As President-elect Joe Biden readies his transition team and sets the agenda for his first 100 days in office, startups can expect to see some movement on long-stalled infrastructure initiatives that could mean big boosts to their business.

Infrastructure is high on the list of priorities of the incoming Biden Administration as the former vice president hopes to make good on his campaign promise to “build back better.”

American infrastructure has been crumbling for decades without significant investment from the federal government, and much of what will be replaced will also be upgraded with new technology, according to people familiar with the Biden plan.

That means tech companies focused on next-generation telecommunications and utility infrastructure, transportation, housing and construction tech around energy efficiency could see new dollars pour in over the next four years.

“Infrastructure and build out of the clean energy economy … doesn’t necessarily mean large wind or large solar projects. It could mean advanced metering … it can be new engine technologies,” said Dan Goldman, a managing partner at Clean Energy Ventures. “We think that that can be a huge opportunity for job creation … not only putting people back to work but putting people back to work in high quality jobs.”

And there’s a willingness to encourage these infrastructure projects in less partisan ways in states like Massachusetts, Virginia and Florida, which are actively building out electric vehicle infrastructure and renewable energy projects, Goldman said.

A prototype community southeast of Los Angeles, California, aims to demonstrate the advantages of prosumers in a disadvantaged community selling into electricity markets and reaping a cleaner environment plus income and resilience.

The Basset-Avocado Advanced Energy Community (BAAEC) is funded in part by a $9 million grant from the California Energy Commission’s  EPIC program, said Luis Felipe Cano, CEO of Community Electricity. His company has partnered with The Energy Coalition, Energy Web, UCLA and others on the project, the second phase of which is expected to be completed in 2023. The Energy Coalition is the prime contractor for the EPIC grant.

The total investment for the prototype project’s first and second phase will be about $20 million, which includes matching funds from partners that include vendors, he said.

Initially, a prosumer network made up of 50 single family homes equipped with PV and energy storage will be created. Also critical to the project will be a resilience hub, based on a microgrid, located at the Evergreen Baptist Church campus. It will consist of rooftop PV solar, community solar, electric vehicle (EV) charging and battery energy storage.

Residents will be equipped with a mobile app, called iDecarb, that will help community residents become prosumers, showing them how to generate revenues by selling electricity and renewable energy credits into California markets while at the same time decarbonizing the community, Cano said. The app connects to a platform, Energy Web, that allows members to sell green energy and allowances to California markets using a community operating system. For now, the possible sales are simulated because all of the regulatory frameworks aren’t in place to allow for the sales.

Form Energy raised a $70 million Series C to scale its super-long-duration energy storage technology.

That investment was first reported by Reuters Friday, without naming the participating investors. It brings Form Energy’s total funds raised to around $120 million, a hefty sum for a novel technology that’s still a few years away from its first commercial deployment.

Lithium-ion batteries dominate nearly all the grid storage that is being installed today, but that technology’s cost-effectiveness wanes in applications geared to store energy for many hours or days. Entrepreneurs have pursued a motley crew of alternatives to turn wind and solar power into baseload power plants: things like flow batteries of various chemistries, gravity-based systems that mimic pumped hydro storage and compressed air in caverns or tanks. But the long-duration storage sector has produced more bankruptcies and delays than surefire successes.

Form Energy burst onto the scene in 2018 with a founding team of veteran energy storage leaders, including co-founder Mateo Jaramillo, the former director of Tesla’s stationary storage business. It launched with a $9 million Series A backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures, Macquarie Capital, Saudi Aramco, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology offshoot The Engine.

The company scoured the known energy-storing materials for ingredients that could deliver days or weeks of storage at radically lower cost than lithium-ion. Initially, the founders told Greentech Media that their path to commercialization could take a decade — a decidedly sober approach compared to the rosy projections other startups in the space had touted.

But Form’s activities quickly began to pick up speed. It raised a $40 million Series B in 2019, bringing in strategic investors such as Italian oil and gas giant Eni. That funding came after Form developed a “fully functioning cell that was hitting the technical marks,” Jaramillo told GTM at the time. The Series B funding was earmarked for scaling up the cell by 10 to 100 times and turning it into a fully engineered product, he noted.

• Wind and solar capacity will exceed coal and gas in less than five years, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency.
• The increase will mean wind and solar will overtake gas capacity in 2023 and coal in 2024.
• The report also showed how renewables had proved to be resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic, unlike other commodities.

Wind and solar capacity will double over the next five years globally and exceed that of both gas and coal, according to a new International Energy Agency (IEA) report.

The Paris-based intergovernmental agency anticipates a 1,123 gigawatt (GW) increase in wind and solar that would mean these power sources overtake gas capacity in 2023 and coal in 2024.

The IEA’s Renewables 2020 report concludes that while other fuels have struggled due to Covid-19 this year, the market for renewables has proved

“more resilient than previously thought”.

The continued growth of wind and solar means renewables, including hydro and bioenergy, would displace coal as the largest source of the world’s power by 2025, says the IEA’s report.

Last year, Carbon Brief analysis of the IEA’s data found that it only expected renewables to overtake coal output over the next five years under its more optimistic “accelerated case” scenario.

However, this year – even in its less ambitious “main case” scenario – wind, solar, hydro and biomass are projected to take the lead within the next five years.

Capacity milestones

Renewables are set to dominate the construction of new power infrastructure in the coming years as costs continue to fall.

US winemaker Domaine Carneros has selected EDF Renewables to ensure its long-term financial and sustainability goals are achieved.

The wine maker has tasked the independent power producer to design, build, and operate a resilient solar photovoltaics (PV) and battery energy storage microgrid solution.

The system will comprise a 250KW solar PV and a 280KW/540KWh behind the meter battery energy storage system to island the entire facility during a power outage.

The solar PV system will be a combination of a carport and ground-mount installations.

The microgrid will help reduce diesel fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as extend fuel reserves up to an entire week.

The system is projected to offset 624 metric tons of carbon each year.

Wildfires, rolling blackouts, and PG&E’s Public Safety Power Shutoffs, have made power unreliable throughout California, putting products and business operations at risk. Domaine Carneros is one of the first in the region to implement a microgrid solution that demonstrates a sophisticated approach of leveraging all available onsite assets to improve resilience and sustainability while also reducing costs during grid connected and power outage operations.

We recently saw the International Energy Agency (IEA) report that solar power offers the cheapest electricity in history. That was a global report. A US-focused report from Lazard recently reported something similar. The highly regarded energy analysts showed that wind and solar offer the cheapest electricity in the country, even significantly undercutting natural gas combined cycle power plants now. But that’s only half of it.

Solar & Wind Energy Are Cheaper — Much Cheaper

Historically, when we write about such reports, we — and the analysts we’re referencing — are comparing estimated electricity costs from new power plants. However, for at least a few of these reports, Lazard has been including average electricity cost from already built power plants — just the operational costs (the brown diamonds in the chart below). The latest report shows that new wind and solar power plants can even provide electricity more cheaply than existing, in-operation natural gas, coal, and nuclear power plants! This is where things get interesting.

We’re at a kind of crossover point right now, but if solar and wind continue to come down in cost while the others stay the same or get more expensive, there will be serious pressure to retire fossil and nuclear power plants early and scale up wind and solar power production even faster. Why pay more for electricity from old, dirty power plants when you can get it more cheaply from new, clean, green electricity?

(Side notes: the light blue diamond is for offshore wind, the green diamond captures the price with 20% green hydrogen used in the natural gas combined cycle power plant, and the dark blue diamond captures the price with 20% “blue hydrogen” used in the natural gas combined cycle power plant.)

Here’s another chart looking at electricity costs from new wind and solar power plants versus marginal costs from existing fossil and nuclear power plants:

Not too bad.

Much more is available in the Lazard report examining levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) — aka the average cost of electricity production from a power plant across an estimated plant lifetime, or 20 years — including shorter comparisons in several other nations. The short story, though, is that solar and wind are much cheaper basically everywhere.

While 2020 has obviously been challenging on many fronts, one of the surprising upsides we have seen in the power industry is that the vision of a very high renewable energy penetration grid is not only technically feasible, but it might arrive faster than anyone anticipated. I wrote in Utility Dive this past August, detailing the experience of electricity markets in Europe during the pandemic, which was characterized by large shares of renewable energy on the grid and the shutdown of much of the continent’s baseload generation capacity.

A key component of this transition is the deployment of flexible generation – primarily grid-scale batteries – that allow for the optimization of these renewable resources. At Wärtsilä, our focus has been not only the deployment of these flexible storage assets but most importantly their optimization through asset-level and portfolio control.

This strategy has led to many interesting conversations with our customers, allowing us to collaboratively find new ways to increase the value of energy storage assets. One of the most exciting, and the key to the growth of energy storage as a market category, is the ability to leverage artificial intelligence for automated bidding of stored renewable power into competitive electricity markets.

This has the potential to be a game-changer for energy storage, mitigating the risk from merchant revenue streams atop the already clear benefits provided by grid-scale batteries.

The market is taking notice. In my conversations with IPPs, I am increasingly hearing that operators are rethinking their trading strategies to incorporate storage and take advantage of these potentially lucrative arbitrage opportunities. These customers typically fall into two categories.

RheEnergise is one of only a select handful of businesses to have been awarded grants under both the Sustainable Innovation Fund & the Small Business Research Initiative.

RheEnergise is bringing innovation to pumped energy storage and developing a technology that solves the many disadvantages of other competing energy storage and grid flexibility solutions. The awarded grants are supporting a feasibility study into a £1.6m demonstration project with full system functionality specifically designed for use with the RheEnergise high-technology fluid taking the extensive theoretical and practical learning to the next level. For further information see the IDTechEx report on Potential Stationary Energy Storage Technologies to Monitor.

The UK’s Climate Change Committee states that energy storage is the key enabler necessary to achieve a net-zero carbon energy system however there is nowhere near enough energy storage for a zero-carbon energy system that includes transport, power and heat. Unlike traditional pumped hydro energy storage, RheEnergise’s HD Hydro operates on small hills rather than mountains meaning there are infinitely more sites available for projects.

The Business Secretary Alok Sharma said: “The UK’s response to coronavirus has demonstrated the very best of British ingenuity, and it is this resourcefulness that will help us navigate our way through this pandemic. Today’s investment will ensure that our innovators and risk-takers can continue to scale up their ideas, helping the UK to build back better and ensure we meet our clear commitments on tackling climate change.”

Innovate UK Executive Chair Dr Ian Campbell said: “In these difficult times we have seen the best of British business innovation. The pandemic is not just a health emergency but one that impacts society and the economy. RheEnergise’s energy storage innovations, along with every initiative Innovate UK has supported through this fund, is an important step forward in driving sustainable economic development.”

Stephen Crosher, RheEnergise’s CEO said: ‘Society needs energy storage to match the intermittent supply of renewables with the variable demand by consumers. These awards by Innovate UK will make a significant difference to RheEnergise, to accelerate the time it takes to bring our High-Density Hydro innovations to market and our goal of developing the lowest cost energy storage solution available.’

What does it take to successfully create a multi-gigawatt battery storage factory?

The European Union has invested billions into creating a manufacturing supply chain for the energy storage market, seeing the multi-country initiative focus on key parts of the supply chain. Europe wants to make its own mark on the lithium-ion battery revolution, in both the electric vehicle (EV) and battery energy storage system (BESS) sectors.

Energy-Storage.news’ editor Andy Colthorpe moderates a discussion with some key players in that European push. We hear what sort of financing and business strategies have been required to support Northvolt, a startup with an ambition to serve 25% of total demand across the continent from 150GWh of battery and system gigafactories. See the video below. 

Joining Andy in the virtual conference room are:

• Joakim Palmgren – Project Finance North, Central and South East Europe at the European Investment Bank
• Bo Normark – Industrial Strategy Executive at EIT InnoEnergy Steven Cespedes -Director, Project Finance at BNP Paribas
• Edward Reed – Director of Advisory Services at WSP
• Tim van Pelt – Director, Renewables and Power, Energy Sector at ING Bank
• Marco Schweer – Director, Sector Lead – Renewable Energy at SMBC

This discussion took place at Solar Media’s Energy Storage Virtual Summit, hosted in late September 2020.

With thanks to conference producer Lucy Jacobson-Durham and the rest of the team at Solar Media’s Solar Events. 

The United Kingdom, which has recently set a record for wind power meeting its demand, issued a security of supply alert earlier this week as wind power output was low due to calm weather. This event highlights the need of increased energy storage capacity able to balance power to the grid at times of strained supply, energy historian and expert Ellen R. Wald wrote in Forbes.

On Tuesday, National Grid ESO issued an electricity margin notice (EMN) for the evening on Wednesday. “This is a routine signal that we send to the market to indicate that we’d like a larger cushion of spare capacity,” National Grid said. The grid operator was expecting tight margins on the UK electricity system because of low renewable output and the availability of generators over periods of the day with higher demand.

“The tight margins on the electricity system are the result of a number of factors including the weather, demand for electricity and the availability of generators,” National Grid said on Wednesday.

The UK alert about tight margins of spare supply poses again the question of how grids will accommodate growing shares of wind and solar power generation while ensuring there will be no blackouts.

The UK wants to significantly boost its wind power generation, which already holds a high share in the power mix, to the point of powering every home with wind by 2030.

The UK will aim to become a global leader in offshore wind energy, powering every home in the country with wind by 2030, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in early October.

Currently, offshore wind meets 10 percent of the UK electricity demand. 

Last year, the UK became the first major economy in the world to enshrine into law its target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.