zone for installers. “We only allow in participants who are going to demonstrate value,” Solar Cutters Co-founder and Director Jack “Longy” Long tells pv magazine. “If they are a manufacturer they have to be able to provide technical support within a reasonable timeframe.”

Clenergy’s National Channel Manager, Sean Guzzi, fits the criteria. Guzzi is second-generation solar — his father Mario Guzzi founded Clenergy as an inverter manufacturer, with partner Daniel Hong, in 2007. Eventually solar mounting gear became the focus of the business, but competitive factors meant the company has always manufactured its components in China.

Long and Guzzi became friends through Solar Cutters, each recognizing the other’s commitment to quality: “This is a great industry,” says Long. “We’re super passionate about about high-quality installations.”

They hatched a plan that would start to realize some of their individual and joint ambitions: Guzzi believed the cost of manufacture of quality aluminum products in Australia was reaching parity with product made in China, and wanted to start making some of the company’s components on home ground; Long was also motivated to support Australian manufacture and wanted to hold more networking and training events for Solar Cutters, but needed funding that came without strings attached.

For the people, by the people

“I was using the Solar Cutters Facebook group for feedback about the rail,” the design of which needed to consider current and emerging market trends, says Guzzi. “You know, panels are getting longer and wider every day, which creates more of an uplifting force if the wind gets underneath it,” he tells pv magazine.

Clenergy mounting gear is engineered to withstand Australian conditions, in particular the high winds of cyclone zones, and exposed coastal and outback areas. The company’s generic mounting products are sold with “an engineering certificate that takes into account the many different factors you might come across in a residential installation and some smaller scale commercial installations”, says Guzzi — factors such as roof height and pitch, the surrounding terrain (exposed or built up), the size of solar panels … Some 75% of installations are well served by Clenergy’s generic products, while tougher installs are referred to the company’s engineering team for bespoke designs.

In finalizing the new Australian-made generic rail, Guzzi turned to the Solar Cutter community for feedback, and among their responses was the decision arrived at by a poll on the Solar Cutters’ Facebook page, to extend the standard rail length from 4.2 metres to 4.4 metres.

“Basically, installers still wanted to be able to get four of the wider panels on a length of rail,” says Guzzi.

The Cutter Rail is manufactured at the Queensland and Western Australian plants of Capral — an ASX-listed company that employs more than 900 people — from non-anodised aluminum, to Australian and New Zealand standards AS NZS1170.2-2011.

“There are still cheaper products coming in from overseas,” says Guzzi, but he says sales are already supporting the quality of the Cutter Rail.

Long told pv magazine, “There was a big push in the industry and on social media towards sourcing locally manufactured products, and that’s something we at Solar Cutters can really get behind — especially when it comes to racking. A lot of people regard it as the cheapest component of an install, but it’s the most critical component of a solar installation for resi because it holds the load to the roof!”

He adds, “The fact that we had a bit of fun with it,” is another selling point. “Everyone loves the Monorail episode of The Simpsons, where Lyle Lanley keeps saying ‘Monorail, monorail, monorail’. Sean and I were saying, ‘Imagine if it was Cutter Rail, Cutter Rail, Cutter Rail’”.

Proceeds from sales of the rail are already flowing to support a series of installer nights, which will be scheduled when Covid-19 restrictions are further eased. “The content of the events will be voted for by members,” says Long, who is delighted that he and Guzzi found “a way to give back to the industry that doesn’t affect the installer’s hip pocket.”

Morning Brief: Maximizing solar self-consumption by rethinking panel orientation, carbon-neutral beer

Eric Wesoff — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 13:55:52 +0000

Also in the brief: Did we mention carbon-neutral beer? Plus drone inspection of transmission towers.

Maximizing solar self-consumption by rethinking PV panel orientation: Over 2 million Australian households—more than 20%—now have rooftop PV panels, and while this is a generally positive scenario, the increased uptake of PV systems around the nation is creating a few challenges for the electricity industry. UniSA solar researcher, Kirrilie Rowe, says one key problem facing home PV stems from the discrepancy between the times of peak use and peak production. “Solar panels on residential dwellings are typically installed facing the equator to maximize the energy collected, but the power generated by an equator-facing panel peaks at around midday, whereas residential loads typically have peaks in the morning and afternoon.” Source: Techxplore

Murata Electronics bringing its battery cells to work with Yotta Energy on its panel-level energy storage.

SunCast will be hosting its first SunCast Career Summit as a virtual experience on September 1st. Over three days, participants will engage with industry leaders, attend workshops tailored to practical advice, learn specific strategies in group and 1:1 settings, and develop their own game plan for success. The SunCast Career Summit will start on September 1st, with registrations opening on August 17th at 12:00 pm PDT. Registration and additional information are available here. Source: SunCast

New Belgium Brewing’s Fat Tire Amber Ale has become America’s first nationally distributed carbon-neutral beer. The accomplishment has been made possible throught New Belgium’s commitment to renewable energy, which includes powering the brewery with wind power and producing electricity with solar and biogas technology. New Belgium also developed the first carbon footprint study for beer, and has donated significant money to climate and environmental causes. Source: New Belgium Brewing

Cyberhawk, a drone-based inspection company, has secured secured a contract with a major California-based utility for the provision of unmanned arial vehicle (UAV) services. The scope of work includes thousands of UAV inspections of lattice steel towers and wood electricity transmission structures. The inspections will allow Cyberhawk and the utility to inspect and collect data on the structures, making it easier to detect any abnormalities or changes before they lead to negative consequences. Source: Cyberhawk

SolarEdge stock jumps on Q2 revenue beat and solid earnings — despite Covid-19

Eric Wesoff — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 23:36:42 +0000

SolarEdge was able to keep its streak of profitable quarters going -- in what was expected to be a hard-hit quarter for solar. The company sees "signs of recovery in the U.S."

SolarEdge was able to keep its streak of profitable quarters going, despite a squeeze in revenue and earnings — in what was expected to be a hard-hit quarter for solar.

The company posted Q2 revenues of $331.9 million with 94% of that from solar, all at a compressed GAAP gross margin of 31.0%. The company shipped 3.5 million of its solar power optimizers in the quarter, down from 5 million in the previous quarter. Here’s a link to the presentation.

The $331.9 revenue number beat analysts estimates.

“This quarter, despite the challenges caused by Covid-19, we maintained healthy profitability while generating cash from operating activity,” said Zivi Lando, CEO of SolarEdge. “Our global strength, and in particular our loyal customer base in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Australia, softened the decline in U.S. demand this past quarter.”

Second quarter 2020 highlights

Revenues of $331.9 million (down 23% q-q and up 2% from the same quarter last year)
Revenues from solar products of $310.1 million
GAAP gross margin of 31.0%
GAAP net income of $36.7 million, down 13% from the prior quarter.
GAAP net diluted EPS of $0.70, down from $0.81 in the prior quarter
1.44 GW (AC) of inverters shipped

Second Quarter 2020 Summary

GAAP operating expenses were $73.0 million, up 1% from $72.2 million in the prior quarter and up 12% from $65.3 million in the same quarter last year.

GAAP operating income was $30.0 million, down 56% from $67.8 million in the prior quarter and down 34% from $45.4 million in the same quarter last year.

As of June 30, 2020, cash and cash equivalents totaled $592.7 million, compared to $467.5 million on December 31, 2019.

Guidance for Q3 2020

SolarEdge provided guidance for Q3 2020

Revenues to be within the range of $325 million to $350 million
Non-GAAP gross margin expected to be within the range of 32% to 34%
Revenues from solar products to be within the range of $305 million to $325 million

Sales in Europe have returned

According to the the company’s presentation, “sales and installations in Europe have returned, and in some countries exceeding, pre-Covid-19 rate.” The company sees “signs of recovery in the U.S.”

The company sees “tracking indicators such as weekly new orders, installation rates and distributor sell outs all trending positively.”

SolarEdge stock is up 12% after hours and up 82% this year.

AES invests $8.6 million in startup to develop pre-fab solar arrays

pv magazine — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 13:53:24 +0000

AES, one of the world’s largest power companies, has made a strategic investment in Sydney-based pre-fabricated solar array manufacturer 5B to meet the growing needs of its customers for solar.

From pv magazine Australia

U.S. utility AES has made a strategic $8.6 million investment in Sydney-based 5B, in a show of confidence in the company’s prefabricated, redeployable solar technology.

The funds will help the startup to scale up its operations. It has already been tapped to build the world’s largest solar farm near Tennant Creek in Australia’s Northern Territory.

Maverick is the name of 5B’s modular PV systems, which come preassembled onto concrete blocks that replace conventional mounting structures. A single Maverick is a ground-mounted DC solar array block of 32 or 40 PV modules, which can be made with any standard framed 60 or 72-cell PV module.

Prebuilt Mavericks can be folded up, packed onto trucks for transport, unfolded, and then connected to a home or business in less than a day. “These significant advantages will help us meet our customers growing needs in today’s ever-changing environment,” said Andrés Gluski, president and CEO of AES.

For the full story, please visit our pv magazine Australia site.

PG&E, Tesla begin construction on one of the world’s largest batteries

Tim Sylvia — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 20:00:58 +0000

With 182.5 MW and 730 MWh of capacity and expansion capabilities that would bring it to 1.1 GWh, the Moss Landing battery energy storage system is set to be even bigger than Tesla's Hornsdale project in Australia, as big-battery development takes off worldwide.

A massive battery storage project is officially underway in Monterey County, California, with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and Tesla beginning construction on one of the largest battery energy storage installations in the world.

Set to clock in at 182.5 MW and 730 MWh, the Moss Landing battery energy storage system will be comprised of 256 Tesla Megapack battery units on 33 concrete slabs at PG&E’s electric substation in Moss Landing. The project’s targeted completion and energization is set for early-2021, with the project achieving full commercial operation in Q2 2021.

And while this project is certainly a noteworthy installation, it marks just the first step in PG&E’s huge battery storage project pipeline. In fact, this Tesla battery might not even be the biggest one located at the Moss Landing substation, as PG&E has signed a contract for a 300 MW storage system at the same location, which will likely clock in at 1.2 GWh of capacity. While this second system is currently set to be significantly larger than the Tesla one under construction, PG&E’s agreement with Tesla contains an option for upsizing, which would increase the capacity of this first system from four hours to six, or 1.1 GWh total.

That larger system, being developed by Vistra Energy, has also begun construction, with Phase I, which is 300MW/1.2 GWh set to come on-line before the end of the year. The project already has expansion planned, whihc will add another 100 MW/400 MWh.

Outside of the Moss Landing behemoths, PG&E also has third-party contracts for a 75 MW transmission-connected project near of Morgan Hill, California and a 2 MW project at the Gonzales substation in the Salinas Valley. The utility also owns a 20 MW battery system located the Llagas substation in Gilroy, California.

As familiar as PG&E is with large-scale battery energy storage projects, Tesla may be even more so. The world’s largest operating battery storage system, the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia, utilizes Tesla batteries and is colloquially known as the Tesla Big Battery.

This project initially sat at a capacity of 100MW/129MWh, but has since been expanded and is now rated at 150 MW/193.5 MWh. If the Moss Landing battery project is completed on time, that means that the two largest lithium-ion storage projects on the planet will be utilizing Tesla batteries – and it’s not like the competition is particularly close either.

As much disparity as there is on this list right now, it’s set to look entirely different in a short time. In addition to the Moss Landing battery project, there are a number of 100 MW storage projects being developed across the United States, including Clean Power Alliance Lancaster, AES Alamitos and Arizona, Strata Oxnard. There is also the massive 409 MW Florida Power and Light Manatee project.

In the UK, construction has started on the 100 MW Minety project, as well.

Morning Brief: To solve the climate crisis, we need an investment revolution, plus FPL looks at green hydrogen

Eric Wesoff — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 10:00:18 +0000

Also in the brief: Even the world’s top coal exporter is struggling to make money from burning the fuel, RFA for D.C. solar program

To solve the climate crisis, we need an investment revolution: Decarbonizing our entire economy by 2050 will require two things:

1. Massive investments and innovation in areas like electrification, affordable long-term energy storage, and regenerative agriculture.

2. Investors patient enough to allow these investments to pay off.

Source: World Economic Forum, Bloomberg New Energy Finance

Even the world’s top coal exporter is struggling to make money from burning the fuel: Australia’s coal power plants, which make up more than half of the nation’s generation mix, are facing increased pressure as rooftop solar hollows out daytime demand. That could mean early closures among the country’s aging fleet, giving energy planners the tricky task of ensuring energy security while replacing the steady, predictable flow of power with more variable renewable generation. A surge in new wind and solar capacity is driving wholesale electricity prices as low as $29 per MW-hr in some parts of the network — in many cases lower than it costs the plant to buy its coal. Almost one in four Australian households has panels. Australia’s coal fleet is mostly owned by the country’s three big power companies: AGL Energy, Origin Energy and EnergyAustralia. Source: Bloomberg

Notice of Funding Availability: The Washington D.C. Department of Energy & Environment DOEE seeks an eligible nonprofit organization to operate a year-round solar photovoltaic systems installation and job training program for underserved and underemployed District residents, ages 18 and over, and transition participants to more sustainable opportunities in the solar and related industries. The funding available for the project is up to $1,030,000 for one year. Obtain a copy of this RFA by mailing a request to solarworksdc2020@dc.gov with “Request copy of RFA 2020-2024-EA” in the subject line. Source: DOEE

NextEra’s FPL plans to propose a $65 million pilot project that will use unneeded solar energy to produce 100% green hydrogen through a 20-MW electrolysis system: Already the self-proclaimed ‘world’s largest generator of renewable energy’ with more than 17 GW of wind and solar generation in North America, the company is now dabbling in hydrogen energy. During the company’s second-quarter earnings call, senior executives said that they are taking a ‘toe-in-the-water’ approach, as they did with solar and battery storage, to green hydrogen. Source: RTO Insider

Solar and storage venture capital and finance roundup

Eric Wesoff — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 12:00:51 +0000

Plus a bunch of investments in carbon capture.

Here’s a roundup of recent venture funding and project finance in solar, storage and beyond.

SOLshare, a Bangladesh-based off-grid solar company, closed $1.1 million in financing from IIX Impact Partners, a crowdfunding platform for impact investing, as well as innogy New Ventures – the VC arm of German utility innogy SE, and the investment arm of Portuguese utility EDP. The company aims to bring solar microgrids to off-grid, underserved communities in Bangladesh. More than half of Bangladesh’s population has no access to electricity.

SOLS Energy of Malaysia received an undisclosed amount of funding from Petronas Ventures. The company designs, distributes, installs and maintains solar systems for residential, and small and medium enterprise sectors in Malaysia. The startup has also received funding from 500 Startups. The CEO is Raj Ridvan.

Tax equity and securitization for solar is alive and well

Mosaic, a U.S. provider of financing for residential solar and energy-efficient home improvements, closed a $280 million securitization of residential solar loans. “Our ability to securitize solar loans in this challenged market environment is a vote of confidence in solar energy as an asset class,” said Billy Parish, Mosaic’s CEO. The offering consists of four tranches of notes rated by Kroll Bond Rating Agency from “AA-” to “BB+” with weighted average lives ranging from 1.95 to 5.06 years. The notes are backed by $315 million of solar loans with a weighted average FICO score of 753.

Idemitsu Renewables, a utility-scale solar developer, closed tax equity financing for its 50 MW Central 40 solar project in Stanislaus County, California, and its 80 MW Pioneer Solar project in Adams County, Colorado. Both projects are under construction and will begin operating later this year. The tax equity syndicate was arranged by RBC Capital Markets. Pioneer will sell power to Intermountain Rural Electric Association, a nonprofit electric distribution cooperative in Colorado, and Central 40 will sell power to Silicon Valley Power.

Vivint Solar secured $300 million in new tax equity financing commitments. Vivint said the finance would help support the growth of its residential solar business, and the new money would finance around 185 MW of residential systems, equivalent to around 24,000 new customers. Vivint said the two deals satisfied its tax equity financing needs well into next year.

Energy storage

Orison, a Wyoming-based startup raised a $8.5 million seed round from investors including Australian electricity retailer Origin Energy. The company claims its batteries are designed to make energy storage accessible and affordable and allow “any energy consumer to self-install the system without utility approval or permits.” Origin plans to test and potentially deploy the energy storage solution later this year in the Australian market. According to uncritical reports at GTM, The energy monitor costs $300 and the battery system costs $2,200 for 1.8 kilowatts/2.2 kilowatt-hours — comparing unfavorably to Tesla’s Powerwall, which delivers 13.5 kilowatt-hours for $6,500.

Highview Power won a $12.5 million grant from the UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy for a 50 MW/250+ MWh cryogenic energy storage facility. Javier Cavada, Highview CEO, said, “This new cryogenic energy storage plant will deliver much needed long-duration energy storage and provide valuable services to the National Grid.” Highview recently received $43.5 million from Sumitomo Heavy Industries. The facility will use existing substation and transmission infrastructure, with income derived from arbitrage, grid balancing, and ancillary services.

Investments in carbon sequestration

Soil Carbon, an Australian startup looking to convert atmospheric CO2 into soil carbon, raised a $6.8 million seed round led by Horizons Ventures along with Grok Ventures, Clean Energy Finance and Lowercarbon Capital. “Microbe mediated carbon sequestration is one of the most important scientific endeavors of the 21st century. It promises an elegant solution for two of our greatest challenges today: the decrease of fertility and resilience in the world’s agricultural soils and climate change induced by the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere,” according to the company’s website. The company is developing a carbon-fixing endophytic fungus to sink carbon in soil. Here’s a video.

Carbon Clean Solutions Limited (CCSL), a UK-based startup focused on low-cost CO2 capture and separation technology, closed on a $22 million series B round from Equinor Ventures and ICOS Capital, joining WAVE Equity Partners, Chevron Technology Ventures, and Marubeni Corporation. The company is looking at CO2 capture technology for use across the steel, cement, waste management and refining & petrochemicals sectors. According to the company, its commercially available carbon capture process is applicable for industrial flue gases or off-gases with CO2 concentrations ranging from 3 to 25 vol.% and can achieve 90%+ capture rates.

Climeworks raised $75 million to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere last month, in a direct-air capture process where CO2 from fossil generators and industrial sources is captured, treated and injected into underground earth formations for permanent storage or for industrial use.

Solar panel recycling: Turning ticking time bombs into opportunities

Eric Wesoff — Wed, 27 May 2020 23:53:06 +0000

With the average lifespan of a solar panel at roughly 20 years, installations from the early 2000s are set to reach end-of-life. Will they end up in landfill or be recycled? The cost of recycling is higher than landfill, and the value of recovered materials is smaller than the original, so there’s limited interest in recycling. But given the presence of heavy metals, if waste is managed poorly, we’re on track for another recycling crisis.

From pv magazine’s global site.

The presence of hazardous materials in the end-of-life solar panels can result in significant pollution and health issues, if released into the environment. To close the loop in the energy cycle, the next mission of the solar panel industry is the safe disposal or recycling of end-of-life products. In the waste management hierarchy, however, re-use or value-added recovery/re-purposing is considered preferable to recycling.

The main contributor to the total weight of a typical crystalline silicon PV module is glass (75%), followed by polymer (10%), aluminum (8%), silicon (5%), copper (1%) and small amounts of silver, tin, lead, and other metals and components. Lead and tin, if leached into soil and groundwater cause health and environmental concerns, while copper, silver, and silicon present a value opportunity if recovered efficiently. So, the landfill option should be fully replaced with recycling to prevent environmental pollution and retrieve the valuable materials present in the panel.

(pv magazine spent Q4 2019 looking at the use of lead in c-Si modules as a part of its UP initiative. Topics included the use of lead in perovskites and lead alternatives. Read more, stay tuned and get involved!)

Currently, however, recycling cannot be considered the economically favorable option, so economic incentives are required to accelerate this displacement. Among the valuable materials in the panel, silicon presents the best opportunity, given its considerably larger fraction and its ultra-high purity (99.9999% or six nines/6N). The solar-grade silicon from PV waste can be recovered for second-use applications in solar panels or repurposed for value-added application in the anodes of advanced lithium-ion batteries.

One industry’s pain could be another industry’s treasure

The growing number of electric vehicles has presented an opportunity to the materials recycling world and waste management industry; and there may be room for used solar panels too. Today’s EV batteries are an essential part of the total EV cost (33% to 57% depending on the car), and materials production is the dominant contributor to the energy cost of making the batteries. Cost-cutting strategies rely heavily on innovations at the materials level, i.e. raw materials sourcing and processing.

While EV fans definitely welcome lower prices, setting mileage records is what makes headlines. In 2015, Elon Musk claimed that silicon in Model S batteries increased the car’s range by 6%. Ever since, EV companies like Daimler and BMW have also been actively engaged in research and development programs to synthesize battery-grade silicon for EV applications. Silicon recovered from the solar panel may just be what they need.

Australia can play an even more influential role

Australia has always placed well among the fast-expanding PV markets such as China, Japan, India, and the U.S. Now with more than 2.3 million rooftop solar power systems installed across the country, Australia officially ranks first.

The other thing we have in common with these countries is not, unfortunately, something to brag about: Recycling of end-of-life PV modules is not regulated in Australia. In fact, Europe is the only region that has a robust and transparent regulatory framework to support the PV recycling process. As of mid-2012, the recast WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) Directive 2012/19/EU mandates European countries to adopt PV waste management programs where producers are responsible for the take-back and recycling of the panels they sell.

The goal of these policies is to develop greener products, and make recycling more affordable and economically sustainable by leading producers to factor in the cost of the collection and end-of-life treatment of their products into the price paid by the consumers.

In Australia, we are working on it, throughout a national program led by the Victoria state and in close relation with the PV industry. The goal is to make recommendations to states, territories, and federal governments on a preferred national management approach. While the outlooks of the program are undoubtedly promising, accelerating the development of it may be critical. In fact, the criticality of the issue was recognised in 2015, when solar panels were identified as the fastest-growing e-waste stream without dedicated recycling infrastructure in the Victorian e-waste market flow and processing capacity analysis.

It is expected that more than 100,000 tons of solar panels will enter Australia’s waste stream by 2035. Is this a crisis or an opportunity? If you look up solar panel recycling in Australia, there are a number of services. However, mostly they can recycle less than 20% by weight – the aluminium frame and the terminal boxes. Recycling the remaining 80%, including the precious silicon, is not currently offered in Australia, but it does not have to remain like that.

You can only do what you can sell

While as users,we can’t do much but rely on responsible recycling businesses to properly dispose of solar panel waste, as scientists and engineers, we may be able to do more. Providing scientific evidence on the potential impacts and benefits of recycling PV panels could incentivize the government and industry.

Our collaborative study with The Group of Research in Energy and Environment from Materials at the University of Liege in Belgium, provides such evidence. Evidence that in the future, end-of-life solar panels may prove to be a valuable secondary resource for a critical material in electric-vehicle batteries: Ultra-pure Nano-structured Silicon.

The process of recycling silicon modules in Europe began more than a decade ago; however, the problem associated with most processes developed to date is that the recovery rate is not more than 80% and the value of the retrieved materials is not competitive compared to the originals.

As part of this program, the university group patented a greener, more cost-effective method of dismantling the PV modules; namely by avoiding the high temperatures (450-600°C) usually employed for burning the materials. This new hydrothermal recycling method, which is conducted at temperatures below 200°C prevents the combustion of halogenated-polymers and the vaporization of heavy metals such as tin, lead, and silver; hence avoiding the waste gas treatment step.

Just as important, the use of moderate temperatures prevented the melting and diffusing of metallic contacts components into other photovoltaic components, such as glass and silicon wafers, which bypass the purification steps necessary for the recovery of high purity silicon and glass. The simple and scalable dismantling process was tested on several PV brands, and advantageously offered clean glass, which was made available to relevant industries to evaluate the value of the recovered material.

A new discovery, published in the Journal of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, reports on the simple and economic recovery of nano-structured silicon from end-of-life PV panels with demonstrated value-added applications in lithium-ion batteries.

As scientists, we cannot do much marketing, but we can provide evidence that if you recycle properly, you can sell.

About the author

Dr. Mahdokht Shaibani has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, with a focus on energy storage from Monash University, Australia.

University of Queensland’s Tesla battery paying for itself

Blake Matich — Tue, 19 May 2020 06:00:48 +0000

The University of Queensland has released a performance report on the Tesla Powerpack it installed in December 2019. Across a range of revenue streams, the Powerpack is already earning the university some serious cash.

From pv magazine Australia

In December 2019, the University of Queensland (UQ) flipped the switch on one of the state’s largest behind-the-meter battery storage systems – a 1.1 MW/2.15 MWh Tesla Powerpack.

This week, it released “The business case for behind-the-meter energy storage,” a report on the first-quarter performance of its Tesla battery. The university, which funded the Powerpack through the sale of renewable energy certificates created by its 6.3 MW behind-the-meter solar PV portfolio, hoped that the energy storage system would reduce the university’s monthly peak demand charges.

The Powerpack reduced the university’s peak demand charges, and in the first three months of this year, it actually delivered $48,300 in revenue.

Revenue driver

The university’s Powerpack has delivered revenue across several main services.

Grid frequency

The university partnered its Powerpack with Enel X, whereby it is paid to keep its battery on standby, so it’s ready to respond rapidly to sudden grid frequency issues. The National Electricity Market’s (NEM) Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) then pays the university for its storage.

FCAS outperformed the university’s forecast by a staggering 54% – an outcome that is being put down to unprecedented pressure on the NEM brought on by the past summer’s bushfires, storm events, and other issues facing Australia’s outdated grid.

Virtual cap

A virtual cap contract (VCC) is a kind of financial insurance on the wholesale electricity spot market. To manage risk in a volatile market cap, contracts are offered for a premium, and a payout is provided if the market’s prices exceed that cap. Typically, in the NEM, the threshold is $190/MWh. The university’s Powerpack is able to discharge energy when the price exceeds the threshold.

Given that the first quarter was the first real outing for the Powerpack, it has performed extraordinarily well. However, the university believes that its performance can only improve. First, it wants to develop an effective control strategy to maximize arbitrage revenue. However, this depends on the Australian Energy Market Operator producing better pre-dispatch price forecasts.

The university also believes it can improve on its FCAS and virtual cap revenue. Indeed, its financial modeling estimates that the battery could provide a financial return of $160,000 per year in a short period, and pay for itself within eight years. The expected lifetime of the battery is 15 years.

Top global Li-ion battery projects: Tesla grows lead as Hornsdale expands to 150 MW

Eric Wesoff — Sat, 18 Apr 2020 18:00:02 +0000

The world's biggest battery is now rated at 150 MW/193.5 MWh and dwarfs any lithium-ion battery system in operation worldwide.

The 50-megawatt expansion of what is already the world’s largest lithium-ion battery, the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia with batteries from Tesla, has completed its network connection, according to independent power producer Neoen Australia.

Hornsdale Battery Extension: network connection works completed! The world biggest battery to provide soon extra reliability to the grid in those extremely challenging times (very low demand, increased risks of outages, …).
Congrats to the #CPP, #Tesla and #Neoen teams ! pic.twitter.com/2nZixPSJLb

— Neoen Australia (@NEOEN_AU) April 3, 2020

Hornsdale Power Reserve, the world’s biggest operational lithium-ion battery, abuts the 315 MW Hornsdale Wind Farm in Jamestown, South Australia. The project is now rated at 150 MW/193.5 MWh and dwarfs any other lithium-ion battery system in operation around the globe.

Table: Largest global operational Li-ion storage projects – by rated power

Certainly, there are a few compressed air energy storage projects in operation with much higher power capacity. Japan has a few large, vintage sodium sulfur batteries in operation. (DOE global energy storage project database here)

As pv magazine Australia has reported, the expansion of the Hornsdale battery is intended to provide grid-scale inertia services and fast-frequency response on Australia’s National Electricity Network.

The battery has already brought down grid stabilization costs by roughly $40 million in its first year of operation, according to consultantcy Aurecon.

At the same time, Hornsdale generated roughly $50 million in revenues in less than two years through the provision of both Contingency and Regulation Frequency Control Ancillary Services and through arbitrage trading. Even during severe grid anomalies, such as those impacting an interstate interconnector after a lightning strike, the big battery has successfully kept the lights on in South Australia’s renewable-heavy grid.

Hornsdale will be tasked with supplying fast-frequency response and system inertia – termed “synthetic inertia” when delivered by battery storage. Historically, large fossil-fuel or hydro-electric units, or synchronous generators, have provided system inertia by virtue of their spinning turbines.

Ian Learmouth, the CEO of Clean Energy Finance Corporation, a governmental green bank that has provided debt financing for the project, said that the provision of synthetic inertia is “critical” if renewable penetration levels are to continue to grow.

100 MW energy storage projects galore

There is a pipeline of giant lithium-ion projects scheduled for completion in 2020 and 2021 that will change the look of that earlier “biggest project list.”

The UK is building the 100 MW Minety project. And, in the U.S. alone, there are a number of 100 MW storage projects (Clean Power Alliance Lancaster, AES Alamitos and Arizona, Strata Oxnard) as well as the 300 MW Vistra Moss Landing project and the massive 409 MW Florida Power and Light Manatee project.

ClearVue’s luminescent solar concentrators create clear PV windows

Eric Wesoff — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 13:00:25 +0000

The lure of building integrated photovoltaics continues to attract entrepreneurs and startups.

ClearVue is a small ASX-listed Western Australia-based solar company looking to generate power from clear windows. It’s another attempt at building integrated photolvoltaics (BIPV).

However, this company’s solar power generation method is very different from conventional silicon or thin-film solar approaches to BIPV.

ClearVue’s transparent luminescent solar concentrator is a spectrally selective polyvinyl butyral interlayer sandwiched between two panes of glass. Most visible light is transmitted through the glass, but infrared light is deflected by inorganic particles in the interlayer to solar cells in the frame. UV light is converted to infrared and also deflected to cells on the window perimeter via total internal reflection.

In 2019, pv magazine Australia reported that ClearVue signed a memorandum of understanding with Taiwanese thin-film CIGS solar manufacturer BeyondPV to supply PV strip modules for use in its insulated glass units and windows.

The CIGS solar strips are applied to the permeter of the integrated glass window units.

Luminescent solar concentrator

A luminescent solar concentrator (LSC) is made from plastic or glass with fluorescent materials or quantum dots in or on it. The hope for the LSC is that cheap dyes or phosphors can make the system inexpensive as well as tolerant of defects or angle.

The luminescent ingredients can be dialed-in to absorb and re-emit at selected wavelengths. Luminophores used in LSCs can be quantum dots, rare-earth ions, nanoclusters and organic molecules. There has been a recent move away from organic dyes towards more stable inorganic phosphors.

pv magazine USA spoke with ClearVue’s CEO Victor Rosenberg and senior staff last week.

Rosenberg said that the window product is absolutely clear and claims:

Solar conversion efficiency of the window is 3.3%
The 1.1 X 1.2 meter unit has been tested to UL 61730
Two OEMs in China are in production

ClearVue wants to license its technology to big glass companies, like Ubiquitous Energy, another clear solar window technology startup.

The glass and window industries are conservative and risk adverse. As Ubiquitous Energy told pv magazine, “It has to work, be efficient and durable — and they still need to see large-size product before they move.”

ClearVue’s path to commercializing an integrated solar window facade is not just an engineering problem. The company has to drive a completely new type of window and curtain wall product through the very conservative building channel — and that’s a daunting marketing challenge — especially for a lossy, pre-product company with limited sales and cash in the bank.

According to an investor presentation, $9 million has been invested in ClearVue over the last eight years.

VC-funded companies such as Israel’s Pythagoras Solar and California’s Solaria tried and failed to commercialize solar windows. Other companies still in the fray include:

Heliatek’s organic solar cell technology is focused on windows and facades
Ubiquitous Energy is working on transparent solar window films using organic solar cells.
Onyx uses amorphous silicon to create facades and curtain wall
SolarGaps builds solar blinds
Physee’s solar facades
eni – developed with MIT, eni builds plastic-based luminescent solar concentrators

Forget toilet paper, Australians are panic-buying PV

pv magazine — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 12:00:04 +0000

Byron Bay-based solar retailer Smart Energy says it is seeing an unprecedented surge in sales and inquiries for solar and home energy storage as consumers look to shore themselves up in uncertain times.

From pv magazine Australia.

New South Wales-based solar retailer Smart Energy has said it is witnessing a record sales quarter after an unprecedented 41% increase in sales and a 400% increase in battery inquiries over the last two weeks as panicking consumers look to protect themselves in uncertain times.

While other industries are being battered by the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Byron Bay-based Smart Energy is taking on additional resources and looking for ways to support communities and installers as the solar and battery retailer enjoys an unprecedented surge in demand.

Smart Energy co-founder Elliot Hayes said there are many contributory factors to the explosion in interest in solar and storage, with the main ones consumers seeking greener purchases following the recent bushfires and floods in Australia and the associated economic downturn, and people seeking to future-proof their homes.

On-site energy

With a deep-set global recession far from unlikely and people self-isolating and using more electricity at home as a result, generating and consuming energy on-site is one way to guarantee a measure of supply.

“Our growth is a by-product of economic uncertainty that is driving both residential consumers and businesses to look for ways to future-proof their savings, homes and businesses,” said Hayes in a statement. “People are also more worried about the state of the planet than they have been before, and rightly so. They’re looking for ways they can make a difference like conserving energy, being aware of the products they buy and their means of transportation.”

Payback period

In August, pv magazine Australia spoke to Hayes about Smart Energy’s rapid expansion from the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. Hayes said high-quality workmanship and a business model that enabled customers to pay for solar with the savings it generates were crucial to the business’ success. “Typically, our customers pay off their system in five years or less, at which point they own the system and enjoy free electricity from there on in,” said the co-founder at the time.

The solar industry in Australia had expected to take quite a hit from the COVID-19 outbreak, considering most of its panels are shipped from China, where the virus originated. However, market intelligence firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance has reported PV component production is already resuming in China and while short-term shortages are expected, the global solar capital is expected to prioritize meeting export demands ahead of those of its domestic market.

By Blake Matich

Bushfire-affected South Australia homeowners to get free sonnen batteries

Marija Maisch — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 21:29:09 +0000

The state government has partnered with the German energy storage company to offer 188 families locally assembled sonnenBatteries as they rebuild their homes.

From pv magazine Australia.

South Australians rebuilding their homes in the wake of a cataclysmic bushfire season will be offered free battery storage systems through a program launched by the state government and German manufacturer sonnen. The program will benefit any of the 188 families who lost their homes in the state during the devastating fires and who opt to include rooftop solar in their rebuilds.

State minister for energy Dan van Holst Pellekaan today said installing batteries as part of rebuilds would help make post-bushfire homes more sustainable and resilient and offer them access to cheaper electricity. “People who lost their homes in the fires need a helping hand to re-establish themselves and a battery worth more than $6,630 will reduce their future electricity bills whilst adding value to their new home,” he said.

The initiative will also ensure energy security for properties in vulnerable or remote parts of the grid, said the state minister. “Kangaroo Island and parts of the Adelaide Hills can have outages due to storms so rebuilding with batteries will make households more energy resilient by improving reliability and affordability,” said Van Holst Pellekaan.

sonnen commitment

For sonnen, which set up an assembly and production facility at the former Holden car manufacturing site in Adelaide in 2018, the program is an opportunity to support the South Australian community after the fires. “This initiative will help add significant value to those rebuilding their homes, alleviating pressures of energy costs and providing them with the control to manage their energy needs more independently,” said sonnen Australia CEO Nathan Dunn.

The German company’s decision to establish the plant was driven by the launch of the South Australian government’s Home Battery Scheme, which aims to install 40,000 systems across the state by offering subsidies. Uptake of the program is reported to have risen in recent months and participants have cut their electricity bills significantly, sometimes to almost nothing, according to Van Holst Pellekaan.

In another community rebuild initiative stretching across New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, the Resilient Energy Collective is looking to install standalone solar and battery systems at up to 100 sites affected by the bushfires and the floods that followed them. Funded by software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and his wife Annie, the venture is rolling out pre-fabricated solar arrays made by Sydney-based 5B as well as Tesla batteries in communities disconnected from the electricity grid.

Oil and gas giants Shell and Total get serious about solar

Eric Wesoff — Sun, 09 Feb 2020 17:00:34 +0000

Total acquired 50% of India's Adani Group’s solar portfolio for $510m and Shell is building its first large-scale solar farm, a 120-MW effort in Australia.

Oil and gas majors have made forays into solar power and renewable energy over the past decades but it always seemed more like public relations than full-on commitment.

That might be changing.

Reluctant oil efforts into solar and renewables

The history of photovoltaic commercialization was launched, in part, by Exxon in the 1970s. Atlantic Richfield’s efforts in solar manufacturing and solar power plants were eventually sold to Siemens in the 1980s. (This glosses over a lot of history and solar heroes.)

Japan’s oil producer Showa Shell Sekiyu recently merged with Japanese oil refiner Idemitsu Kosan, changing the ownership of thin-film PV builder Solar Frontier.

Shell and Oman’s sovereign wealth fund have invested in concentrated solar power in order to better extract fossil fuels by “heating a cubic mile of earth” to free stubborn reserves with enhanced-oil recovery.

Every few years, Exxon and J. Craig Venter of Synthetic Genomics issue a joint proclamation about progress in biofuels derived from algae. Venter gets funded, Exxon gets green cred, and we are once again reminded that algae oil is the fuel of the future.

Oil and gas firms getting serious about solar

Judging by recent efforts from Total and Shell, it appears that oil and gas firms are seeing the writing on the wall when it comes to climate change, and perhaps the obligations of their social contract. They are getting serious about solar power.

Oil and gas major Total acquired a 50% stake in Indian conglomerate Adani Group’s solar business for $510 million, according to a release.

Adani has a portfolio of 2,148 MW of installed solar capacity and 172 MW of installed wind capacity, along with more than 2 GW under construction. According to Total, all the projects benefit from nearly 25-year power purchase agreements with national and regional electricity distributors.

Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani said in a statement:“The investment reinforces the immense potential in India’s renewable energy sector.

Total forecasts that its low-carbon operations could account for 15% to 20% of its sales by 2040. Currently Total’s low-carbon power generation capacity is nearly 7 GW, with 3 GW coming from renewable sources, according to the company.

Total envisions India’s solar capacity growing from 81 GW in 2019 to 225 GW in 2022.

Total is a also majority stake holder in high-efficiency solar leader SunPower and has a well-funded low carbon-focused venture arm.

Tom Heggarty, principal analyst with Wood Mackenzie, said that the Adani investment was Total’s sixth investment in renewable power including acquisitions of solar PV and wind assets in France, Australia, Brazil and Egypt.

Total already had a foothold in the Indian solar PV market through its joint venture with EDF Renewables, with over 200 MW under ownership, along with PPAs for an additional 700 MW of generation.

Shell’s first large-scale solar power plant

Royal Dutch Shell will begun construction on the Gangarri project, its first large-scale solar farm, as part of its plan to expand into power generation, according to a release. Shell looks to complete the plant in Queensland, Australia at Wandoan, around 250 miles west of Brisbane, early next year. The 400,000-panel, 120-megawatt solar farm is near existing power infrastructure and a gas generation facility.

Renew Economy notes that Shell, like other oil majors around the globe is making “slow but significant moves into renewable energy development and generation.” It is preparing to become a major electricity utility, and has acquired ERM Power, a large electricity retailer serving C&I customers in Australia. Shell also owns a 49% stake in Australian solar developer ESCO Pacific.

Last year, Shell Energy became the sole off-taker of a 200-MW California solar project, the Sandrini Solar Park near Bakersfield, California which is expected to be operational in 2022, at an estimated investment of more than $200 million.

Shell acquired German-based energy storage company sonnen last year.

Valentina Kretzschmar, director of corporate research at Wood Mackenzie, said, “The energy transition will have an impact on every single oil and gas player.”