Highview Power, a provider of long-duration energy storage solutions, announced plans to construct the UK’s first commercial cryogenic energy storage facility (also referred to as liquid air) at large scale, which will be located at a decommissioned thermal power station in North of England. The 50 MW/250 MWh project is a clean large-scale energy storage facility that can help the UK achieve its goal of decarbonizing industry, power, heat and transport. The project being developed was announced by Highview Power CEO Javier Cavada during remarks at the BloombergNEF summit in London.

Along with this first large-scale facility, Highview Power is developing a portfolio of projects in the UK and is in the process of securing sites. These projects will further the UK’s strong move towards its clean energy goals and help it meet the expected global demand for energy storage.

“We are excited to begin working on our first commercial UK project at scale to become the largest battery storage system in Europe and support the national grid. This CRYOBattery plant will provide the critical services needed to help maintain a stable and reliable grid,” said Cavada. “Long-duration, giga-scale energy storage is the necessary foundation to enable baseload renewable energy and will be key to a 100% carbon-free future.”

Highview Power, a provider of long-duration energy storage solutions, announced plans to construct the UK’s first commercial cryogenic energy storage facility (also referred to as liquid air) at large scale, which will be located at a decommissioned thermal power station in North of England. The 50 MW/250 MWh project is a clean large-scale energy storage facility that can help the UK achieve its goal of decarbonizing industry, power, heat and transport. The project being developed was announced by Highview Power CEO Javier Cavada during remarks at the BloombergNEF summit in London.

Along with this first large-scale facility, Highview Power is developing a portfolio of projects in the UK and is in the process of securing sites. These projects will further the UK’s strong move towards its clean energy goals and help it meet the expected global demand for energy storage.

“We are excited to begin working on our first commercial UK project at scale to become the largest battery storage system in Europe and support the national grid. This CRYOBattery plant will provide the critical services needed to help maintain a stable and reliable grid,” said Cavada. “Long-duration, giga-scale energy storage is the necessary foundation to enable baseload renewable energy and will be key to a 100% carbon-free future.”

In addition to supplying energy storage, Highview Power’s facility will also provide valuable services to the national grid to help integrate renewables, stabilize the electrical grid and ensure future energy security. Other services the facility could deliver include market arbitrage, frequency management, reserve and grid constraint management services. Highview Power is currently in discussions with potential offtakers to contract for the capabilities and services the facility can provide.

Energy storage installations around the world will multiply exponentially, reaching 1,095GW/2,850GWh by 2040. Over the next two decades, $662 billion of investment will be needed for stationary energy storage, according to BNEF.

Highview Power’s CRYOBattery uses only benign materials with zero emissions and has zero water impact. The new facility in the North of England is the first large scale commercial system utilizing this technology, pioneered at Highview Power’s pilot plant in Slough, and evolved at the demonstration plant in Pilsworth, Greater Manchester, which has been successfully operating since early 2018.

“No other policy in play right now” could be “more immediate or more impactful” than a ‘standalone’ Investment Tax Credit (ITC) in the US for energy storage, the CEO of the national Energy Storage Association has said.

Energy-Storage.news spoke with Kelly Speakes-Backman, head of the ESA, for a wide-ranging feature interview. Speakes-Backman said that energy storage right now is enjoying “extremely strong, bipartisan support, from Congress, from our Department of Energy and other administrations such as the Department of Commerce and Environment Protection Agency (EPA).”

One of the reasons why storage is enjoying cross-party support in what appear to be divided times, is that there is growing recognition of the role batteries and other storage can play in creating an efficient, affordable and sustainable grid, the ESA CEO said. Congress will debate the matter this month.

“Energy storage is there to integrate intermittent resources like solar and wind and help enable our grid to get cleaner – of course – but it’s also there for grid operators to improve the efficiency of the grid, to add more resilience.”

At the moment, energy storage projects are eligible for the solar ITC – itself the subject of strong stakeholder advocacy and lobbying at the moment – but only if installed simultaneously and co-located with the solar power generation.

ESA CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman referred to analysis firm Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables latest quarterly US Energy Storage Monitor report, which highlighted that a storage ITC could boost forecasted installation figures by 2024 by 300MW each year (from 4.8GW to 5.1GW of predicted deployments).

“Frankly, it made sense at the very beginning to have these, the solar-plus-storage [ITC eligible projects]. But storage is applicable to so much more than just being coupled with solar now, that I think it’s important to create a level playing field. The same for solar, the same for CHP, geothermal, fuel cells, all the other technologies that enjoy independent, standalone ITCs, storage is at a point where it’s important that it be counted as a standalone asset,” Kelly Speakes-Backman said.

Chinese battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL) began building its first battery factory outside China in Erfurt, a city in the German state of Thuringia. “Germany is home to a strong automotive industry and several of CATL’s key customers,” said Matthias Zentgraf, head of Europe CATL in a press release. “We believe that the combination of Germany’s industrial tradition and CATL’s tradition of innovative battery technology will greatly accelerate the electrification of the automotive industry in Europe.”

CATL has been chosen as a battery supplier by BMW, Volkswagen, Daimler, Volvo, and Bosch. One of the factors that makes Erfurt an attractive place for a battery factory is that it is within four hours of several several electric car manufacturing facilities, especially the one in Zwickau where Volkswagen will start making its ID.3 electric sedan shortly.

CATL originally expected to invest about €240 million in the new factory but has now raised that number to €1.8 billion. The factory, which is expected to begin production in 2022, will have an initial capacity of 14 GWh a year with expansion to 24 GWh planned in the years to follow. It will employ 2,000 workers when completed, according to Electrive. In exchange for incentives from the government of Thuringia, CATL has also promised to invest in local research and development programs.

While it waits for the new factory to be completed, CATL will begin manufacturing batteries at the site of the former Solar World Industries plant beginning next year. The existing facility is close to where the new factory is being built.

Rio Tinto Finds Lithium In Borax Tailings
Older readers may remember a television program called Death Valley Days, which was sponsored by Twenty Mule Team Borax. In what may have been the highlight of his acting career, Ronald Reagan was the spokesperson for the company, pitching Boraxo hand soap and other cleaning products.

October 23 (Renewables Now) – New York regulators have given the green light to a plan calling for the construction of a 316-MW energy storage system at the site of an ageing power plant in Long Island City.

The Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity was issued by the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) last week, moving the state closer to achieving its clean energy targets. This includes a goal of having 3 GW of energy storage capacity by 2030.

Planned to be partially operational by March 2021, the Ravenswood lithium-ion battery system will provide peak capacity, energy and ancillary services, and will also offset “carbon-intensive” on-peak generation that will improve the grid reliability in New York City.

The proposed system was developed by LS Power’s Ravenswood Development LLC and is expected to be able to store electricity that will supply more than 250,000 homes over an eight-hour period. The stored power will be discharged under New York Independent System Operator’s (NYISO’s) and Consolidated Edison Inc’s (NYSE:ED) dispatch orders.

LS Power said that the project was accepted in the NYISO 2019 interconnection facility study process and is “well-positioned” to meet a 2022 in-service requirement. It also took in a 300-MW Request for Proposals (RfP) that Con Edison issued this summer, which also requires projects to be switched on by end-2022.

Advanced battery technology company Saft has executed its first projects in Australia, installing around 2MWh of battery energy storage systems (BESS) at 13 sites in Queensland.

Electricity distribution network operator Ergon Energy has decided to adopt Saft’s lithium-ion energy storage systems to meet customer needs at fairly remote locations in Queensland, with the systems to be deployed over four years.

While Saft recently launched a 2.5MWh, much larger containerised ESS product, for the Ergon deal, the European battery company has deployed 20 separate Saft Intensium Mini lithium-ion energy storage systems (ESS), each of 100kWh capacity and 25kVA power “up to 800V in harsh environments,” Saft said.

Ergon currently uses single-wire earth return (SWER) cabling to reach customers a long way from the grid. SWER, which uses a single cable that also acts as the earthing, is in wide use in Australia and New Zealand. In a 2016 interview on Ergon’s corporate blog, company innovation engineer Stephen Richardson said that Ergon manages more than 164,000km of SWER.

In order to support the operation of the grid, including SWER cabling, Ergon is rolling out its own Grid Utility Support System (GUSS), which Richardson described as a “network-side energy storage product,” and said that the first 20 sites being developed with GUSS have been chosen by the distribution company as “the most needy areas for initial deployment”.

Saft’s battery systems have therefore been incorporated into Ergon’s GUSS proposition, with the battery company claiming the Ergon Energy Network ordered the GUSS to be deployed as a “cost-effective alternative to traditional augmentation on SWER networks”.

The batteries charge up during times of low demand and reinject power to the grid when demand peaks. Energy demand spikes in remote Queensland can be related to anything from energy-intensive farming to household peak demand in the evenings, and the SWER networks have been vulnerable to capacity and voltage constraints as a consequence, Saft said.

UK liquid air energy storage (LAES) start-up Highview Power said its first ever 250MWh ‘Cryobattery’ installation will be placed at the site of a decommissioned thermal power plant in the North of England and could be Europe’s largest ‘battery’ system when completed.

The company is a designer and manufacturer of liquid air energy storage (LAES) systems and claims that the technology enables the safe and reliable storage of energy at large scale and long durations, without requiring significant scale-up in costs. Company CEO Javier Cavada wrote a technical paper about the LAES systems and their economic appeal for our journal PV Tech Power earlier this year.

Highview has been in the public eye over the past few months after Energy-Storage.news in June reported that several 50MW / 250MWh sites are in development in the company’s homeland, as well as the potential for development in the US.

“We will start construction next year, we have commenced agreements, we have the firm services to be provided to National Grid and it will be the largest battery system in Europe at 250MWh,” Highview Power’s Javier Cavada told Energy-Storage.news yesterday.

Keeping the decommissioned power plant site ‘on the map’
The project is planned as the first of five of the same size to be developed in the UK by Highview, and Cavada said the choice to replace a fossil fuel plant site on the grid was instrumental.

“We will be using the same connection and the same electrical infrastructure [as the thermal plant], so there is no need to make [new] transmission lines. So where we are they are decommissioning a fossil fuel plant, we will use the same point of [grid] connection for the cryobattery.”

The LAES system will perform many of the same tasks that the thermal plant has done, as well as “getting electrons from the grid that are hopefully more and more renewable every day and shifting them to the right moment to meet demand,” and will be able to provide voltage support, inertia and other services to the grid.

Spanish renewables company Acciona has inked a deal to acquire 3GW of PV projects and 1GW of energy storage from US independent power producer Tenaska.

The deal includes 20 projects in the Southwest Power Pool and Southwest Power Pool markets, spanning the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. Acciona expects that eight projects, totalling 1.5GWp – or 1.2GW of rated power – to be in service by the end of 2023.

Tenaska’s development services arm, Tenaska Solar Ventures, will work alongside Acciona on project development.

The new solar plants will plump Acciona’s North American renewables portfolio, which is currently heavily weighted towards wind. The Spanish firm’s US solar activity is currently limited to a 64MW concentrated solar plant (CSP) in Las Vegas.

Rafael Esteban, Acciona’s North American energy division director, said that the new solar and storage capacity will give the company the “opportunity to increase our commitment to renewable energy and sustainability in the United States through photovoltaic and energy storage technology, after the investments we have already made in wind power.”

In a statement, Acciona said it counted 1,207MWp of solar capacity worldwide at the end of the first quarter of 2019.

Nebraska-based Tenaska is no stranger to inking megadeals. In November 2018, the Nebraska-based IPP signed an agreement with Swiss asset management company Capital Dynamics to develop 2GW of solar across the Midcontinent System Operator (MISO) market.

Supporting New York’s state goals of reaching 3,000MW of energy storage by 2030 – equivalent to 40% of today’s electric demand – codes for the safe installation of energy storage systems (ESS) will go into effect on a permanent basis after 1 November.

The issue of fire safety in relation to the deployment of stationary energy storage systems in New York, particularly in the US state’s densely populated urban areas, has been considered to have held back what has otherwise been a hugely fertile state for clean energy. New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) statistics showed that as of September this year there were only 51 installed ESS in New York (not including New York City) with a total storage capacity of 74,600kWh.

Energy-Storage.news recently spoke with NEC, provider of the state’s first, 20MW, grid-scale battery system and Key Capture Energy, the project’s developer. Both parties said that there had been a lot of work to do in getting that ESS up and running, including a great deal of work in close partnership with the Fire Department. NEC’s Roger Lin also said that he had been one of around 50 industry stakeholders to have contributed to the US National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) draft energy storage standards, published in September this year.

In June, the New York State Department of State issued its 2019 Energy Storage System Supplement which included amendments to the New York State Uniform Fire Prevention and Building Code, as well as pertinent amendments to the 2015 International Fire Code and 2015 International Building Code, both widely used across the world and now adding relevant definitions for different energy storage system technologies and terms.

Fire Department takes lead on issuing guidance
At the beginning of October, the Fire Department issued guidance on the design, installation and emergency management procedures for outdoor stationary storage battery systems, noting that “various highly-publicised incidents have illustrated the fire safety concerns associated with lithium-ion batteries. In addition to lithium-ion, the new stationary storage battery technology includes nickel-cadmium, nickel metal hydride and flow batteries,” the Fire Department’s rule said.

Britain’s cheapest “virtual battery” could be created by hoisting and dropping 12,000-tonne weights – half the weight of the Statue of Liberty – down disused mine shafts, according to Imperial College London.

The surprising new source of “gravity energy” is being developed by Gravitricity, an Edinburgh-based startup, which hopes to use Britain’s old mines to make better use of clean electricity at half the cost of lithium-ion batteries.

Gravitricity said its system effectively stores energy by using electric winches to hoist the weights to the top of the shaft when there is plenty of renewable energy available, then dropping the weights hundreds of metres down vertical shafts to generate electricity when needed.

The scheme mimics hydropower projects which have played a key role in helping to balance the electricity grid since the Dinorwig project in Wales began operating in the mid-1970s.

Charlie Blair, Gravitricity’s managing director, said: “The beauty of this is that this can be done multiple times a day for many years, without any loss of performance. This makes it very competitive against other forms of energy storage – including lithium-ion batteries.”

A full-scale project would drop 24 weights totalling 12,000 tonnes to a depth of 800 metres to produce enough electricity to power 63,000 homes for more than an hour.

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By carefully controlling the winches Gravitricity said it could extend this period by allowing the weights to fall at a slower rate and release electricity over a longer period.

The company is currently in discussion with mine owners in the UK, Finland, Poland, the Czech Republic and South Africa, where mine shafts could be more than 2,000 metres deep.

Oliver Schmidt, the lead author of Imperial’s report, said Gravitricity’s model is the most price competitive energy storage option because it has a relatively low upfront cost and a potential lifespan of more than 25 years.

In a deal spanning 20 projects, seven states, two power markets and more solar than the entire state of Florida has installed to date, ACCIONA has agreed to a deal with Tenaska to acquire 3 GW of utility-scale solar and 1 GW of co-located solar and energy storage.

This represents one of the largest deals known to pv magazine. What’s more is that the projects aren’t all that far from going on-line, CEO of ACCIONA’s Energy Division in North America, Rafael Esteban boldly shared: “We will bring a significant portion of the portfolio into service between 2021 and 2023.”

Specially, ACCIONA envisions commissioning eight projects by the end of 2023, adding around 1.5 GW of peak capacity to its North American renewable energy portfolio.

And, if we want to play the exponential capacity game, it seems as if this deal will set the record. Prior to this acquisition, ACCIONA’s entire American solar portfolio was comprised of just the 64 MW Nevada Solar One concentrated solar plant, just outside of Las Vegas. On the global scale, however, the company owns over 10 GW of renewable generation assets.

And while 3 GW of solar is massive, 1 GW of battery storage is, quite literally, unlike anything we have ever seen in the United States. To date, the country has only 899 MW of operating batter storage. And while that figure is anticipated to reach 1 GW by year’s end, even then this is 1/67th of the total installed solar capacity and an even smaller percent of installed renewable energy capacity.

In July, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) has released a report predicting that the volume of battery storage will more than double to 2,500 MW by 2023. Considering both the above goal of having the majority of this project pipeline in operation by 2023 and the size of the pipeline, this deal alone could help the United States achieve or, moreover, surpass that figure.