The increasing mandates and incentives for the rapid deployment of energy storage are resulting in a boom in the deployment of utility-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS). In the first installment of our series addressing best practices, challenges and opportunities in BESS deployment, we will look at models and recommendations for land use permitting and environmental review compliance for battery energy storage projects with a particular focus on California, which is leading the nation in deploying utility-scale battery storage projects.

Land use permitting and entitlement

There are three distinct permitting regimes that apply in developing BESS projects, depending upon the owner, developer, and location of the project.

Utility-Sponsored Projects – Public Utilities Commission

BESS projects developed or owned by the state’s investor-owned utilities are subject to California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) jurisdiction under General Order (GO) 131-D. GO 131-D governs permitting for utility-owned infrastructure including the potential need for a Certificate of Public Necessity and Convenience (CPCN) or Permit to Construct (PTC) and related environmental review pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). For BESS projects approved to date, the utilities have invoked an exemption from GO 131-D qualifying such projects as “distribution” facilities falling below applicable 50 MW and 50 kV thresholds, thereby avoiding CPCN and PTC compliance and California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review and significantly streamlining permitting.

Private Land Projects – State and Local Government Agencies

For BESS projects developed or owned by private entities, permitting jurisdiction is dependent upon the location of the project, typically either on private, federal or state land, and governed by the applicable governmental agency with jurisdiction over that property. The majority of BESS projects developed to date are located on private land – typically near substation infrastructure and/or generating facilities – and subject to the applicable county or city zoning and land use ordinances and, if necessary, associated CEQA review.

What do people in energy storage business development do?

2019 was the biggest year ever for energy storage in the United States. As of late 2019, there were planned or contracted utility-scale storage projects in 47 states, per Wood Mackenzie.

Laura Meilander is one of the people working to expand the energy storage market even further. Meilander is vice president of business development at Convergent Energy + Power, a storage-focused developer, owner, and operator based in New York. She is responsible for growing Convergent’s book of business with utility companies.

“The [utility business development] team’s goal is to build as many energy storage projects as possible, as long as it is advantageous and feasible for both us and the utility customer,” Meilander explained.

Front-of-the-meter storage has found a foothold across the United States by providing a range of services, according to Wood Mackenzie’s most recent Energy Storage Monitor. Services for utilities include ancillary services in the territories of PJM, NYISO, ERCOT, ISO-New England and CAISO, standalone and solar-paired capacity applications, and distribution upgrade deferral and non-wires solutions in constrained parts of New York and Massachusetts.

“As part of my role, I identify and connect with utilities that could benefit from a battery storage system. As a result, I am constantly communicating with potential customers,” said Meilander.

Meilander’s day-to-day involves finding potential customers, pitching her company’s value proposition to prospects, and then tracking her progress on the back end in her company’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

Having a strong CRM tool is crucial in this kind of role, where organization is key. Keeping track of who she has been in touch with helps Meilander stay organized and allows her colleagues to see the status of her client meetings.

“Key characteristics” of sector leaders is that they’re able fill multiple roles at once, Ricardo F. Rodriguez, research analyst with Guidehouse Insights and report author, told Utility Dive, including providing “turnkey solutions,” using innovative financing, forecasting future revenue streams and using integrated software platforms.

The top distributed energy storage systems integrators now do fewer standalone integrations or “one-off” projects.

ENGIE, the company atop the leader board, has found success through a mergers and acquisitions strategy, according to Rodriguez. “ENGIE has been able to expand its product offerings through a series of acquisitions that include Green Charge, Op Terra, EV-Box, Ecova, and SoCore.”

Tesla has gained ground in the industry not through acquisition, but by developing internal capabilities, according to Rodriguez. Tesla’s ecosystem of software includes machine learning capabilities that enable customers to optimize energy storage and use.

Competition in the market has intensified as “the number of cities, states, and businesses committed to carbon reduction goals is swelling and the demand for onsite generation of renewable energy is mounting,” according to the report.

Analysts at Guidehouse Insights evaluated players in the DES integration market using 10 criteria: geographic reach; go-to-market strategy; partnerships; pricing; product performance; product portfolio; sales, marketing, and distribution; staying power; technology; and vision.

“The recognition by Guidehouse is a testament to the hard work of the Enel X team around the world and underscores our ability to deliver customized energy solutions that meet the economic and sustainability needs of any customer,” Surya Panditi, head of Enel X North America told Utility Dive in an email.

One of the pioneers of using aggregated residential energy storage systems to create virtual power plants (VPPs), Sunverge has been active in the market since 2011 and Martin Milani became chief executive officer (CEO) in late 2017, taking over from company founder Ken Munson. The company has done projects in geographies including Canada, Australia and Japan, but is presently most-focused on its home market in the US. Here’s some of the backstory and where the company is going these days, as told to Andy Colthorpe.

The term VPP is old. It comes from energy efficiency and demand response and in energy storage the ability to connect or curtail loads. For example, reducing load by half a megawatt would be like having a half a megawatt power plant, hence the term virtual power plant.

Sunverge had a slightly different point of view. Curtailment was obviously one thing but the ability to actually use energy storage in conjunction with solar, to pump energy back into the grid to do things like volt/VAR optimisation, reactive power support, frequency response and frequency regulation. From very early on, Sunverge also saw those things which aren’t virtual at all – they’re actually very real.

The beauty of distributed storage controlled and aggregated by a multi-service platform is that there are many different ways to monetise the services at any given time on both sides of the meter.

In the US you have the concept of nodal pricing and locational marginal pricing, so electricity has a certain value, a certain price, at a certain location, at a certain time – that’s why energy storage can be extremely effective in addressing those kinds of needs as well.

I think a lot of people thought this market was going to move a lot quicker back in 2014 and 2015 than it really did. That’s been a challenge for Sunverge and a challenge for everyone else. In many ways, Sunverge has been able to weather that a little bit better than some of the others because [as well as the solar-focused market] we also focused on the vertically integrated utility and in fact we’ve had utility programmes where they are actually applying energy storage not just for Demand Side, but also to address a grid condition like distribution asset upgrade deferral to deal with feeder load situations, to deal with capacity [issues] and over-penetration of solar.

Our publisher, Solar Media is currently hosting a season of online conferences, the Digital Series. Topics still to run include Solar & Storage Finance (1-5 June) and Energy Technologies (15-19 June), while last week we saw the Large-Scale Solar series. Our Energy Storage Digital Summit got us off to a low carbon yet globe-spanning start and took place from 11-15 May. From a full week of webinars and panel discussions, there was a huge amount of ground covered. Here are some more of our takeaways and there are links below to some of the news and views we’ve already posted. ​

1. Developing energy storage projects in the age of COVID-19 amplifies existing challenges
   Erik Stokes, branch chief at the California Energy Commission hosted a panel discussion: “Timeline to building a safe storage project” on the first day. Speaking to three senior team members at developers Soltage and Hecate Energy, and from consultancy Geostrategies, Stokes heard that COVID-19 is unsurprisingly having an impact on project execution.

Brian Schmidly, founder at Geostrategies said that most battery and equipment manufacturers sending products out from Asia are now back online, but that there are likely to be delays and bottlenecks toward the end of this year as everyone plays catch-up. This is perhaps similar to the early days of solar, Schmidly said, when demand outstripped available supply for PV modules.

Hecate Energy general counsel Holly Christie noted that while in the first few weeks of the pandemic, many parties claimed force majeure clauses, since force majeure refers to something unforeseen, after a period, it becomes more difficult to argue that the delays are “now not unforeseen”. Change of law provisions are now “fluid notions that were not necessarily so before”.

Dirk van Ouwerkerk, senior VP of energy storage development at Soltage, said that the pandemic’s effects on supply chains need to be monitored very, very closely, and that there are two types of supply chain issues: “materials getting through to manufacturing, and then getting manufacturing product to the projects”. This includes the “vast majority” of manufacturing for both LFP and NMC battery cells, which is in China.

Van Ouwerkerk said that the delays are not structural in nature. He expected to see three to six months of delays but felt that the delays are “decreasing and probably not there next year”. On a related note, he went on to say that with energy storage still at a relatively early stage of industry maturity, there hasn’t been the same level of standardisation as achieved in solar. Every project is still very different and the cost of capital high. Soltage develops projects, van Ouwerkerk said, there is a constant reassessment of “fatal flaw” analysis.