Energy Storage Journal Issue no. 32

POWERING THE SMART GRID

Issue 32: Spring 2021

Britain’s near blackout moments

New technology shines a light through chaos

The State of New York A peek at the projects that are helping to meet energy pledges

Silicon anodes

How scientists are overcoming the chemical hurdles

John Goodenough

Profile of the father of the lithium battery, still in his lab at 98 www.energystoragejournal.com

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EDITORIAL Mike Halls: mike@energystoragejournal.com

What if we don’t need energy storage at all?

Welcome to some of the most irritating phrases of recent times. “Thinking out of the box” is one of our pet hates, as is “blue sky thinking” and any sentence that has to use “innovation” as part of its construction.

Irritating yes, but sometimes relevant.

Thinking out of the box is particularly relevant at this juncture in the life of the energy storage industry. The reason? There’s far too little of it going on!

For all the talk by start-ups of bringing so-called ‘disruptive technologies’ to energy storage, the new wave of products and companies are almost exclusively refinements of existing products … better anodes, more efficient electrolytes, cleverer separators, cutting costs by new work-arounds …

That’s not a criticism: but continued refinements are hardly disruptive, nor are they game-changers for the industry.

Perhaps utilities have been looking in the wrong direction.

And here’s the blue sky thinking. What if, in our drive to free us from that pesky carbon dioxide, our approach has been completely and utterly wide of the mark?

What if we don’t need energy storage at all?

It’s an idea a few brave souls suggested about a decade ago, when the price of lithium batteries was sky high.

As the cost of batteries dropped away, their ideas were dismissed as fanciful. But there have been a few brave voices starting to champion an idea that turns all our conventional ways of doing things upside down.

The traditional thinking is that intermittency in renewable generation — the sun going behind clouds, the wind less blustery — would cause havoc to the grid if not managed.

Energy storage systems such as batteries were needed because they can be switched on within a millisecond to ease out the fluctuations and keep the grid stable.

The fact that the number of these batteries was huge and the cost astronomical hardly deflected from the need to manage intermittency.

Last October the International Energy Agency trumpeted that “the world’s best solar power schemes now offer the cheapest electricity in history, with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries”.

With electricity so cheap and steadily falling in price — far, far faster in fact than the costs of energy

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storage — the answer to the issue of intermittency could be found in over-capacity.

Wind and solar are becoming much less expensive to the point where over-building is increasingly affordable. This is true even when the output from wind and solar generators is essentially curtailed and not fed into the grid.

Oversizing reduces production gaps because more energy output is available during periods of low solar and wind availability.

Today, the current regulatory practice for solar and wind-generated electricity favours maximizing production at all times. The utilities that operate these facilities seek to sell every electron that they generate at the highest prices, whereas curtailing output is seen as a revenue loss.

This has two consequences. This old operational idea inhibits the transition to relying on solar and wind as solid, on-demand sources, because all their output is used only when it is available. This approach also, unfortunately, keeps renewable energy at the margins.

In addition to over-capacity reducing the need for huge battery banks, it is not difficult by charting through extremes of weather at various locations to compute what size might be needed to virtually eliminate all energy storage.

On top of that there are new technologies coming to the market that mean harvesting energy is possible from cloudy days.

One such product is called AuREUS — it’s a mouthful, Aurora Renewable Energy and UV Sequestration — and it was invented by an electrical engineering student in the Philippines. It’s a two-step process where organic luminescent particles absorb UV light and convert it to visible light, then a solar film converts that visible light into energy.

There’s even talk about PV systems — known as antisolar panels — that could generate electricity at night.

Researchers from the University of California have shown this is possible with what is essentially a heat engine. Anti-solar panels on earth emit infrared light into the coldness of the night sky and a circuit is created.

At the moment they theorize that thermo-radiative cells would only be able to generate about a quarter as much power as a solar panel with the same area, but if technology like this has a future — who knows, the next irritating phrase for the future might be dark sky thinking.

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 1

Contents

CONTENTS

FEATURES

Energy Storage Journal | Issue 32 | Spring 2021

NEW YORK

COVER STORY: BLACKOUT?

BATTERY HERO

20

27

34

SETTING THE STAGE FOR NEW YORK’S NEW ENERGY OPPORTUNITIES

RENEWABLES BRING BRITAIN TO THE BRINK OF BLACKOUT

JOHN GOODENOUGH, 2019 NOBEL LAUREATE WINNER

New York has made some bold pledges with its energy storage plans. Time to take a look at how they are being implemented.

You could be forgiven for thinking the energy transition is causing more problems for the grid than it’s solving, but new technology is stepping in.

Profile: Just a couple of months short of his 99th birthday, the father of the lithium ion cell is still at the heart of battery development.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

3

8

AutoGrid provides VPP software for Total’s largest battery-based energy storage project in France.

The price of lithium-ion batteries price drops to its lowest ever in 2020, with a 13% drop on 2019.

14

24

Kelly Speakes-Backman steps down as CEO of the US ESA to join Department of Energy.

Chemistry Upclose: it’s the next step forward, how to use more silicon in anodes.

IN THIS ISSUE: 1 EDITORIAL: What if we don’t need energy storage at all? | 3 NEWS: STRAIGHT FROM THE NEWS DESK 6 LAUNCHES & TRANSACTIONS | 8 FUNDING & COSTS | 10 STORAGE DEPLOYMENT | 14 PEOPLE | 17 GENERAL NEWS 20 SETTING THE STAGE FOR NEW YORK’S CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE: Jodi Frank has a look at what’s going on to achieve this 24 CHEMISTRY UPCLOSE: Debbie Mason looks at how battery materials firms are trying to replace graphite with silicon in their lithium batteries | 27 COVER STORY: RENEWABLES BRING BRITAIN TO THE BRINK OF BLACK-OUT: New inertia technology could smooth the volatility | 34 SPOTLIGHT: John Goodenough: The father of the lithium-ion cell

ABOUT US

40 FORTHCOMING EVENTS: ESJ sorts through the re-scheduled programme following major disruptions caused by Covid-19.

Energy Storage Journal — Business and market strategies for energy storage and smart grid technologies Publisher: Karen Hampton karen@energystoragejournal.com +44 7792 852 337 Editor-in-chief: Michael Halls, mike@energystoragejournal.com +44 7977 016 918

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Editor: Debbie Mason | email: debbie@energystoragejournal.com | tel: +44 1 243 782 275 Advertising manager: Jade Beevor | email: jade@energystoragejournal.com | tel: +44 1 243 792 467 Reporter: Hillary Christie | email: hillary@batteriesinternational.com Finance: Juanita Anderson | email: juanita@batteriesinternational.com | tel: +44 7775 710 290 Subscriptions and admin: admin@energystoragejournal.com | tel: +44 1 243 782 275 Design: Antony Parselle | email: aparselledesign@me.com Reception: tel: +44 1 243 782 275 The contents of this publication are protected by copyright. No unauthorized translation or reproduction is permitted.

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The lead-lithium storage debate steps up a notch The new titan of lead The CEO interview

Next gen integrators

on, head-to-head

the ideal middle man

soon to a2021 Ecoult’s UltraBattery, Anil Srivastava and • Coming 2 • Energy Storage Journal Spring smart grid near you, ready to take lithium Leclanché’s bid for market dominance

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IMPACT CLEAN POWER TECHNOLOGY S.A.

Impact is ready for the hydrogen revolution Impact Clean Power Technology S.A., a leading Polish manufacturer of heavy-duty battery systems distributed around the world, will showcase several technology innovations later this year.

They will include a battery module with a density of 300 kWh/kg for a new generation of batteries with increased capacity. That’s 50% more than is currently used in the latest public transportation vehicles.

The company is also developing systems for hydrogen fuel cells. During the next 15-20 years, hydrogen drives will dominate the zero-emission vehicles market. The condition for this, however, will be the conversion of entire national economies to hydrogen.

“Impact has extensive experience with hydrogen systems. We have delivered dozens of solutions that are already out there on the European roads.

Only this year, several dozen hydrogen buses with our batteries will be on the road,” said Bartłomiej Kras, CEO of ICPT S.A. “We see hydrogen as the energy carrier of the future. To make it profitable it must be produced by electrolyzers in renewable sources and the whole economy must be switched to hydro-

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

gen production and a support system.

This means that switching from natural gas to hydrogen will take 10-15 years. However, hydrogen fuel for vehicles is not enough to make the business worthwhile.

“We are facing 15 years of development and getting to an economy where we replace one factor with another. It is a long, arduous and expensive process. We keep our fingers crossed that this trend will take off and continue around the world,” he added.

We are currently at the stage of mass replacement of transport fleets in the cities with electric vehicles. Soon, such a revolution, already under way in Europe, will begin in the United States.

Our partner, Impact Americas, operates in that market. And in our New Technology Lab, we work on the latest solutions that can accelerate the growth of this promising industry.

This work has resulted in, among other things, a new UVES Energy GEN 2 battery system made with NMC technology with 30% higher energy density than competitive solutions. This top-selling product significantly reduces vehicle operating costs and noticeably increases effective range.

The company has also developed a high power density battery system, UVES Power GEN 2. According to engineers, the new technology will allow the battery to be charged with up to 60% more power than in the solutions used previously.

This means that the cells are already proven in the most demanding vehi-

cles with high electricity requirements.

Another direction of Impact development is to technologize the battery systems by getting rid of rare earth materials. Today, hard-to-find elements like cobalt must occur in cells to ensure their performance. Impact is working with manufacturers on the next generation of cells that will come to market in five to eight years. These will have high energy density but without the difficult elements.

“We are also working on systems that will use the new cell with safer solid electrolytes in the future.” says Bartłomiej Kras.

“There will no longer be volatile fractions with flammable vapours. Solid electrolyte batteries will take up the baton from current lithium-ion batteries in the next 10 years.

“Standard lithium-ion cells are not up to the challenge of today’s mobile devices and electric vehicles. The solution to the industry’s problems may lie in next-generation cells with higher density and longer life.

“Outdated battery power systems are one of the biggest problems the entire technology industry must face today. Another problem will be the disposal or recycling of used batteries in vehicles, which still have 80% of their original power, although they can no longer be used for transport.

This makes them ideal for stationary applications such as energy storage for RES. “Together with Solaris Bus & Coach and Tauron, Impact is currently developing the first technology demonstrator for adopting used bus batteries in large-scale grid-supported storage and photovoltaics. Thus, a new business model for carrying such batteries in the future can be developed.

“Impact has delivered more than 1,700 battery containers to the electric bus market worldwide in 2020 alone. You can imagine how many photovoltaic installations with storage we can power from this.”

According to analysts from Verified Market Research, the value of the global electric vehicle battery market will grow to $71.74 billion by 2027 at an average annual growth rate of 5%.

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STRAIGHT FROM THE NEWSDESK

AutoGrid provides VPP software for Total’s largest battery-based energy storage project in northern France

AutoGrid, an artificial intelligence management software provider for the energy industry, announced on February 23 it was to provide frequency regulation capabilities to Total, the French oil major, for its largest batterybased energy storage project in France. This is a 25MW/25MWh lithium-

ion system at the Flandres Center in Dunkirk’s port district.

The system will use the company’s AutoGrid Flex VPP management suite.

This enables the system to provide stability to the French power grid in real time (less than 500 milliseconds) and supports Total’s participation in Europe’s

Frequency Containment Reserves market.

AutoGrid Flex controls the project’s end-to-end market reserve purchasing from Reseau Transport d’ Electricité, the electricity transmission system operator of France. Currently in operation, the €15 million ($18 million) system is based on Saft’s Intensium Max 20 High Energy solution with 11 integrated 2.3MWh containers.

“Tapping the AutoGrid platform for this milestone project has allowed us to bring more flexibility onto France’s power grid, enabling a more stable and reliable network, and opening up new opportunities in the FCR market,” said JeanMarc Simandoux, a vice

president in the Trading Division, Gas Renewables & Power, at Total.

“Our prior work utilizing AutoGrid’s platform, and the company’s successful track record of project delivery on this project, assures us we’re tapping a power trading market-leading partner.”

Total Flex will operate the largest battery on the FCR market and monetize capacity, accounting for up to 3% of the French market (total size of 650MW).

Since 2016, Total has also been a minority investor in AutoGrid through its corporate venture capital arm Total Carbon Neutrality Ventures, thus supporting AutoGrid’s plans for smart energy networks early on.

JLEN takes 100% stake in 50MW battery storage project The wave of new investment in energy storage technologies continues unabated.

JLEN Environmental Assets Group, a UK infrastructure fund, announced on March 3 it had acquired a 100% equity stake in Gigabox South Road Limited. GSRL holds the development rights to construct the West Gourdie project, a 50MW lithium-ion battery energy storage plant based in Dundee, Scotland.

JLEN will invest up to £21.2 million ($28 million) over the next 12-15 months.

The West Gourdie project is approved and construction ready. The project should start commercial operations in March 2022.

“Storage projects provide vital support to the National Grid, by reducing system imbalance and enhancing the grid’s ability to harness a greater level of intermittent renewables on

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the system,” said JLEN. The West Gourdie project will be connected to Scottish Hydro Electric Power Distribution’s distribution network and has a 49.9MW import and export connection.

The project will provide stability to the local network either through direct provision of balancing services to the National Grid, or by reducing volatility on the system via wholesale trading in the wholesale power markets and the balancing mechanism, a tool used by the National Grid to balance supply and demand in real time.

This is JLEN’s third investment into battery storage systems, adding to the two co-located batteries that the company owns as part of its run-of-river hydro portfolio.

Richard Morse, chairman of JLEN, said: “This is our

first grid-scale battery project. This investment should offer additional returns over time as it is structured to take advantage of increased

market volatility as intermittent renewable generation facilities play a greater part in supplying green electricity to the nation.”

Unicore enters virtual power market and launches US VPP with America Energy Unicore Investment on February 18 announced that it had entered into the US virtual power plant market through an Austin-based subsidiary, America Energy. America Energy and Unicore will work in cooperation with utility companies in the region, adding resiliency to the whole, while also placing the VPP as part of Unicore’s energy and real estate investment portfolio.

“VPP is already a

growing industry in Europe (for example in Scotland and Germany), and it represents the future of clean power generation and distribution,” said Unicore founder, Herve Ime. “In addition to big providers, VPPs allow private individuals to enter the network with local renewable sources of energy to become part of a growing chain of stable, decentralized energy solutions.”

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 3

LATEST FROM THE NEWSDESK

Shell acquires VPP provider Next Kraftwerke Royal Dutch Shell, the petrochemical giant, announced in early March it plans to acquire the remaining shares in Next Kraftwerke, giving Shell total ownership of one of the world’s largest virtual power plant operators. This follows a similar acquisition

by Shell in February 2019 of Sonnen, a German energy storage specialist that offers VPP services.

The move is part of a much larger trend, where the oil majors are taking an active stake in the development of the renewable energy market.

Next Kraftwerke becomes part of the Renewables & Energy Solutions division at Shell. It will operate as a portfolio company in the Shell group under its existing brand and core management team, and its staff will be offered continued employment following the

completion of this acquisition, which as yet is subject to regulatory approval.

The acquisition should be completed by the second quarter of this year. Shell has said it aims to double its electricity business to about 560TWh by 2030.

Next Kraftwerke is one of the largest VPP operators, in charge of some 10,000 decentralized energy units across Europe. Their electricity is traded on behalf of Next Kraftwerke’s customers on the wholesale electricity markets.

David Wells, VP Shell

Energy Europe, said: “The power market is rapidly becoming more fragmented and distributed. Much of this is driven by more and smaller generators as well as increasing own-generation by consumers. The acquisition of Next Kraftwerke will accelerate Shell’s strategy to grow by adding smaller renewable assets to our portfolio.

“The complementary skills of the two companies will also support utility-scale projects by providing a wide range of hedging and risk management options.”

Gore Street announces new revenues from work on UK’s DCR Gore Street, the energy storage fund supporting the transition to low carbon power, announced on March 3 that it is participating in the National Grid’s new dynamic containment service and will have most of its operational portfolio participating from April 1.

Like frequency response, dynamic containment is a service to contain the grid’s frequency within the statutory range of ±0.5Hz in the event of a sudden demand or generation loss. However, dynamic containment requires a faster response and should manage the imbalance in frequency in under a second.

In January 2021 National Grid permitted

stacking of dynamic containment services with balancing mechanism participation, enabling energy storage operators to optimise revenue strategy by unlocking additional value.

Since October 2020, dynamic containment has paid an average of £17/ MWh ($22/MWh), well above the recent average fast frequency response prices of £6.5/MWh over the same period.

“If this pricing trend continues, this new service could provide Gore Street with a significant uplift in revenue across more than 90MW of operational assets in Great Britain,” said the firm. “This new revenue stream operates alongside fast frequency

4 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

revenue streams and the company believes that current dynamic containment prices may result in a material uplift in the company’s revenue for the current calendar year.”

Alex O’Cinneide, CEO of Gore Street Capital, said the firm was “excited to take part in this service which reinforces the benefits of our revenue stacking model, enabling our assets to participate in multiple contracts to generate significant value.

We look forward to potentially adding further assets to the service over time and as leading experts in the sector, will continually seek further revenue streams to add accretive value for our shareholders.”

Leclanché in first secondary frequency regulation application of a gas turbine ENERGODATA, a provider of ancillary grid services in Slovakia, has chosen Leclanché to provide its proprietary energy management software along with a battery energy storage system for installation in a natural gas-fired power plant in Levice, Leclanché announced on February 10.

The system should be fully operational by the fourth quarter of 2021.

The Leclanché EMS and BESS will be installed in the Veolia gas power plant in Western Slovakia. It will help the plant comply with new European secondary frequency control regulations for automatic frequency restoration reserve. The regulations, which becomes effective on January 1 next year, require the plant to deliver its full power, when requested by the transmission system operator, in just 7.5 minutes instead of the current 15 minutes.

Leclanché said it will be the first time battery storage technology will be used to support secondary frequency regulation application of a gas turbine.

“Leclanché has provided energy storage systems for primary frequency control with Almelo in the Netherlands, Cremzow in Germany and the PJM in the US. This is the first time in Eastern Europe that an energy storage system is being deployed at an existing power plant to support secondary frequency control. It is a contribution to stabilizing the European grid and helping to integrate more and more renewable production,” said Anil Srivastava, CEO, Leclanché.

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STRAIGHT FROM THE NEWSDESK

US energy storage market shatters quarterly deployment record Energy storage in the US is reaching new heights, according to Wood Mackenzie and the US Energy Storage Association in their latest US Energy Storage Monitor report, released in early March. Some 2,156MWh of new energy storage systems were brought online in Q4 of last year. This is an increase of 182% from Q3 2020, making Q4 the new record quarter for US storage.

As prices fall and barriers to storage deployment are eroded, front-of-the-meter storage is taking off in the US — 4MW out of every 5MW deployed in Q4 were FTM storage. The segment contributed 529MW out of the total 651MW of storage deployed in Q4. Cali-

Puerto Rico seeks 1GW of renewable energy tied with 500MW battery The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority issued a formal request for proposals on February 22 to build 1GW of renewable energy capacity and 500MW of battery energy storage on the island. This is the first of six requests for proposals that aim to install 3.75GW of renewable energy sources and 1.5GW of energy storage in the coming years.

Puerto Rico, which was devastated by Hurricane Maria in September 2017, is seeking to create a decentralized power system that will consist entirely of renewable sources by 2050. Part of this latest request for proposals will involve the creation of virtual power plants.

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fornia had the lion’s share of Q4 FTM deployments, according to the report.

At 90.1MW deployed, residential storage projects made up 14% of the MW total for Q4. After gradual growth in deployments over the first three quarters of 2020, Q4 saw a notable residential spike, driven in large part by homeowner interest in California.

Massachusetts led the non-residential segment in Q4, which is growing more slowly than the other two US storage segments and deployed 76.5MWh during the quarter. California and Hawaii also saw several new projects come online.

In 2020 overall, 1,464MW/3,487MWh of new storage came online in the US, meaning that 179% more storage was added in 2020 than in 2019 in MW terms. The US storage market will add five times more MW of storage in 2025 than was added in 2020, with FTM storage continuing to contribute between 75-85% of new MW each year.

“2020 is the first year that advanced energy storage deployments surpassed gigawatt scale — a tremendous milestone on the path to our aspiration of 100 GW by 2030,” said Jason Burwen, US Energy Storage Association Interim CEO. “With continuing storage cost declines and growing policy support and regulatory reform in states and the federal government, energy storage is on an accelerating trajectory to enable a resilient, decarbonized and affordable electric grid for all.”

“The data truly speaks for itself,” said Dan FinnFoley, Wood Mackenzie head of energy stor-

age. “The US installed 3,115MWh of storage from 2013 through 2019, a total that 2020 has beaten in a single year. This is the hallmark of a market beginning to accelerate exponentially, and momentum will only increase over the coming years. The new largest battery in the world, the 300MW/1,200MWh system newly installed at Moss Landing, likely won’t hold the title for long.”

Q4 was the most eyecatching quarter to date for the residential market.

California contributed most residential storage deployments in 2020 and Hawaii was also a very active market, while states in the northeast, the midwest,

the mid-Atlantic and the southeast are forecast to see growth over the next few years.

“Battery backup is already becoming somewhat of a contested concept in the industry, as it can have different meanings depending on the installer or vendor,” said Chloe Holden, Wood Mackenzie research analyst. “But the ability of solar-plus-storage to provide backup is increasingly driving sales even in markets without additional incentives, particularly states that suffer from regular power outages. We expect an uptick in home battery sales in Texas in the aftermath of February’s devastating outages.”

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Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 5

NEWS — LAUNCHES & TRANSACTIONS

DTEK sets up London investment hub to attract cash for storage projects

Ukraine’s largest energy group, DTEK, said on January 13 it was planning to build an investment hub in the City of London to attract businesses to invest in the former USSR state’s renewable energy storage projects.

The hub should be up and running in the first half of this year, the company says.

“The hub primarily concerns renewable energy sources, energy storage systems and hydrogen energy projects,” said group CEO

Maxim Timchenko.

The vast majority of Ukraine’s electricity is generated by the country’s rich coal resources, and DTEK Energy says it provides roughly a quarter of that power in its 10 thermal power plants.

In 2017, it produced almost 25 million tonnes of coal from its 16 mines and five coal processing plants.

While there is no sign of DTEK reducing its coal supply, the hub is a signal that the firm is bringing renewable energy on board. The DTEK Renewables arm of the company already operates three wind and solar farms.

A day after the announcement, Timchenko said the company had appointed Ildar Saleev as CEO of DTEK Energy.

“In the light of global

trends, the Ukrainian energy sector is undergoing major transformations,” said Timchenko.

“Changes mostly concern the future of thermal generation and the coal-mining industry, as they will make the most significant contribution to the decarbonization of the economy and environmental protection.

“The new DTEK Energy CEO is faced with a tough challenge: preparing TPPs (thermal power plants) for the switch to a new operation mode within the Ukrainian energy system, be an active participant in the ancillary services market, and finding growth points by testing new technologies.”

Also on January 14, Dmytro Sakhahuruk was appointed executive director of DTEK.

Lead battery recycler shifts focus to lithium-ion batteries Aqua Metals, the lead battery recycling company, on February 17 said it was expanding into lithium-ion by buying 10% of LiNiCo, a US start-up ‘focused on creating economically viable and environmentally sustainable technologies for lithium-ion battery recycling’.

Aqua Metals and LiNiCo had already agreed a leaseto-buy arrangement for the Nevada AquaRefining facility, which was damaged by fire in November 2019.

Aqua Metals has now committed $2 million, paid in Aqua Metals shares, for the 10% stake.

The move, says Aqua Metals, is part of its strategy to potentially apply its

AquaRefining intellectual property to lithium-ion battery recycling.

In the same statement, Aqua Metals announced the launch of an ‘eco-network’ of itself, LiNiCo and two other firms, Green Li-ion and Comstock Mining Inc. This would “advance the best-in-class technologies to recycling lithium-ion batteries at volume, both economically and sustainably”, the firm said.

“We believe a collaboration strategy with innovative companies that have multi-disciplinary backgrounds in metals, mining, high volume throughput, and hydrometallurgy is the best approach to solving the sustainability challenge of

6 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

metals recycling, especially with lithium-ion batteries,” said CEO Steve Cotton.

“Forming an eco-network is an important step in our strategy for exploring the expansion of AquaRefining technology to other applications.”

There is certainly a looming lithium-ion battery problem, with the Institute for Energy Research estimating that between 2021 and 2030, 12.85 million tonnes of lithium-ion batteries will go offline worldwide — and that’s just from electric vehicles.

It says more than 10 million tonnes of lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese will be mined for new batteries.

Canadian lithium battery recycler Li-Cycle goes public Li-Cycle, which says it is the largest lithium battery recycler in North America, on February 16 signed an agreement with Peridot Acquisition Corp to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol LICY. The transaction, which is timetabled for completion in the second quarter of 2021, is expected to raise $615 million, which the company says will enable it to fully fund its planned global expansion.

Once completed, the combined company will be named ‘L-Cycle Holdings Corp’ and will be led by Ajay Kochhar, co-founder and CEO of Li-Cycle, and Tim Johnston, co-founder and executive chairman.

Li-Cycle, which was founded in 2016, says one of its commitments is to supply the ‘missing step’ of a truly sustainable ESG-friendly lithium battery cycling option.

“Legacy recycling technologies have largely relied on thermal operations, which can emit harmful emissions and result in lower recovery rates,” says the company.

“Li-Cycle’s two-stage battery recycling model enables customers to benefit from a safe and environmentally friendly solution for recycling all types of lithium-ion materials.”

Li-Cycle’s recycling method uses decentralized facilities so that batteries can be mechanically processed close to sources of supply, While large-scale production is centralized to capitalize on economies of scale.

Alan Levande, chairman and CEO of Peridot, will join Li-Cycle’s board of directors.

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NEWS — LAUNCHES & TRANSACTIONS

Hydro-Québec launches subsidiary to develop and supply battery systems Canada’s largest utility, Hydro-Québec, on December 9 launched a subsidiary called EVLO Energy Storage to design, sell and operate lithium iron phosphate battery energy storage systems for power producers, transmission providers and distributors, and commercial and industrial markets.

The modular systems are the result of extensive work on battery materials by Hydro-Québec, which says the

EVLO systems have been tested in actual operating conditions on and off-grid, with a microgrid and at a solar farm in La Prairie.

“We firmly believe that the knowhow Québec has acquired with regard to batteries will help develop solar

and wind power,” said Hydro-Québec president and CEO Sophie Brochu.

“Our products will also have useful applications in existing power grids, such as managing consumption peaks.”

The company says its chemistry is safer than other lithium-ion batteries, with protection against thermal runaway and temperature increases.

EVLO has also signed a

Athan Fox and Miles Freeman’s Ever Resource bought by iQ International Ever Resource Ltd, a UK battery recycling start-up founded in June 2020, has been bought by the Swiss technology company iQ International, the firm announced on February 12.

Ever Resource directors Athan Fox and Miles Freeman will launch ‘company-wide state-of-the-art recycling opportunities, particularly for batteries’, iQ says.

Fox becomes director of innovation, Freeman director of recycling operations.

Both previously worked for Aurelius Environmental, which was known for its work on recycling methods for lead batteries.

In 2017, Aurelius started work with Cambridge University to develop a recycling technology that could produce lead oxide that outperforms virgin lead.

Its patented process produces lead oxide directly from waste lead oxide paste, unlike other recycling systems, which produce lead metal that is then oxidized separately to lead oxide.

The technology won a grant of more than €1.3 million ($1.5 million) from the European Commission.

Earlier this year, iQ International said it had signed an exclusive licence agree-

Stem and Star Peak to form combined company adding $608 million to balance sheet Stem, the artificial intelligence company used in energy storage systems deployed worldwide, announced in December it is to revamp its already strong balance sheet through what it describes as a ‘business combination’ with Star Peak. Star Peak is a special purpose blank cheque company, used here to create a combined company with a $1.35 billion pro forma equity value.

Stem said the new entity would create “the first

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public pure play smart energy storage company”.

The transaction will provide $608 million of gross proceeds to the company, assuming no redemptions, including a $225 million fully committed common stock private placement at $10 per share.

The boards of directors of Stem and Star Peak unanimously approved the transaction, which will require the approval of both firms’ stockholders and regulatory approvals.

Upon closing the

transaction, expected by the end of March, the combined company will be named Stem and listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the new ticker symbol STEM. The combined company will be headed by John Carrington, the existing CEO of Stem. He said: “This transaction is transformative for us and we expect it to accelerate our growth. This merger will enable expansion to several additional global markets.”

memorandum of understanding with the hydroelectric, wind and solar firm Innergex at Tonnerre, in northern France, to supply a 9MWh system.

This is its first major storage project on the global market, and will be commissioned in 2021.

“Tonnerre is Innergex’s first standalone battery project, and we are happy to be partnering Hydro-Québec to showcase Québec internationally,” said Innergex president and CEO Michel Letellier.

“Storage plays a key role in the global development of renewable energy options and is a growth driver for Innergex.” ment with the University of Cambridge for the recycling technology developed by the university and the team at Ever Resource.

“After working closely with the Ever Resource founders for over a year, iQ has decided to acquire Ever Resource and hire its founders (Fox and Freeman) to launch companywide stateof-the-art recycling opportunities, particularly for batteries,” says iQ. “Among the many opportunities with this acquisition, Ever Resource, working with Cambridge University, has developed technologies to upcycle spent battery paste by converting it into a superior, nanostructured, more energydense leady oxide.

“The advantage of this is more energy per kilogram of battery, longer cycle life, greater depth of discharge and significantly reduced environmental impact.”

Ever Resource is also researching and developing better ways to recycle lithium-ion batteries, says iQ. This includes a collaboration with the University of Birmingham to develop proprietary methods for the processing of end-of-life electric vehicle battery packs.

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 7

NEWS — FUNDING & COSTS

Lithium-ion battery price drops to lowest ever in 2020 The price of lithium batteries dropped to its lowest ever in 2020, a report

by BloombergNEF claimed in December, citing a 13%

drop on 2019 figures.

For the first time, BNEF said, battery packs were selling for less than $100/ kWh for e-buses in Chi-

na, although the volumeweighted average price for e-buses there was slightly higher, at $105/kWh. The market average was

Energy storage sector continues to boom despite Covid crisis Corporate funding for battery storage, smart grid and energy efficiency rocketed by 112% to $8.1 billion in 2020 compared with $3.8 billion in 2019, a February report

by Mercom Capital says.

The battery storage sector saw a 136% rise in corporate funding, with $6.6 billion in 54 deals, although venture capital funding for battery firms was down $0.2 billion from last year’s $1.7 billion, it said.

Lithium-ion battery technology was the clear winner, receiving VC funding of $649 million, with solid state batteries and flow batteries also getting a share of the cake.

Despite shaving off 19% from its earlier forecasts for energy storage installations this year because of the pandemic, Wood Mackenzie still said 2020 had broken records for deployment.

Looking to 2021, market analysts at IHS Markit forecast that the global market for energy storage will more than double, with 10GW of installations compared with 4.5GW last year, dominated by the US. Up to 2025, the energy storage market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of around 24.4%, says Mordor Intelligence.

“Factors such as a

8 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

growing renewable energy sector, supportive government policies and schemes for energy storage systems, and improving energy storage economies, are expected to be the major drivers for the market in the coming years,” it says.

Mordor warned that EU legislation could restrain market growth because ambiguity was putting network operators off.

The commercial and industrial sector would increasingly seek out storage options as it increased the amount of renewable power generation it was using, the report says.

$137/kWh hour in 2020, which means that over 10 years, the price per kilowatt hour has dropped by 87% in real terms from $1,100 in 2010.

In battery electric vehicles, the lower $126/kWh pack price means that the battery portion of the total cost of a vehicle was 21%, dropping to $101/kWh by 2023, BNEF’s 2020 Battery Price Survey said.

“It is at around this price point that automakers should be able to produce and sell mass market EVs at the same price (and with the same margin) as comparable internal combustion vehicles in some markets,” said BNEF. “This assumes no subsidies are available, but actual pricing strategies will vary by automaker and geography.”

BNEF also said that new cathode chemistries and falling manufacturing costs would drive prices down in the near term.

Calling the price drop a ‘historic milestone’, James Frith, BNEF head of energy storage research and lead author of the report, said within a few years the average price in the industry as a whole would pass this point.

“What’s more, our analysis shows that even if prices for raw materials were to return to the highs seen in 2018, it would only delay average prices reaching $100/kWh by two years — rather than completely derailing the industry,” he said.

“The industry is becoming increasingly resilient to changing raw material prices, with leading battery manufacturers moving up the value chain and investing in cathode production or even mines.”

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NEWS — FUNDING & COSTS

Decline in battery prices to cause FTM storage systems to drop by 30% The cost of front-of-meter storage systems fell faster than anticipated last year thanks to the drop in battery prices, said sector analyst Wood Mackenzie on January 19, and could fall by 30% by 2025.

Improvements in battery energy density also contributed to lower overall balance of system (BOS) components and associated costs, the analyst said, along with other hardware components losing price variance between countries.

“As batteries are expected to represent a shrinking portion of all-in system costs, there will be heightened focus on BOS cost reductions in the future,” said senior analyst Mitalee Gupta.

“Manufacturers will continue to innovate and produce BOS components that help reduce labour costs, and installation crews are implementing more efficient labour practices as they gain more experience on job sites. Competitive markets will drive system efficiencies, product standardization and cheaper batteries as we progress towards 2025.”

China has the lowest all-in costs globally, and WoodMac says its systems are expected to fall 33% in 2025.

Because China is the world’s largest lithium iron phosphate battery producer, the chemistry is expected to emerge as the leading battery chemistry over the next five years.

“As Chinese vendors ramp up manufacturing and improve LFP technology further, the costs of these batteries will decline faster,” says the analyst.

In the rest of the Asia-Pacific region, nickel manganese cobalt is the dominant

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chemistry, WoodMac says, although there is growing interest in LFP for energy storage applications.

WoodMac picks out Australia as a key NMC market and costs should fall by 34% by 2025, which would be welcome in a country where the price of electricity is one of the highest in the world.

“Though a dominant NMC market, technology transition is taking place in the country as several developers and system integrators are looking at LFP with renewed interest,” says the WoodMac report.

“Cost competitiveness of LFP, supply availability from China and improve-

ments in the technology make it a favourable choice for energy storage applications.”

“As the region’s storage industry takes off, every component across the value chain will play a role in bringing down system costs,” says Gupta. “Fire risks and safety standards, tariffs and trade policies, and safe-guarding the supply chain amidst Covid-19 uncertainty are factors that could make or break the industry.

Separately, a further report released on January 21 says the cost of solar power has dropped 90% over the last two decades, and will likely fall another 15% to

25% in the decade to come.

By 2030, solar will become the cheapest source of new power in every US state, plus Canada, China, and 14 other nations.

Solar is already the cheapest form of new electricity generation in 16 US states, plus Spain, Italy and India.

Even with the Covid-19 pandemic raging, global installations exceeded 115 gigawatts (GW) in 2020, compared to 1.5 GW in 2006.

While the growth of solar to this scale was driven partially by government subsidies and environmental goals, solar generation is now attractive based on price alone.

“As batteries are expected to represent a shrinking portion of all-in system costs, there will be heightened focus on BOS cost reductions in the future”— Mitalee Gupta, Wood Mackenzie Record energy spending in 2020 driven by Europe Energy spending broke records last year driven

by Europe, with an unprecedented $500 billion recorded by the news agency BloombergNEF as being funnelled into renewables, storage and electric heat globally.

BNEF says that in total, the world committed $501.3 billion to ‘energy transition investment’ in 2020, an increase on 2019 of 9% — and this in a year chronically disrupted by the pandemic.

But not all regions saw an increase: while Europe recorded a 67% increase in spending of $166.2 billion, China was down 12% on the previous year at $134.8 billion, and the US came in third at $85.3 billion, down 11%.

“Europe’s impressive performance was driven by a record year for electric vehicle sales, and the best year in renewable energy investment since 2012,” the agency said.

2020 was ‘the biggest ever build-out of solar projects and a $50 billion surge for offshore wind’, with renewable energy capacity clocking up $303.5 billion from companies, governments and households, and $139 billion going on electric vehicles and charging infrastructure. This was a new record itself, up 28%.

The battery storage technology sector received a $3.6 billion boost, level with 2019 despite the cost of batter-

ies actually falling — so in real terms, an increase.

It shows a global commitment to decarbonize the energy system, says head of analysis Albert Cheung at BNEF. “Clean power generation and electric transport are seeing heavy inflows, but need to see further increases in spending as costs fall,” he said.

“Technologies such as electric heat, carbon capture and hydrogen are only attracting a fraction of the investment they will need in the 2020s to help bring emissions under control.

“We need to be talking about trillions per year if we are to meet climate goals.”

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 9

NEWS — STORAGE DEPLOYMENT

Texas black-outs signal more opportunities for battery storage CIT Group’s announcement on February 11 that it was arranging a portfolio of six battery storage systems with a total output of 230MW for the southern US state of Texas will no doubt be welcomed in a state that has seen at least five million people suffering from power blackouts over several days, with no end in sight for some.

Supply fell short by about 3.4GW, ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages about 90% of the state’s electricity) said, which means the amount of battery capacity outlined by CIT Group would have to be increased 150-fold to meet demand.

The batteries, three of which are already operational, are owned by Key Capture Energy, which has an overall development pipeline of 2.5GW in New York and New England, as well as Texas. The other three should be completed this year.

The growing need for energy storage has been dramatically exposed in the frozen state, with at least five million people experiencing power blackouts for days as rare winter storms have caused temperatures to plummet to as low as minus 13°C (8.6°F).

The average temperature for February in the state is around 13°C, or 55°F, but temperatures are still hovering around zero and for thousands the lights had still not been switched back on as we went to press.

Claims have been coming from different quarters as to why the power seized up, with some saying wind turbines froze, others blaming coal and natural gas station failures, others claiming it was the amount of snow and ice dumped on equipment not designed to withstand it.

“No matter which way you cut it, this is a massive failure for a grid and a state that holds up energy

The growing need for energy storage has been dramatically exposed in the frozen state and electricity as a shining example,” the USA Today newspaper quoted Varun Rai, director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas-Austin, as saying.

At a news conference on February 16 the paper said ERCOT admitted 4.5GW of energy had gone offline, with a third of that from wind, the rest being gas and coal.

It is early days for battery installations across the

Saft switches on largest grid-scale battery in France Saft, the subsidiary of oil major Total, has switched on the largest grid-scale battery storage system in France, at 25MW/25MWh, the firm announced in January.

Saft was contracted by French utility RTE to install the lithium-ion battery at the site of a former oil refinery operated and owned by Total in Dunkirk, northern France.

It is providing fast reserve services to support the stability of the French power grid as part of government policy to develop electricity

capacity, Total said.

“This project is part of Total’s strategy to develop the stationary energy storage solutions that are critical to the expansion of renewable energy, which is intermittent by nature,” says Patrick Pouyanné, Total CEO and chairman.

The battery is small compared with its counterparts in other countries, such as in the UK, where the need to obtain permission before installing batteries of more than 50MW in size was removed in July and could lead to a swathe of larger

10 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

battery installations.

In March, RTE unveiled a pilot storage project in France using software-controlled batteries known as RINGO, in which one battery absorbs excess local energy output generated by renewable sources, while a second simultaneously releases it to areas of need.

This is just one step in the development of France’s power system, which RTE predicts will need another 48TWh of storage, 10% of total consumption, to supply the increasing demand from electric vehicles.

state, but already Texas is ranked fourth in the country for battery capacity.

On January 7, Chinese battery giant CATL and Californian energy storage firm FlexGen said they would be increasing capacity by 220MWh with the installation of two standalone 110MWh batteries in the state, which are earmarked as dispatchable assets for a leading independent power producer.

“RTE could also capitalize on electric vehicle batteries and use them as an additional grid management tool based on the RINGO model,” it says. “In concrete terms, smart-grid vehicle batteries become storage units. They are able to supply the grid if there is a peak in demand and are able to recharge if there is a peak in solar output, for example.”

Oil giant Total says it is building a portfolio of lowcarbon electricity operations, aiming to increase the proportion to 15%-20% of its sales by 2040. It claims its low-carbon power generation capacity is almost 7GW, of which more than 3MW is from renewable energy sources.

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NEWS — STORAGE DEPLOYMENT

World’s biggest battery officially begins operating at Moss Landing Texas-based energy firm Vistra on January 6 said it had switched on the largest lithium-ion battery storage facility in the world, the Moss Landing facility in Monterey County, California.

The 300MW/1,200MWh system is not even up to capacity yet, with a further 100MW/400MWh due to be added by August 2021 in Phase 2 — and if required, ultimately it has the potential to be stepped up to 1,500MW/6,000MWh. The system, developed in cooperation with the utility Pacific Gas and Electric Company, has been installed at the existing Moss Landing power plant. It uses existing transmission lines to improve grid stability and fill the ‘reliability gap’ created by intermittent renewables, Vistra CEO Curt Morgan said.

“A battery system of this size and scale has never been built before,” he said.

“As our country transitions to a clean energy future, batteries will play a pivotal role and the Vistra Moss Landing project will serve as the model for utility-scale battery storage for years to come.”

Now in Phase 1, the battery system can power around 225,000 homes at peak electricity periods, using stored excess electricity from the grid generated during peak solar output

hours.

The Moss Landing battery has smashed the previous world record for size: the Tesla/Neoen 100MW/129MWh Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia was widely applauded on installation in 2017 as the world’s largest, and even with its expansion just three years later to 150MW/194MWh, it is just half the size of the California system.

Plans revealed to deliver world’s largest battery in Australia An announcement in February by the Australian firm CEP.Energy that it was planning to build the world’s biggest battery by about four times (1,200MW) would see the amount of battery storage in Australia exceed predictions by a third.

The battery, in New South Wales, would be eight times larger than Australia’s current biggest system — the Hornsdale Power Reserve installed by Tesla in 2017 — and four times bigger than the Californian battery at Moss Landing, which has just come online.

CEP.Energy chairman Morris Iemma said batteries were key at a time when traditional power generation www.energystoragejournal.com

units, such as coal and gas stations, were being wound down.

Australia does not keep a national register of energy storage systems, says the Smart Energy Council, whose 2018 report, Australian Energy Storage: Market Analysis, identified 55 large-scale energy storage projects, existing, planned or proposed, representing a total of 4GWh of storage, excluding pumped hydro.

The Smart Energy Council is a combination of the Australian Solar Council and the Energy Storage Council, comprising more than 1.000 members from manufacturers, developers, distributors and installers.

It said the combination of residential and commercial battery storage could deliver more than 3GWh, excluding this latest proposal and probably several others that have materialized since the report was written. These include plans revealed by Origin Energy in November to build a 700MW battery with four hours’ duration in the same region of New South Wales.

Australia has long had some of the highest electricity prices in the world, exacerbated in part because of the closing down of large coalfired power stations. The size of the country also means that electricity networks are expensive to maintain, adding to customers’ bills.

Singapore’s first VPP project will use Hitachi ABB Power Grids

Hitachi ABB Power Grids, a company formed in July to develop electricity networks, will supply the energy storage system for Singapore’s first virtual power plant, the company said on February 4.

The project, begun in 2019 by the Energy Research Institute at Nanyang Technological University, has been funded by the state’s Energy Market Authority and Semborp Industries.

It will use intelligent protocols to integrate electricity from distributed energy resources, such as solar power, into the electricity system, optimizing the power output of resources across the island. Energy fluctuations resulting from solar intermittency will be balanced automatically via the VPP. “This marks a key milestone in the VPP project, as energy storage is critical to the efficient integration of green energy into Singapore’s power grid,” said Sembcorp chief digital officer Matthew Friedman.

In July, Hitachi completed a $6.85 billion 80.1% take-over of the ABB’s power grids division — a huge transaction that allows for a 100% take-over after 2023.

News agency Bloomberg said at the time it was the biggest corporate deal Hitachi had made, and that it planned to move away from its nuclear plant business into electricity networks.

ABB’s Power Grids division head, Claudio Facchin, was appointed CEO, with Hitachi executive VP Toshikazu Nishino as chairman.

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 11

NEWS — STORAGE DEPLOYMENT

Q3 2020 US energy storage deployments increase by 240% over Q2 The US Energy Storage Association’s December US Energy Storage Monitor report on December 2 said 476MW of energy storage was deployed in the third quarter of 2020, an increase of 240% over the previous quarter.

The vast majority of the growth was in the front

of the meter segment, although residential storage did also grow.

“The new record for storage is not an anomaly but rather a sign of things to come as FTM storage procurements, particularly in California, grow dramatically in number and size,” said Wood Mackenzie,

which prepares the report.

The US battery energy storage market is set to grow from 1.2GW in total to 7.5GW in 2025, driven primarily by large-scale utility procurements, the statement said.

“Solar-paired storage will account for a large majority of these installa-

tions, and potentially the vast majority, as developers aim to capture value from the Investment Tax Credit.”

The tax credit was enacted in 2006 to spur on the solar industry. It awards a tax credit of 26%, reducing to 22% by the end of this year, to solar systems built at residential or commercial properties.

Since it was implemented the solar industry has shot up by more than 10,000%, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

“These eye-catching deployment totals represent only the beginning of a long-anticipated scale-up for the US storage market,” said Dan Finn-Foley, Wood Mackenzie head of energy storage.

“Massive price declines and efforts to ensure eligibility have set the stage for exponential growth, and the curtain has only just risen on the first act. Considering the scale of systems anticipated for 2021 we do not expect this record, remarkable as it is, to stand for long.”

SCE brings future portfolio up to 2GW battery storage capacity Southern California Edison is adding another 590MW of battery energy storage capacity in its road to carbon neutrality by 2045.

SCE, the second largest utility in the US, has added another 590MW of battery energy storage capacity to its portfolio ‘to further enhance the region’s electric system reliability needs’, the utility said on December 7.

All of the batteries are lithium-ion and include three utility-scale projects plus one 5MW behindthe-meter pilot system.

It brings the state’s total of storage capacity

planned to come online by 2023 to more than 3GW. Of that figure, just over 2GW will be battery storage, which includes the 770MW/3GWh procured by the utility in May. “Bringing more utilityscale battery storage resources online will improve the reliability of the grid and further the integration of renewable generation resources, like wind and solar, into the grid,” said William Walsh, SCE vice president of energy procurement and management.

The new projects include a 325MW ‘Desert

12 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

Peak’ project by NextEra Energy; a 200MW project named ‘Crimson’ by Recurrent Energy; a 60MW ‘Eldorado Valley’ project by 174 Power Global/ Hanwha Group; and a 5MW behind-the-meter system by Sunrun.

In its Pathway 2045 white paper, published in November 2019, SCE sets out a road map of how to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.

It emphasizes the need to decarbonize the electricity sector and electrify transport and buildings coupled with energy efficiency, as well as use low-carbon fuels to elec-

trify applications such as industrial and heavy-duty long-range movement of goods.

“In 25 years’ time, three quarters of light-duty vehicles, two thirds of medium-duty vehicles and one third of heavy-duty vehicles will need to be electric,” the white paper says. “And by 2045, almost three quarters of space and water heating will also need to be electric.”

SCE has about five million customer accounts, it says, in a 50,000 square mile (80,500 square kilometre) area.

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NEWS — STORAGE DEPLOYMENT

Chakratec installs flywheel technology to charge EVs at hotel

Israeli energy storage firm Chakratec has installed its flywheel technology at one of the hotel chain Premier Inn’s facilities in Germany to allow guests to charge their EVs without adding more pressure on to the power grid, the firm said on February 9.

The company says Brit-

ish hotel chain Premier Inn, which has around 800 hotels, is the first to install the technology in Germany. It is also the first indoor installation of its kind.

It is looking at installing the ‘Kinetic Power Booster’ at new sites throughout Germany over the next five years.

Because hotels are usually placed in busy city centres they are usually in areas where the power grid is under a lot of pressure of electricity demand.

“At most of Premier Inn’s city centre locations the grid is too weak to provide the required power for EV charging,” the com-

AGL chooses two energy firms to supply 1GW of storage Australian energy firm AGL picked Finnish manufacturing giant Wärtsilä and US-based energy company Fluence on January 14 to supply 1,000MW grid-scale energy storage.

Last year, AGL said it planned to install battery storage systems near the Loy Yang A power station in Victoria, Liddell power station and Broken Hill in New South Wales, and Torrens Island in South Australia.

The company chose Wärtsilä and Fluence through a competitive tender process for ‘their capability, experience and pricing as well as their alignment with AGL’s values and strategic objectives’.

“This framework agree-

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ment is another example of AGL getting on with the business of energy transition and will enable delivery against our commitment to build 850MW of grid-scale battery storage by FY2024,” said AGL chief operating officer Markus Brokhof.

“We are already well advanced with our planning process and these framework agreements will reduce tender timeframes for individual projects, enabling faster project schedules and commercial operation.”

He said energy storage technology was critical in creating cleaner and smarter distributed energy infrastructure.

Fluence has many multi-megawatt energy storage projects on the

go, including 1GW in California to be deployed by the end of this year; 500MW in southeast Asia; and more than 700MW on the British Isles. It supplies ‘Stack’ products, including Gridstack, Sunstack and Edgestack systems, which integrate solar with storage.

Wärtsilä already has more than 70 grid-scale installations to its name around the world, operated with its GEMS energy management software.

Wärtsilä says it welcomes new CEO Håkan Agnevall on February 1.

Current CEO Jaakko Eskola will retire on June 30 and remain as senior adviser to the board and executive team until then.

pany says. “To overcome this hurdle, energy storage must be added to the chargers to boost the grid, which is done by applying Chakratec’s kinetic energy storage technology.

“The KPB stores the electricity as kinetic energy in a fast-rotating flywheel in a vacuum, which presents two major advantages: unlimited high-power charge and discharge cycles (more than 150,000) without degradation over the full system lifetime of 20 years, and since it is a non-chemical technology, it is also a sustainable and reusable system, as opposed to toxic and polluting chemical batteries,” the company says.

Lead batteries have also been rolled out to supply electricity for EV charging to save peak charges from the grid.

In 2020, Batteries International reported on a feasibility study by the Consortium for Batteries Innovation, which showed that lead batteries could do just this job, and do it fast.

International Lead Award winner Frank Fleming explained how his company, EAI Grid Storage, had designed a gas station and earmarked a further eight for lead battery installations to charge EVs rather than sucking energy out of the grid.

“We want to charge quickly — fast charging is critical and lead batteries are extremely capable of fast recharge,” said Fleming.

“This system places the lead acid batteries very nicely between the grid and the EV charging. They sit on charge 24 hours a day and take the energy off the grid at a controlled rate below the excessive demand rate.”

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 13

PEOPLE NEWS

Bosch battery CEO and veteran Reinhardt Peper joins IQ International advisory board

Reinhardt Peper

Reinhardt Peper, former CEO of Bosch Battery Systems, has joined IQ International’s advisory board after retiring from Bosch in November, IQ announced on January 1.

Based in Detroit, US, Peper had headed up Bosch battery since 2013, having joined the company in 1984. Apart from a three-year stint as CEO of Cobasys from 2009,

Peper’s career had been spent entirely with Bosch until now.

Before retiring, he oversaw all company operations with regional responsibility for the Bosch energy storage business in North America, as well as being part of the Bosch electric power train and lithium battery development team.

Peper’s experience in international business, new technology and as part of the powertrain development team were cited by IQ CEO Kevin Loman as reasons for the appointment.

“This is an incredible addition of complementary skill to the diverse experience of the current advisory board members,” he said.

“The vast and varied

intellectual property pipeline of IQ International presents compelling change for the traditional leadacid battery industry,” said Peper.

“The vision and strategy to leverage the existing supply chain, commercialize recycling technologies and develop new technologies for application-specific and commercial economic constraints induced me to join the IQ advisory board.”

In October IQ appointed two former Johnson Controls Power Solutions (now Clarios) battery experts to its full-time workforce. Ray Brown, appointed chief integration officer, and Dennis Brown, chief marketing officer, already had seats on IQ’s advisory board.

Ian Whiting appointed commercial director of UK Battery Industrialization Centre The UK Battery Industrialization Centre, a modern purpose-built 18,500m2 battery production development facility, appointed Ian Whiting as its commercial director in December.

The UKBIC is part of the Faraday Battery Challenge, a government programme that aims to put the UK on the map when it comes to developing cost-effective, highperformance and recyclable batteries. It is due to open this year.

With Britishvolt in the throes of planning a battery gigafactory in Wales, UKBIC managing director Jeff Pratt has said the battery industry in the country needs to attract skills,

ability and knowledge of the industry to help drive it forward.

Whiting has previously worked for AMTE Power, a start-up that has signed a memorandum of understanding with Britishvolt to build the gigafactory.

Most recently he worked as a freelance battery technology consultant.

“I’m delighted to be joining UKBIC and helping to accelerate the introduction and adoption of electrified technology, an ambition which, once complete, will support the UK as a whole,” Whiting said.

Britishvolt and the UKBIC have other links: in June, Britishvolt hired Isabel Sheldon as chief

14 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

strategy officer as the first member of its technical team and head of an advisory board. Sheldon was UKBIC’s business development director before joining Britishvolt, and she has just been awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Honours list for her services to electric vehicle battery technology.

Ian Whiting

Evergy appoints Campbell as CEO

David Campbell

Missouri, US utility Evergy appointed David Campbell as CEO and president effective January 4.

Evergy is a fairly new company, having been formed in 2018 when local energy providers KCP&L and Westar Energy merged. It has about 1.6 million customers.

Campbell has a lot of experience in the energy and utility sector, with 15 years in senior leadership positions. His most recent post was as executive vice president and CFO with Vistra Corporation, a multi-state power generator and provider headquartered in Texas with around 5 million customers.

Before Vistra, Campbell was CEO of Luminant, a large power generator in Texas.

Campbell joins Evergy four months after it announced its five-year Sustainability Transformation Plan, which aims to reduce costs for its customers with better grid reliability and security and accelerate the company’s transition to clean energy.

“I join Evergy with a shared drive and commitment to provide customers with clean, affordable, reliable and secure energy to power their lives, while driving sustainable, superior value for shareholders,” said Campbell.

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PEOPLE NEWS

Nexeon hires Liya Wang as CTO after COO and CCO appointments in December UK advanced silicon materials developer Nexeon on January 11 appointed Liya Wang as chief technology officer to help steer the company’s products for next generation lithiumion batteries.

Wang is well versed in battery development, living mainly in the US since 1993, when he began with IMRA America, Inc as a researcher in electrochemical capacitors and high-power lithium-ion batteries.

As vice president and manager of Materials Development for T/J Technologies from 1999 to 2002, he led the development of advanced electrode materials for Li-ion batteries and managed multi-million dollar government-funded research projects.

Wang was made director of Emerging Materials with lithium battery man-

Liya Wang

ufacturer A123 Systems from 2006-2010, where he worked on the transition of new generations of lithium iron phosphate cathode and precursor materials.

After his time with A123 Systems, Wang helped build an R&D centre for energy storage technologies for CIC Energigune in

Spain, leading the development of advanced batteries and electrochemical capacitors, as well as industrial projects to provide energy storage solutions for different industries.

Back in the US in 2012, Wang began work with XG Sciences, where he was vice president – R&D and led the development of graphene-based materials for energy storage, thermal, electric, anticorrosion and composite applications.

Most recently, in 2019, Wang was made general manager of special projects & IP management, office of CEO, before joining Nexeon this January.

On December 16, Nexeon announced the appointments of Christian Spoerk as chief operating officer and Gaetan Borgers as chief commercial officer.

Umicore announces management changes in its recycling units International materials technology and recycling group Umicore announced in January that Stephan Csoma, executive vice president of recycling, would retire in March after being with the company since 1992.

Before joining the management board in 2012 Csoma led the Zinc Chemicals business unit, and as executive vice president has overseen the divestment of the Zinc Chemicals, Building Products and Technical Materials businesses.

Denis Goffaux, who joined the company

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in 1995, will succeed Csoma on April 1. He set up Umicore’s first cathode materials plant in Cheonan, South Korea, in 2000, and since 2018 he has been in charge of Umicore’s rechargeable battery materials activities.

Goffaux leaves the post of executive vice-president energy & surface technologies on March 1, and will be replaced

by Ralph Kiessling, who joined Umicore in 2003.

His background is in catalysis, and he ‘has started to prepare the automotive catalyst business to face a

SolarEdge sees in the New Year with two appointments

new market reality with less demand for combustion engines’.

In June, Umicore was granted a loan from the European Investment Bank to partly fund a cathode materials plant in Nysa, Poland, to supply advanced cathode materials for advanced lithium battery cell manufacturers.

“The development of our rechargeable battery materials activities in Europe is a strategic growth project for Umicore,” said chief financial officer Filip Platteeuw at the time.

Israel-headquartered smart energy firm SolarEdge has hired SheWoong Jeong as CEO of its battery subsidiary Kokam, as well as appointing Yogev Barak as chief marketing officer of SolarEdge, the company said at the end of December.

Described by SolarEdge as an ‘industry veteran’, Jeong has joined the firm from Samsung Electronics, where he was appointed general manager and executive vice president for Automotive Batteries and ESS in 2014.

He had worked for Samsung in various positions for two decades, after nine months at Motorola at the beginning of his career.

In September Kokam launched a UPS battery system for mission-critical facilities. It makes batteries and energy storage systems for applications in sectors including aerospace, grid storage, industrial and electric vehicles.

Yogev Barak has worked in international marketing and B2B product management for a quarter of a century, most recently at HP Indigo, where he was head of strategy, marketing, products and business management.

He worked for HP Indigo for 14 years and before that spent 13 years in a variety of jobs with Applied Materials.

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 15

PEOPLE NEWS

Kelly Speakes-Backman steps down as CEO of the US ESA to join Department of Energy Kelly Speakes-Backman, for three and a half years the CEO of the US Energy Storage Association, on January 21 said she had been appointed principal deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy with the Department of Energy.

She has been replaced

by ESA vice president of policy Jason Burwen as interim CEO. Speakes-Backman had ‘led ESA through a pivotal shift in the industry with record-breaking growth in 2020, despite the challenges from Covid-19,” said ESA board chairman John Hewa, who is also president and CEO of Rappahannock Electric Cooperative.

“As the Biden-Harris administration takes office, and as the storage industry

enters a new phase of accelerated market growth, energy storage is poised to become central to Ameri-

ca’s clean energy economy to enable a more resilient, efficient, sustainable, and affordable grid for all.”

Kelly Speakes-Backman

Wilson Ma named VP of Corporate Development at Li-Cycle

Wilson Ma

Canadian lithium-ion battery recycling firm Li-Cycle announced on January 27 it had appointed Wilson Ma as vice president of Corporate Development.

Ma will spearhead Li-Cycle’s efforts to scale the recover of lithium-ion resources globally, while leading other strategic

initiatives, the company says.

Ma was already based in Toronto, where he worked at global electrical giant Emerson. He started in corporate development, strategy & innovation some seven years ago, before being appointed director of growth & business transformation.

He will report to Li-Cycle co-founder and CEO Ajay Kochhar in his new job, which is described as helping to deliver longterm sustainable growth in the clean energy sector.

“This is a key leadership position for Li-Cycle and Wilson will be instrumental in helping to drive our company’s advancement

16 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

into global markets,” said Kochhar.

“I look forward to working with Li-Cycle’s entire ecosystem to close the circular loop on lithium and other critical materials, and to help achieve the broader vision of creating a sustainable future for our environment,” said Ma. On November 18, Li-Cycle said it had closed a series C equity funding round to develop its New York commercial hub and move into international markets. It did not give details of the financing other than to say the US asset management firm Moore Strategic Ventures had led the round.

Fluence hires Marek Kubik as MD of UK, Ireland and Israel Siemens and AES joint venture Fluence has named Marek Kubik managing director of its UK, Ireland and Israel business, Kubik announced on the digital networking platform LinkedIn at the end of January.

Kubik was market director for the energy storage firm AES in May 2016 and cofounded Fluence in a similar capacity in 2018, where he has remained ever since.

“After five exponential years helping to scale up our UK and Ireland pipeline from 5MWh to over 1,200MWh, Israel has a trajectory to more than double that volume of batteries in half the time,” he said on the post.

“Having been involved in the market opening of Israel since 2017, it’s fantastic to see the cogs click into place and the market to open with such speed.”

He has also advised the United Nations’ Cleaner Electricity Systems, looking at technology to reduce emissions.

Fluence began in July 2017 when energy storage integrators AES Advancion and Siemens Siestorage created the technology and services company.

Since then it has deployed or been awarded contracts to install 2,400MW of storage in 100 projects in 24 countries, it says.

It is headed by Manuel Pérez Dubuc as CEO, who worked as senior VP of global new energy solutions at AES.

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NEWS

EU publishes legislation ‘that will define our industry for the next 15 years’ The new EU ‘Batteries Regulation’ published on December 10, the first since the Batteries Directive of 2006, has been met with a broad welcome from battery industry stakeholders, along with warnings of over regulation and complexity in the new 158-page document.

EUROBAT has called it ‘a crucial piece of legislation that will define our industry for the next 15 years’.

The main points of the proposals include recovering increasing amounts of raw materials from all kinds of batteries; raising collection and recycling rates; providing detailed information on what each battery contains, including how much of the materials in each has been recovered; reducing the EU’s reliance on imports of materials; strengthening internal market processes and a circular economy with common rules for the single market; and reducing environmental impacts.

It also talks about restricting the use of hazardous chemicals, in particular mercury and cadmium, and aims to ultimately have battery makers declare the carbon footprint associated with each battery.

“This proposal is an important milestone,” said EUROBAT president Marc Zöllner, also CEO of Hoppecke Batteries.

“All battery technologies and applications will be regulated by this new piece of legislation, stretching all the way from batteries in vehicles and forklift trucks to energy storage and telecommunications.

European manufacturing must take a leadership role for a sustainable future, to which all battery technologies will contribute.”

EUROBAT says the proposal aims to build the most

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“European manufacturing must take a leadership role for a sustainable future, to which all battery technologies will contribute.”— Marc Zöllner, EUROBAT president & CEO of Hoppecke Batteries environmentally sustainable energy storage solutions, but warns that to avoid ‘hindering innovation in a relatively new sector’, the regulation should not be too prescriptive. It gives a regulation on standardizing battery packs as an example, saying this ‘would go against high performance, energy-efficient battery products’.

“We appreciate that in most cases the proposal looks at the specificities of each battery technology and applications when it comes to recycling efficiency, collection and information requirements,” EUROBAT says. “For instance, the proposal correctly recognises that automotive and industrial batteries are collected at the end of their life, and rightly includes a continuation of the current no-losses policy in this regard.”

Recharge, the advanced rechargeable and lithium batteries association based in Brussels, says the proposal represents the next milestone in delivering an action plan for batteries, enabling policymakers to put the EU’s vision ‘for sustainable, innovative and competitive

batteries “made in Europe”’ into a legislative framework.

Alina Pia Lange, official spokesperson of Recharge, says the 2006 Directive needed updating and the proposal has closed gaps in sustainability areas and recognises the benefits of batteries in this regard.

“The new framework also better reflects important market developments, such as the uptake of lithiumbased batteries and batteries used in electric vehicles,” she said.

“We do see certain areas that have the potential of hampering the innovation and development of our products and industry, however. The specifics will have to be carefully defined in the next steps of the legislative process.”

Lange welcomed the fact that increasing the amount of recycled materials used would be implemented step by step rather than all at once, as “the burden on industry to implement recycled content obligations at a time when volumes of available secondary raw materials are insufficient would have risked jeopardizing the

competitiveness of European batteries.

“Nonetheless, it is questionable if such an obligation will still result in a better environmental performance. Studies have shown that the environmental benefits of recycled content are very limited.

“Overall, implementing and controlling a recycled content obligation seems a disproportionate burden on the industry when recycling efficiencies and recovery rates already exist.”

Recharge says it has been calling for a framework to support the increasing role batteries can play in decarbonizing economies, but warns against imposing too many measures.

“In today’s proposal we see a high level of complexity and fear that this will translate into over regulating fast-paced innovative industries, such as batteries or electric mobility,” it said.

“Closing the gap with international competition will depend on long-term investments and a coherent regulatory framework.”

The London-based International Lead Association says the proposals are a welcome step towards Europe’s zero-carbon objectives, with battery technologies being required to achieve them.

“We therefore support the focus of the new proposal on increasing recycling efficiencies and material recovery for all battery chemistries, increasing use of recycled materials in the manufacture of new batteries, increased requirements for due diligence and responsible sourcing of raw materials, and minimising the environmental footprint of batteries,” said managing director Andy Bush.

The regulation should go in force on January 1, 2022.

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 17

NEWS

Biden signals support for batteries in clean transition — yet omits to mention coal New US president Joe Biden has given a major boost to the battery industry by specifically naming the sector in his ‘Build Back Better Recovery Plan’ on January 14. He said battery technology and clean energy would be among the research and development markets that would receive historic investment in the months and years to come.

The mention came after about 17 minutes of his hour-long speech, when he said: “Imagine historic investments in research and development to sharpen America’s innovative edge in markets where global leadership is up for grabs, markets like battery technology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, clean energy.”

At another event in Jackson, Missouri on January 27, Bloomberg reported, Biden ‘enlisted the entire US government in the fight against climate change’ — yet he omitted to mention coal, which is often blamed as the main cause of ‘global warming’.

The news agency quotes Mitch Jones, policy director at the environmental group Food and Water Watch, as calling the omission ‘a disappointment’ and ‘scientifically unsound’.

“For years we’ve been force fed the false idea that fracked gas — fracked methane — is cleaner than coal, but now coal gets a pass?” he is quoted as saying.

According to Bloomberg, the omission was a decision and not just an oversight — with administration officials originally planning to include it but then deciding

to omit it two days ahead of the event.

Battery Council International welcomed Biden’s comments on battery technology.

“The lead battery industry, with its strong domestic supply chain, is ideally positioned to rapidly deliver on the president’s promise to have American jobs support the nation’s post-Covid economic recovery, and also to ensure America’s global leadership on technological innovation and a green economy infrastructure,” said executive vice president and general counsel Roger Miksad.

“Lead batteries will be the dominant rechargeable battery technology for the foreseeable future. They are the most recycled consumer product in the US and are the global leader in a variety of green applications from well known automotive uses, supporting clean mobility in low carbon start-stop and micro-hybrid vehicles, to the growing utility and renewable energy storage markets, which are ushering in a global energy transition.”

BCI says the US lead battery industry spent $100 million in R&D in 2019 and is actively pursuing next-

generation battery technology and energy storage as the market is predicted to grow to 430GWh by 2030.

In November 2020, former US Energy Storage Association CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman said the election of Biden as US president signalled a message of support from Americans for a clean energy economy.

“As outlined in our 2030 Vision, at least 100GW of energy storage is needed over the next decade to support the buildout of higher shares of wind and solar power, as well as distributed energy resources and electric vehicles,” she said.

The ESA urged the new administration to promote domestic energy storage supply chains through finance and innovation; promote equitable electric system resilience; and establish market designs that value and compensate grid flexibility.

Chinese battery giant CATL to supply batteries for 220MWh stand-alone storage systems in Texas Chinese lithium battery giant CATL has been chosen to provide the batteries for two 110MWh standalone storage systems in Texas, US, the company behind the installation, FlexGen, said on January 5.

The batteries are operated and controlled by FlexGen’s HybridOS management platform, which already has more than 260MW/171MWh of projects in commercial operation, including a number of microgrid and utility-scale energy stor-

18 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

age systems around the US as well as a microgrid in eastern Siberia and a utility system in central Siberia. The installations mean the company will operate 80% of Texas’s battery storage capacity.

Texas ranks second in the US along with Hawaii and New York in terms of battery storage after California, which had 4.2GW across 215 operational projects in 2020, according to the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems.

Several projects were

agreed in 2020 for energy storage installations, including three utility-scale systems totalling 200MW that will be installed by Key Capture, Mitsubishi and Powin Energy working together. They are due to come on line this summer.

In August, the US Energy Storage Association set a target of deploying 100GW of new energy storage for the country across a range of technologies by 2030, trebling a previous target of 35GW by 2025.

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NEWS

New thermal battery 90% more cost-effective than lithium, laboratory claims The Savannah River National Laboratory, one of 17 national laboratories owned by the US Department of Energy, said on February 2 it had developed new metal hydride materials in a thermal battery to create a unique energy storage technology. This, they said, competes with lithium-ion in providing the ‘Holy Grail’ of effective and efficient energy storage for grid-scale applications.

SRNL, working with the Sweden-based TEXEL Energy Storage firm, which has a US office in California, ran a techno-economic analysis comparing its technology with Li-ion batteries storing energy integrated with gridscale PV installations.

“The SRNL team examined the impacts on the

levelized cost of storage for several scenarios and found that the thermal battery technology should achieve a LCOS ranging from $0.019/ kWh-$0.073/kWh, at higher volume production, which compares positively to the cost of storage expected today for lithium-ion ranging from $0.087/kWh-$0.32/ kWh,” the SNRL says.

Ragaiy Zidan, lead author and inventor of the SRNL’s technology, said: “This study has shown the tremendous potential of exploiting chemical bonds to efficiently store energy, an areas that SRNL has been advancing for many years. We look forward to scaling this technology with TEXEL.” The thermal battery has

been developed with the new metal hydride materials in combination with a Stirling convertor, a power convertor that converts heat into electricity by oscillating a linear alternator. They were developed by Ford Motors, SRNL says, on the invention of the Stirling engine by Scot Robert Stirling in the early 1800s.

Foresight Solar seeks approval for utility-scale storage spending Solar PV investment firm Foresight Solar Fund will ask shareholders to approve plans to spend up to a tenth of its gross asset value on utility-scale battery storage systems situated next to its existing solar sites, it announced on January 28.

The investment firm, which was set up in 2013, has a portfolio of installed peak capacity of 683MW of solar panels in the UK (331MW), Australia (227MW) and Spain (125MW). The capacity is spread over a total of 58 ground-based solar power plants.

“In our view, greenfield standalone and co-location

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battery investments will continue to represent the largest opportunity for equipment providers,” said Ricardo Pineiro, head of UK Solar at the Fund.

“However, retrofitting batteries at exiting operational solar projects has the potential to represent a meaningful sized market.”

The Group says it was an early investor in the UK battery storage market, acquiring 45MW of battery facilities in 2018 and since investing in two BSS colocated with hydro.

It says it has identified at least 21 of its ground-based solar power plant sites as potentially suitable for im-

mediate development, and ‘is currently in exclusivity regarding the acquisition of a fully developed BSS of 50MW adjacent to one of the company’s operational portfolio assets in the UK’.

“The continued growth in renewable energy generation is also expected to create a requirement for greater system flexibility as energy systems transition from a model of centralized generation and transmission to more flexible and decentralized systems,” says Foresight.

“Battery storage systems are expected to have a significant role in the energy transition process, with the

company’s existing portfolio of operational solar power plants offering utility-scale BSS co-location opportunities subject to available grid connection capacity and existing land lease arrangements.”

The shareholders will vote on whether the investment policy can be changed in this way at a general meeting this month to be held in Jersey, where the company has its headquarters.

Restrictions on attendance due to the coronavirus pandemic will apply to the meeting, with only appointed representatives of the company attending in person.

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 19

NEW YORK’S CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE

Setting the stage for New York’s new energy opportunities “Green energy is a pressing moral imperative and a prime economic opportunity.

New York can and will be the nation’s leader for renewable energy innovation and production,” said New York governor Andrew Cuomo in January. Jodi Ackerman Frank has a look at what’s going on to achieve this.

New York State has some of the most aggressive energy and climate goals in the US, and at a session of the Public Service Commission in Albany in October, commissioners expanded on targets under a Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that had become law in July 2019.

Under the CLCPA, targets were set to achieve 100% zero-emission electricity by 2040 and an 85% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; at the Albany session, the orders went further — the state was told it must generate 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, a 20% increase on an earlier 2016 target.

The PSC was also directed to set up programmes to achieve procurement goals for specific technologies, including PV and wind generation, as well

20 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

as 3GW of energy storage resources.

Energy storage is an essential part of the effort, according to Bill Acker, executive director of New York Battery & Energy Storage Technology (better known as NY-BEST), a statesupported consortium of corporate, entrepreneurial, academic, utility and government partners that promotes the development and commercialization of energy storage.

“Solar and wind power are intermittent sources of energy, which pose significant challenges in relying on these sources for most of our power,” Acker says. “Integrating energy storage as standard practice will be a game changer in transforming renewable energy into our primary source of reliable electricity.”

The question is how to pull it off.

Although state and federal government encourages diversifying energy storage innovations, lithium-ion continues to be the dominant technology in new development projects for both stationary storage and electric vehicles, according to the DOE 2020 report Energy Storage Grand Challenge: Energy Storage Market Report.

A 20MW battery storage facility that will be built next to an existing New York Power Authority substation in Chateaugay, near the Canadian border, is one example of the kind of move being made to push storage integration with public power utilities.

The project, by O’Connell Electric Company with funding from the New York Power Authority, was begun last summer and includes a one-hour lithium-ion battery system for peak power

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NEW YORK’S CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE

In 2019 Key Capture Energy developed a 20MW BESS funded by NYSERDA

needs. It should come online some time this year.

It wasn’t the first in the state — in September 2019, storage company Key Capture Energy developed a 20MW battery storage system, funded by NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority).

It was connected to the wholesale transmission network to generate revenue for the New York Independent System Operator’s wholesale markets.

A year ago, NYSERDA told Energy Storage Journal there were 400 storage projects in total that were operational in the state. Of those, 108 were identified as commercial projects, 75 were thermal storage and just 33 were operational battery storage projects — but in the pipeline was 7.3GW, according to Jason Doling, assistant director to the Distributed Energy Research Team.

While claiming to be technology agnostic, NYSERDA says it is keen to fund lithium battery options as the chemistry evolves in the lab.

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Continuing his own five decades of research into lithium at Binghamton University, 2019 Nobel Prize Stanley Whittingham is finding ways to get even more out of the chemistry.

“Present lithium-ion batteries all use carbon in anodes, and that takes up half the volume, so we’re working on alternative anodes, which have twice as much storage per litre,” says Whittingham, who is exploring a tin-iron compound as the carbon replacement.

“If we have more volume, we could devote more space to the cathode and the overall cell capacity could go up by about 50%.”

Binghamton University has built a dry room with a pouch cell manufacturing line, where lithium-ion batteries, which are moisture sensitive, can be developed to scale safely.

Collaborations

Over the past several years, Whittingham has collaborated with C4V, a startup founded by Shailesh Upreti in 2014 that is developing a new cathode technology for lithium-ion batteries based on a nanoengineered biomineral. Hydroxyl-lithium-apatite is a natural mineral that gives teeth and bones their rigidity.

Upreti modified the material at the molecular level to increase the biomineral’s electrochemical properties.

Incorporating this synthesized natural material in lithium-ion battery chemistries increases the lifespan of the batteries to 20 years.

It also increases energy storage capacity and overall higher performance required for grid back-up and electric transport.

Taking advantage of the state’s economic development programme,

‘Start-Up NY’, C4V is on the university campus.

The programme allows new and growing companies to operate tax free for 10 years, provided they maintain their business on or near the research universities they have partnered.

Upreti came to the US as a post-doctoral researcher from India to work in Whittingham’s lab. Whittingham’s mentorship, the university’s research facilities, and the surrounding manufacturing industry drew Upreti to New York State.

“We could have harvested the value of our technology tremendously by manufacturing our batteries somewhere else … However, the support from Binghamton University, NYSERDA and the local industrial resources available have convinced and motivated us to grow C4V right here in New York,” he says.

C4V batteries are used in commercial products, including unmanned marine surface watercraft. They are also suitable for microgrids, charging

Stanley Whittihngham and Shailesh Upreti have been working together on new cathode technology.

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 21

NEW YORK’S CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE stations and as small battery banks to augment solar power.

The company’s gigawatt-scale factory in nearby Endicott is expected to be in operation later this year The company also has an international partnership with Magnis Energy Technologies. The Australiabased graphite manufacturer, formerly called Magnis Resources Limited, changed to its current name in 2018 to reflect its new focus on energy storage development with C4V. Other chemistries in the wings Lithium-ion batteries are certainly the star of the show at the moment, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t understudies waiting to play their parts.

Sensing the need for storage and the opportunities it will bring, new energy storage firms are being created with state support — such as Urban Electric Power, which was born out of the City University of New York.

UEP, which was founded in 2012 by Sanjoy Banerjee, the director of CUNY’s Energy Institute, manufactures a battery composed of a manganese dioxide cathode and a zinc-based anode.

The Zn-MnO2 battery provides twice the runtime compared with a lead battery version, and is non-toxic.

The battery is similar in composition to the low-cost alkaline batteries used in flashlights, but rechargeable and much bigger.

The challenge has been to find ways to increase the recharging cycles by limiting build-up caused by the dendrites that eventually short out the battery. UEP has addressed the buildup issue by incorporating additives and dopants to the active material mixture for longer battery life.

Sanjoy Banerjee, co-founder of UEP

22 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

Dendrites increase over time to cause shorts in a lithium battery

Inside UEP’s factory preparing Zn-MnO2 batteries

With support from NYSERDA, utility company Con Edison and a multimillion-dollar grant from the US Department of Energy, Banerjee and his team developed the battery that formed the basis of UEP. The company is based at its 40,000ft2 (3,700m2) factory, just north of New York City.

UEP has several ongoing grid-scale installations, including an 800kW demonstration at CUNY’s City College of New York. The company’s ZnMn2 technology is mentioned in the DOE’s 2020 Energy Storage Grand Challenge: Energy Storage Market Report as an up-and-coming technology.

“Longer term R&D is focused on using the full capability of Zn-MnO2 systems and demonstrating cells with energy densities of 200 Wh/l and a cell cost lower than $50/kWh,” the report says.

“These developments will enable the technology to compete with higher energy density technologies but at significantly lower costs and improved safety.”

“The advantage of Zn-MnO2 is that it’s incredibly low cost to source and manufacture relative to lithium batteries,” says Gabriel Cowles, UEP vice president of finance and business development.

“Both zinc and manganese dioxide are earth abundant and have strong existing supply chains. Our battery technology also provides unparalleled safety, which is vital for energy storage systems both small and large.”

The company recently established a joint venture with Godrej, a conglomerate in India that serves markets ranging from real estate and furniture to industrial engineering and agricultural products.

In partnership with Godrej, UEP has installed 15 energy storage systems, primarily as back-up power for homes and small businesses.

UEP has also installed a 120kWh grid-tied solar-tied energy storage sys-

tem at a Godrej factory in Mumbai.

The system, connected to 44kW of solar, provides Godrej with demandresponse and back-up power to its plant, which manufactures consumer appliances and industrial equipment.

The plant installation represents UEP’s first steps toward utility-scale applications, with the focus on south Asia representing perhaps UEP’s biggest market potential. Godrej is in the process of replicating UEP’s production plant at a larger scale, according to Cowles.

“With our battery consisting of cheaper, safer and more simplistic materials and processes, we are validating the idea that our manufacturing model can be easily duplicated anywhere in the world,” Cowles says.

Performance reviews

Growing New York’s energy storage sector also means establishing uniform regulations and standards.

To help realize these goals, the BEST Test and Commercialization Center opened its doors in 2014 as one of the few organizations in the country that independently validates the performance of various new storage technologies in one location.

BTCC, located in the industrial complex managed by Eastman Kodak in Rochester, was established through a partnership between NY-BEST, New York State and global technology testing, inspection and certification company DNV GL. BTCC’s capabilities, which range from testing single cells to large battery packs with hundreds of kilowatt capacity, include product development, performance validation, certification testing, environmental testing and battery lifetime testing.

The facility includes a safety testing chamber, where batteries are deliberately abused using excessive heat, overcharge or nail penetration methods, resulting in thermal runaway. The triggered temperature levels are then

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NEW YORK’S CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE monitored and the released gasses are analyzed.

“One main purpose of these tests is to evaluate how dangerous battery types are in different applications and to design fire protection systems as well as develop new guidelines and standards to minimize these risks,” says DNV GL business development leader Martin Plass, who oversees BTCC operations.

BTCC’s collaborations in testing projects like this with the New York City Fire Department, Con Edison, NYSERDA and the Electric Power Research Institute are paving the way for both front-of-meter and behindthe-meter energy storage installations in New York City.

Eos Energy

Eos Energy Enterprises, the aqueous zinc battery company that went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange last November, was one of the first startups to test its technology at the BTCC. Funded by a $1 million NYSERDA grant in 2014, Eos built its first AC-integrated battery system, which included a smart inverter and software-based management system that measures current, voltage, temperature and overall battery performance.

Eos tested the system at the BTCC under the target application of Con

Edison, a daily four-hour full charge/ discharge cycle designed to reduce peak demand in power hungry parts of New York such as Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

There is enormous demand for battery performance and safety testing,

according to Plass. “Because of this, we are increasing our testing capacity by 50%,” he says.

“The BTCC is in the right place at the right time, helping New York State become a hub for battery storage technologies.”

New York’s Ioxus offers ultracaps option While companies and researchers work to build better batteries for energy storage, others in New York State have found ways to augment battery storage capacity through another well-known technology — the ultracapacitor.

Founded in 2007 and bought

by XS Power Batteries in April 2020, Ioxus develops and manufactures advanced carbonbased ultracapacitors that deliver up to three times more power and discharge faster than conventional ones. Operating under the strain of temperatures reaching up to 65°C and down to -40°C, they are also more durable than conventional ultracapacitors and can handle up to a million charge/discharge cycles.

Ultracaps store a fraction of the electricity that a battery can. But that is solved when combined with a battery, with the added advantage that they better manage sudden energy demands.

“Batteries do a poor job of delivering the frequent, short power boosts that the electric grid and vehicles need on a regular basis.

But, coupled with ultracaps, batteries are much more efficient — we can reduce their size and they will last much longer,” says Chad Hall, Ioxus cofounder and senior vice president of sales and operations.

Ioxus incorporates its ultracapacitors into packs, or “modules,” which contain supporting electronics for temperature control and voltage protection. Applications include energy regeneration capturing in the transport sector, wind turbine pitch control and peak shaving in the utility and commercial industries.

Ioxus ultracaps can also be incorporated in microgrids, railway applications, and in UPS systems.

Ioxus’ latest product is the uSTART, a two-terminal plug-and-play system that can replace one or more

Chad Hall, Ioxus cofounder and senior vice president of sales and operations.

batteries in commercial trucks while improving the life of the remaining battery, starter and other associated electronics.

“The system, which has a highly sustainable angle as well, can eliminate the need to mine, refine, ship or recycle up to 50lbs (22.5kg) of lead and 20lbs of sulfuric acid per battery, per truck, every two years,” Hall says.

“The demand for ultracaps is growing. Industries are figuring out that ultracaps are a low-cost solution for any number of energy storage applications, and when paired with a battery, can become an extremely reliable, efficient solution over a very long lifetime.”

Ioxus has three manufacturing plants (two in Central New York State and one in Japan). XS Power Batteries, a high-performancebattery company based in Tennessee established a year before Ioxus in 2006, was its longtime partner.

Ioxus ultracapacitor

Inside New York’s new BTCC

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Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 23

CHEMISTRY

UP

CLOSE

Silicon anodes — the race is on, and size (nano) matters

Scientists and battery materials firms have for a while been trying to replace graphite with silicon in their lithium batteries for a much cheaper option. It looks as if they are getting over some of the hurdles.

Makdohkt Shabani

When Tesla announced at its ‘Battery Day’ in September that the company had used silicon in its battery anodes, the automotive press went wild, saying the company intended to revolutionize the use of silicon to slash costs and increase range.

In fact the carmaker had already said in 2015 that it had partially replaced graphite with silicon in the anodes of the Model S batteries, increasing the car’s driving range by 6%, and there has been talk of doing it since then — but so far not much has been achieved.

Increasing the amount of silicon is not a new idea — but making it work is, says Mahdokht Shaibani, an expert in materials synthesis, engineering and scale-up for next-generation energy storage systems at Monash University in Melbourne.

“Silicon, the second most abundant element in the earth’s crust (about 28% by mass), with an ultra-high capacity to hold lithium (in theory as much as 10 times the capacity for a given weight compared to the commonly used graphite anode), has been an ideal candidate to explore as a new anode,” she says.

“The maximum specific capacity of silicon at room temperature is 3,579 mAh g-1, which is comparable to the highest capacity anode material, lithium metal, due to the formation of Li15Si4 when silicon combines with lithium. It also offers an advantageous low working potential, promising high energy density when used in full cells and ensuring improved operation safety by inhibiting the growth of lithium dendrite.

“But while the ‘large capacity to store lithium’ and ‘abundant’ boxes are ticked, the instability of a silicon anode has long intrigued researchers around the globe and has limited the amount of silicon in commercial electrodes to minimal quantities.

Also, silicon is abundant, but that doesn’t necessarily mean manufacturing batterygrade silicon will be cheap” — Makdohkt Shabani, University of Melbourne 24 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

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“But while the ‘large capacity to store lithium’ and ‘abundant’ boxes are ticked, the instability of a silicon anode has long intrigued researchers around the globe and has limited the amount of silicon in commercial electrodes to minimal quantities. Also, silicon is abundant, but that doesn’t necessarily mean manufacturing battery-grade silicon will be cheap.”

Shaibani says the limiting factor in increasing the fraction of silicon in silicon/graphite composite anodes is the volume change that accompanies the charge-discharge process.

“The resulting mechanical stress associated with the substantial volume changes in forming Li15Si4 could be as significant as 300%,” she says. “For graphite, upon lithiation to LiC6, the volume increases by only 9.4%, ensuring mechanical stability. As such, it would be difficult to imagine an all-silicon anode any time soon unless the breakthrough progress happens in accommodating the undesirably large stress.

“Nonetheless, an increasing number of companies are working towards taking graphite out of the picture — a goal that some research groups have already achieved to a great extent.

However, the sophisticated approaches used to produce nanoengineered battery-grade silicon makes the claim of a cheap replacement for graphite somewhat questionable.

“While industrial-grade silicon costs only $1kg-2/kg, much less than that of the spherical graphite used in the anode, the battery-grade silicon could cost up to $2,000/kg if nano-sized.”

Nexeon approach Japan and UK-based battery materials firm Nexeon was founded in 2006. It already has three sets of patents — 24 patents in all — relating to the use of silicon in lithium battery anodes, again with nano-scale silicon particles but also with methods of coating carbon particles with silicon using vapour deposition.

The company works with product OEMs and battery firms to develop what it says is the next generation of lithium-ion batteries, specifically when it comes to the anodes.

Energy Storage Journal spoke to chief engineer Bill Macklin and Liya Wang, who was appointed chief technology officer in January.

“It is well known that silicon powders expand when fully lithiated and then contract on delithiation,” says Wang. “These volume changes (of up

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CLOSE In Nexeon’s lab

“Battery cells with all-silicon-based anodes are realistically going to be on the market within two years” — Nexeon to 300%) rapidly degrade silicon particles, which crack and fracture. This silicon is effectively pulverized within tens, or at best, a few hundred chargedischarge cycles.

“To mitigate this effect, silicon particles need to be nano sized, ideally <100nm. This brings other challenges associated with processing and maintaining the mechanical integrity of the electrode when the silicon content is higher, in addition to the higher cost.

“Nexeon’s solution is to assemble nano silicon within a larger particle along with engineered porosity to accommodate the silicon expansion.

As a result, Nexeon materials have a much lower expansion than a typical silicon powder, such that even with high loading in the electrode up to 70%-85%, conventional binders can be used and cycle life can be maintained.”

NSP-1 and NSP-2 Nexeon has produced two silicon materials that it has called NSP-1 and NSP-2: the former allows silicon to expand without breaking or degrading the electrode; the latter restricts the silicon expansion, allowing for more to be used.

The firm’s anode materials are under evaluation or qualification with various customers, Nexeon says, across a number of applications, with a range of silicon content from 8%-10% NSP-1 being evaluated with graph-

ite, through to testing on silicon-only anode formulations for NSP-2, where the material content is 80-85% of the electrode mass.

The company’s NSP material uses an ‘economic source’ with a purity above metallurgical grade, but below that of solar grade materials. With NSP-2, the silicon precursor is an industry-standard chemical grade.

“Battery cells with all-silicon-based anodes are realistically going to be on the market within two years,” the company says. “We do not believe there is an obstacle to mass adoption of our silicon materials — and we have developed our materials with cost and scalability very much in mind.”

Liya Wang accepts that the battery industry has already successfully demonstrated the good cycle life from anodes with a silicon addition of about 5%, adopting it widely in electric vehicles and aerospace, but reiterates the expansion phenomenon, and that in simple silicon powders, or nonporous composite powders of silicon and oxygen or silicon and carbon, cycle performance suffers.

“However, a range of strategies is being employed to mitigate the potential adverse impact of expansion on cycle life when utilizing higher silicon content electrodes,” he says. “Nexon’s NSP-2 silicon material incorporates a proprietary particle design in which voids are present together with the silicon within the structure that can then

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accommodate a significant portion of the silicon expansion on lithiation, resulting in a lower overall electrode expansion and good cycle life.

“In the case of NSP-2, customers can directly process the silicon material in their Li-ion production equipment, and are only required to optimize the electrode density at the standard calendaring stage. This eliminates the need to incorporate novel electrode structures, processing methods or new production equipment.

“Additionally, Li-ion cell manufacturers have the flexibility to control the level of expansion of their silicon electrodes within the overall cell design via the amount of lithium available from the cathode.”

Actual performance benefits and scale-up Macklin says the major performance benefit of a high content silicon anode is the gain in volumetric energy density (Wh/litre), allowing increased run time or driving range.

“When compared with graphitebased cells, a high silicon anode can deliver a 20% in increase in energy density,” he says.

“With further optimization of the cathode to better match the silicon anode, overall cell level capacity gains over a graphite anode cell can be in the 35%-40% range — a very significant gain. There are then additional benefits from adopting a high silicon anode in terms of an overall increase in the cell gravimetric energy density (Wh/kg).

“As a result of the higher anode potential of silicon, there is a reduced tendency for lithium plating to occur under fast charge conditions compared with graphite, so these are additional advantages for fast-charging applications.”

When it comes to the higher cost of producing battery-grade silicon, the key will be in mass production. “It is a realistic expectation that a number of battery-grade silicon materials, when mass produced to at least a 1,000 tonne/pa scale, can be competitive with graphite on a $/kWh basis,” he says.

“There are of course examples of higher cost silicon anode types being developed by other companies, notably the silicon nanowire electrodes produced by catalytical growth that will be much more expensive, and will also require specialist electrode processing equipment.

“Nexeon has always been very aware of the importance of cost, from its earliest silicon material develop-

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ments, where it successfully utilized a metallurgical grade silicon feedstock.

“The present two Nexeon silicon materials, NSP-1 abd NSP-2, have been developed with cost and scalabil-

ity very much in mind, whilst also delivering high performance in the battery. At Nexeon we do not believe there is an obstacle to mass adoption of our silicon materials.”

OIST looks at changes to the nanostructure

A February 2021 study by the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University has identified a nanostructure that improves the anode in lithium-ion batteries by using silicon instead of graphite.

The report, Nano-vault architecture mitigates stress in silicon-based anodes for lithium-ion batteries, explains how researchers placed silicon atoms on top of metallic nanoparticles to form an arch-shaped nanostructure, which increased the strength and structural integrity of the anode — helping to solve problems of the electrode fracturing and breaking due to the sudden 400% volume increase of lithium ions in the anode.

Tests then showed the batteries had a higher charge capacity and longer lifespan, the scientists said.

“Our goal was to try and create a more robust anode capable of resisting these stresses, that can absorb as much lithium as possible and ensure as many charge cycles as possible before deteriorating,” said senior author of the paper Panagiotis Grammatikopoulos. “And the approach we took was to build a structure using nanoparticles.”

A previous paper in 2017 had explored a cake-like layered structure of silicon sandwiched between

tantalum metal nanoparticles, which improved the structural integrity of the anode, but the scientists could not work out why the material became gradually stiffer with a thicker silicon layer but only to a certain point, when it decreased.

The new paper has finally answered the question. As silicon atoms are deposited onto the layer of nanoparticles, they form columns in the shape of inverted cones, growing wider and wider until they touch and form a vaulted structure.

It is at precisely this point that the structure is at its strongest and battery performance at its best, with a greater charge capacity and stability, adding charge cycle capability.

The breakthrough could have other potential material science applications, as well as being a step towards the commercialization of silicon anodes, Grammatikopoulos says.

“The vaulted structure could be used when materials are needed that are strong and able to withstand various stresses, such as for bio-implants or for storing hydrogen,” he says. “The exact type of material you need — stronger or softer, more flexible or less flexible — can be precisely made, simply by changing the thickness of the layer.

That’s the beauty of nanostructures.”

“Our goal was to try and create a more robust anode capable of resisting these stresses, that can absorb as much lithium as possible and ensure as many charge cycles as possible before deteriorating” — Panagiotis Grammatikopoulos, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University

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COVER STORY: BRITAIN’S BLACKOUT PROBLEM

Renewables bring Britain to the brink of black-out With eight capacity warnings issued this winter, you could be forgiven for thinking the energy transition is causing more problems for the UK grid than it’s solving.

Debbie Mason looks at solutions that can be applied internationally.

During the winter that’s just ended, Britain’s electricity operator, the National Grid, had to issue eight warnings about a lack of electricity capacity on the grid. In one January incident, the price of electricity shot up to £4,000 ($5,500)/MWh and then slumped back down to £50 within half an hour.

The last time an Electricity Market Notice (formerly called a Notice of Insufficient System Margin) had been issued was in 2016; yet this winter there have been six EMNs plus two Capacity Market Notices, all between November and January.

EMNs are issued manually when the normal safety margin for operating the system is not as big as the National Grid would like, and cannot be addressed through the normal mechanisms.

“This doesn’t mean we don’t have enough electricity to meet demand; it just means we’d like a larger cushion

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of spare capacity, and we want the market to provide it,” says National Grid.

CMNs are issued automatically based on specific industry data and are triggered four hours before the safety margin falls below a certain point.

Eight other tight margin forecasts were issued between October 14 and March 1, and while not official warnings of lack of capacity, they signalled that the ESO was having to monitor supply more closely because spare capacity was reduced.

Cold weather, lack of wind and nuclear power plants being offline have all been cited as reasons for the drop in capacity. This means coal plants, which are due to be closed down completely by 2025, were having to be paid to keep ‘warm’ in case they were needed.

On February 4 last year, UK prime minister Boris Johnson accelerated

by a year already ambitious plans to phase out coal from Britain’s energy system to October 1, 2024, saying that it supplied just 3% of the country’s electricity today, compared with 70% 30 years ago.

The UK has around 30 gas fired power stations and just four coal power stations in operation — and it’s not in the generators’ interest to keep the coal stations running, given the carbon taxes they face and government plans to force their permanent closure.

But when capacity is tight, the National Grid has no option but to invite them to switch on — and if the only viable option is coal, the costs are enormous.

Industry is scrambling to come up with enough alternatives, such as battery back-up, so that traditional generators can be permanently stood down, and while most have confidence this can be achieved, we may also have

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COVER STORY: BRITAIN’S BLACKOUT PROBLEM to expect a less than smooth route to fruition.

“We’re in a position at the moment where we have a massively reduced coal power capacity on the system, gas stations closed, and nothing really replacing it.”

— David Henderson, chief commercial officer of px Group

“Right now, building the new grid is akin to rebuilding infrastructure after the war and the greater the proportion of wind we have, the more storage we will need.”

— Mark Simon, CEO of Eelpower

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Chaos and volatility “Energy transition is quite a new label,” says David Henderson, chief commercial officer of px Group, an integrated energy company that began life as part of Enron in the early 1990s.

It now operates a number of power plants, CHP plants and a biomass facility, and it also looks after a 94MW battery portfolio.

“We’ve been doing energy transition for 30 years — we’ve just never called it ‘energy transition’ before.

“Over that time we’ve been at the beating heart of it, operating things such as biodiesel and biomass plants, and a waste processing facility where the output is used in a cleaner and sustainable way.

“But it’s a transition, it’s a gradual change — it’s not a binary, ‘today we’ll use carbon, tomorrow we won’t’ — and the chaos and the volatility we’re starting to see is because of the transition.

“We’re in a position at the moment where we have a massively reduced coal power capacity on the system, gas stations closed, and nothing really replacing it. Owners are forced to shut down because they are driven by prices in the market. If the price doesn’t cover your costs and overheads, you close it down.

“That’s why the capacity market mechanism was put in place — it incentivized a lot of the coal stations to stay on because they can now bid in the capacity market. This is also true for gas peaking plants, which were needed for capacity; they are fast acting, reliable when there’s no wind.

“But this doesn’t solve the emissions problem. Renewables technology needs to be improved to improve the carbon footprint and at the minute we haven’t got a great answer.”

Batteries to smooth volatility “Right now, lithium batteries are the only show in town,” says Mark Simon, CEO of London-based battery installation and optimization company Eelpower, which operates grid-scale batteries on the National Grid. “For the next three to five years there will be no other show.

“We use lithium iron phosphate batteries because with stationary storage it doesn’t matter if they are slightly less energy dense. We are hardcore battery people — we only have big batteries connected to the grid. We build, opti-

mize and trade electricity — that’s our model.

“Energy is inherently volatile: we’re not going to cure that, but we can manage it. Wind and solar are essentially free, and if we can make it sufficiently cheap the prize will be enormous.

“Right now, building the new grid is akin to rebuilding infrastructure after a war and the greater the proportion of wind we have, the more storage we will need.

“If wind produces 50% of the power then storage needs to be about 50% of that — so for 110GW of wind we will need more than 50GW of storage.”

And this is possible, says Rupert Newland, CEO of battery automation and optimization software company Arenko Group, which was founded in 2014.

“You could very easily have an entire grid that’s powered by renewables and batteries,” he says. “You’d need a lot more than there are today but that’s what we’re trying to do — you’re replacing services with batteries, which are incredibly flexible and because you can control them so accurately you can make them provide a service like any other generator.”

For this you would need synthetic inertia to produce an output that has the same impact as a traditional turbine, as well as be able to manage frequency — “it would have to be capable of all these things and can be unlocked by having a very intelligent digital optimization (See pages 31-32, Inertia).

“But it requires fewer batteries than you would imagine to have a meaningful impact. We’re still a long way from the point where batteries can do all this stuff at a large scale, but that’s coming more quickly than you’d imagine.

“National Grid has very stringent requirements for providing as accurate a response as possible, and when something happens these batteries need to respond very fast and in line with what’s happening in the frequency, which is really challenging.

“But by doing it you’re saving the consumer because you don’t have to switch other technologies on and off.

That’s all down to the software being able to control the batteries — in fact we describe batteries as being ‘software-defined assets’.”

Arenko’s software, like the raft of platforms that have come on to the market, does just that — buying and selling power every second of every day.

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COVER STORY: BRITAIN’S BLACKOUT PROBLEM Anesco, a UK renewable energy firm, operates around 174MW of battery storage, which optimization director Alan Smallwood says will soon double to 300MW. “While it’s theoretically possible to run the UK grid purely on wind, solar and battery storage, that would not be the most efficient solution,” he says.

“It would take tens of gigawatts of storage to cover the intermittency of wind and solar and variation in demand throughout the year. A balanced energy mix would include some baseload low carbon generation, such as nuclear, CCS (carbon capture storage) or biomass, and longer duration storage through hydrogen production or compressed air storage.

“We also need to consider that meeting today’s power demand is not enough. We will also need to electrify transport and heat to reach net zero, which will make the challenge even greater.”

Synthetic inertia

Smallwood believes wind and solar will form the backbone of the energy grid, with storage playing a vital role both in offering synthetic inertia and in shifting the energy around to ensure that supply meets demand in a system with less dispatchable generation.

“Over the next 10 years, we will see the majority of existing nuclear capacity leave the system and a good proportion of the CCGT (combined cycle gas turbine) fleet will also be coming towards the end of its life. We expect a lot of this capacity to be replaced by solar and wind.”

“Batteries do have a crucial role to play in the UK energy system,” says Smallwood.

“National Grid is looking to increase its procurement of services designed to

replace conventional inertia — for example, there is a 1200MW minimum target which to date has been filled exclusively with batteries due to their cost effectiveness for this application.”

Just part of a solution

Harmony Energy is a UK storage provider firm that has 11 projects ‘construction ready’ with a capacity of 600MW. Construction of its latest project, a 34MW/68MWh battery of Tesla Megapack cells in West Sussex, is due to be finished this June.

CEO Peter Kavanagh says that while batteries are a major part of the solution — they cannot be all.

“In practice it isn’t realistic to say lithium-ion battery storage can cover the whole void left by shutting down coal and gas power plants, but it can cover a significant share,” he says.

“Other energy storage technologies including flow batteries, liquid air, hydro and smart grid technologies will all play a part in the shift away from fossil fuels.

“Batteries can respond in near instant time to fluctuations (a millisecond response time) to help maintain grid frequency and do not need to be kept on standby, like gas or diesel would. This means they are highly efficient in comparison.

“There is a huge amount of waste in the energy system in terms of energy not used keeping assets on standby and in the pollution that it produces in turn. “National Grid is making progress in utilizing batteries to cover the capacity limitations and allowing them to perform the multiple services they are capable of, which in turn will lead to a more competitive marketplace and ultimately better value for the customers.

“Harmony Energy is focusing on

“We also need to consider that meeting today’s power demand is not enough. We will also need to electrify transport and heat to reach net zero, which will make the challenge even greater.”

— Optimization director Alan Smallwood, Anesco two-hour duration batteries so we are able to cover more services into the future, not just frequency. January showed how efficient our first twohour duration battery at Holes Bay was in assisting with longer periods of capacity limitations.”

UK government offers £68 million for new storage technologies

On March 9, the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy announced funding of £92 million ($128 million) would be made available to developers in energy

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storage, floating offshore wind and biomass production, with the majority (£68 million) going towards storage.

“This will further the development of energy storage technologies to support a future renewable energy system… to accelerate the commercialization of a first-of-akind storage that can hold energy from wind turbines and solar panels, as well as heat, over long periods of time, including months and years,

until it is needed by consumers,” the BEIS said.

“Energy storage is expected to be one of the key components in a smarter, more flexible low-carbon energy system, which can maximise the use of renewable generation.”

The money will come from the £1 billion ($1.4 billion) ‘Net Zero Innovation Portfolio’ that was announced in the government’s ‘Ten point plan for a green industrial revolution’ in November.

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COVER STORY: BRITAIN’S BLACKOUT PROBLEM “Energy storage and demand flexibility will play an ever-increasing role in balancing supply and demand, from energy users changing their profiles in line with the availability of energy through to various mixes of storage helping to support the operation of the system,” says Matt Magill, operability strategy manager at the National Grid.

“Storage already plays a critical role in supporting the energy system, from fast-acting batteries to control the fre-

quency through our services of EFR and Dynamic Containment, through to longer term storage, which is expected to take advantage of the low prices during high renewable periods to store energy and release it at times when the prices are higher.

“Units have been doing this for decades in the form of pumped storage but as the pricing gap increases between the low and high prices, we expect more market players to take advantage.

“Our ambition means a fundamental change to how our system was designed; integrating newer technologies right across the system — from large-scale off-shore wind to domestic-scale solar panels — and increasing demand-side participation, using new smart digital systems to manage and control the system in real time.”

Any major transition can expect one or two bumps; but firms are already coming up with ground-breaking technologies to smooth the path.

Energy storage vital to avoid Texas winter crises CIT Group’s announcement on February 11 that it was arranging to install six battery storage systems with a total of 230MW for Texas will be welcomed in a state where five million people experienced blackouts for days as rare winter storms caused temperatures to plummet to minus 13°C (8.6°F).

Three severe winter storms hit the southern US between February 10 and 20, causing devastation particularly in Texas due to failures in the state’s stand-alone grid.

More than half of the state grid’s winter normal generating capacity of 70GW went offline due to the storm, according to Dan Woodfin, a senior director at ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages about 90% of the state’s electricity).

Unlike the rest of the continental US, the Texas grid is not connected to larger regional grids that can import power in times of high demand.

Gas and water lines froze and this, alongside a higher-than-normal demand for power, forced many overloaded generators to shut down, knocking out power and leaving people without light, heat or running water for days as ERCOT implemented rolling blackouts to ease demand on the network.

Supply fell short by about 3.4GW, ERCOT said, which means the amount of battery capacity outlined

by CIT Group would have had to be increased 150-fold to meet demand.

The existing batteries, three of which are already operational, are owned by Key Capture Energy, which has an overall development pipeline

30 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

of 2.5GW in New York and New England, as well as Texas. The other three should be completed this year.

The outages far exceeded ERCOT’s predictions for an extreme winter event, with peak usage recorded at 69GW during the storm, just over official estimates of 67GW. Early claims blaming renewables, specifically wind power, for the failure in back-up power were later found to be inaccurate. Although some wind turbines stopped turning because of ice, ERCOT said most outages were due to the failure of thermal sources, namely gas.

Because of the independent and deregulated nature of its grid, ERCOT is not subject to US federal oversight — which could force upgrades — nor does it have the same long-term planning authorities as other states.

“It’s an issue of utilities thinking that it isn’t worth it to ratepayers for what might be a very infrequent weather event,” said Tom Seng, director of the School of Energy Economics,

Policy and Commerce at the University of Tulsa.

It is early days for battery installations across the state, but Texas is nevertheless ranked fourth in the US for battery capacity.

According to ERCOT data, new generators are due to be connected to its grid and by February 2022, almost 2,000MW of battery storage will be installed.

Tesla’s 100MW Gambit project is one of a mix of developments planned across the state along with CIT’s. On January 7, Chinese battery giant CATL and North Carolina energy storage firm FlexGen said they would be increasing capacity by 220MWh with the installation of two batteries.

Jim Robb, CEO of regulatory body North American Electric Reliability Corp said: “For batteries to play the ultimate backup system, we need batteries deployed in many orders of magnitude beyond what we have now.”

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COVER STORY: BRITAIN’S BLACKOUT PROBLEM

Modernizing inertia in the search for stablitity One of the main problems in shutting down the coal and gas plants that keep electricity-generating turbines turning is that with their closure goes the inertia that is vital for smoothing peaks and troughs on the grid and keeping the frequency at 50Hz. Until now, the UK’s National Grid has not been able to work out exactly how much inertia the grid has.

Traditionally, all grid capacity has relied on synchronous generators — rotating generators that store kinetic energy so that when there’s a problem, they continue to rotate and supply electricity while the grid works out how to correct itself.

Neither wind nor solar generation can provide inertia — solar because the panels are connected directly to the grid, and wind because the turbines require a frequency converter to sit between them and the grid.

This August, Reactive Technologies will install its GridMetrix system across the entire UK grid in a six-year deal to measure inertia across the whole network.

It is the first time the National Grid will move away from estimation models to measure where and how much inertia there is on the grid — in this way, batteries will be able to step in before there is a system black-out as opposed to reacting to one.

So far, says Chris Kimmett, commercial director for networks at Reactive Technologies, the UK Grid has only been able to guess.

“No one has done it before,” he said.

“It is difficult to measure inertia because we just don’t know how much there is — but by predicting where the shortfalls are, we could turn a battery on before it’s needed — thus predicting power-outs rather than responding to them.

“The National Grid has zero visibility of what’s going on in terms of how much inertia there is on the grid — they have to guess.”

Kimmett says the firm’s technology

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comes from the world of signalling.

“We put a 5MW supercapacitor in the middle of the grid and send a sonar pulse into the grid, then measure the response. It’s treating the grid like a black box — we use the power system as a communications medium.

“Our data is sent to the National Grid, and if inertia is a bit tight here or there they’ll know. Over time we will be able to use the data and make predictions.”

Kimmett says that even the millisecond response capability of batteries is not fast enough to avoid potential cascading losses.

The more countries electrify their heating and transport sectors, the more dependent they will become on electricity — and the trickier it will be to balance and manage supply.

Reactive Technologies is based in Finland and the UK. It is running pilots in Italy, New Zealand, Australia and Japan, but the UK is the first country where the system will actually be rolled out.

“The new grid is much harder to balance,” says Kimmett. “We have to shift it all around in

“It is very difficult to measure inertia because we just don’t know how much there is — but by predicting where the shortfalls are, we could turn a battery on before it’s needed — thus predicting power-outs rather than responding to them. No one has done this before.” ­ Chris Kimmett, — commercial director for networks at Reactive Technologies different ways. But where the battery will give you the throttle in the new grid, our system will enable you to fine tune that throttle.”

Ultimately, if transmission system

Above: Predicting inertia with GridMetrix technology from Reactive Technologies Below: Synchronous condensers can provide inertia

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COVER STORY: BRITAIN’S BLACKOUT PROBLEM operators can measure inertia continuously, the real-time information will allow them to predict grid changes and take the required action to avert outages.

Analytics to measure inertia Another programme being deployed by the National Grid is part of an analytics suite from G E Digital, a subsidiary of General Electric.

Its technology uses analytics to enhance the visibility on the system of available inertia so that fast-acting response services can be enabled.

“Analytics now facilitate the measurement and forecasting of effective system inertia to known and predictable values: conventional rotating power generation, load, solar power and wind power,” GE Digital says.

“Accurate inertia forecasting gives

the transmission system operator confidence in a secure level of renewable penetration and the appropriate amount of reserve services, saving money by eliminating excess reserves and enabling a more stable grid.”

Synchronous condensers could make a comeback in this area as an alternative to fossil fuel plant turbines, says Kimmett.

Also called synchronous compensators, condensers have a free-spinning shaft that helps to alter conditions on the grid by either generating or absorbing reactive power as needed by using kinetic energy in the same way as traditional turbines. The US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory is already looking at these as an option for replacing inertia (see box, below).

Kimmett believes they could provide

competition for battery manufacturers in this space unless batteries are able to up their game.

“Batteries will play a key role in the stability of the power system in future and today are already trusted to deliver frequency response in the same way that fossil fuel plants have always done,” he says.

“However for batteries to replace inertia at scale, grids are looking for independent verification of performance.

The risk for battery manufacturers and developers is that grids replace spinning fossil fuel plants with spinning synchronous condensers, a trend we already see in many parts of the world.

“To stand head and shoulders above the competition they will need measurement tools to demonstrate equivalent (and indeed superior) performance.”

US Department of Energy looks at replacing inertia According to the US DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, inverter-based resources such as wind, solar and certain types of energy storage can replace conventional generators and result in two counter-balancing effects: where less inertia is made available as more and more inverter-based resources are used, in fact these very resources reduce the need for inertia in the first place — addressing the first point.

But at the moment inertia is still vital, which the NREL explores in its report Inertia and the Power Grid: A Guide Without the Spin.

This looks at the options coming up for the new-look grid, which is seeing more and more of its electricity generated by unreliable, intermittent, renewable sources such as wind and solar panels.

One of the options it puts forward is synchronous condensers. These draw energy from the grid to maintain a spinning mass and can inject power into the grid in the same way as a synchronous generator.

These are as yet at an early stage, and have only been installed to meet localized grid issues. ‘However, they could also provide a brute force solution to the potential need to maintain a minimum level of inertia’, the report says, adding in a footnote that historically, synchronous condensers were installed for

32 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

reasons unrelated to inertia and frequency response, and have lower amounts of usable inertia.

“The use of synchronous condensers for providing large amounts of inertia could require adding physical mass,” it says.

Early research is being carried out into the option to decrease UFLS (under-frequency load shedding) settings to add time for frequency response, but the NREL admits that ‘more research is needed to understand the reliability and cost implications of lower UFLS settings’.

One way of ensuring there is enough inertia on the grid is by measuring how much there is and then directing the supply of electricity to where it is in most demand, and

the report says that Texas’s ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) system operators are actively doing just that, keeping certain generators running to maintain inertia above critical levels.

“However, this action can have negative economic consequences by increasing the number of power plants online and operating at partial load, which reduces efficiency,” says the NREL. “It can also require curtailing the output of variable generation, reducing their economic benefit to the system.”

It puts the option forward as a temporary mechanism to allow grid operators to implement and test longer-term solutions in subsequent actions.

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For the challenges ahead...

SPOTLIGHT: JOHN GOODENOUGH

The father of the lithium-ion cell

John Goodenough, 2019 Nobel Laureate winner and now just a couple of months short of his 99th birthday, has been at the heart of the development of the lithium battery.

Goodenough is the man who discovered the cathode material of choice and so made the lithium-ion battery truly portable and rechargeable. Moreover, his explorations into the world of energy storage continue to this day.

It’s hard to pin a label on John Goodenough, noble laureate for his development of the lithium-ion battery and now approaching 99 years of age.

Chemist? Physicist? Materials scientist?

During his seven decades in scientific research he has been all of these and sometimes more.

In the 1950s Goodenough was one of the original pioneers of digital computing — his research into ferrimagnetic memory cores resulted in the first random access memory (RAM) of the digital computer. In the 1960s he was an acknowledged international specialist on magnetism. In the 1970s he was an expert on ceramics and research into the then novel NaS battery.

From the 1980s — to date — his fun-

34 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

damental understanding of the lithium battery has made him the world’s leading figure on its development.

And in this last decade he has been exploring if the capabilities of ceramics holding an electrical (and recyclable) charge could be the next game-changer in energy storage — at least as revolu-

tionary as his pioneering work on the lithium battery.

But it was in the early 1970s when the first energy crisis alerted the international community and its scientists to its vulnerability and dependence on foreign oil. Alternatives to fossil fuels as energy sources were nuclear, solar, and wind — and in the case of renewable energy sources, the need for a rechargeable battery that could store electrical energy as chemical energy.

During this time chemists in France and Germany were pioneering investigations of room-temperature reversible lithium insertion into layered transition-metal sulfides and selenides MS2 and MSe2, which led to the suggestion that a rechargeable lithium-MS2 battery would be feasible since lithium non-rechargeable (primary) batteries were already known; they have an organic electrolyte for transporting lithium ions inside the battery.

In 1976, a rechargeable room-temperature Li-TiS2 battery cell was demonstrated; it had an acceptable rate of charge and discharge and offered an energy density higher than can be achieved with conventional batteries that have an aqueous electrolyte transporting H+ ions.

However, the Li anode was not replated smoothly on recharge but developed dendrites that grew across the flammable organic electrolyte on repeated recharge to give an internal short circuit with disastrous consequences. This effort was, therefore, abruptly abandoned.

The crucial appointment It is at this crucial point in exploring lithium’s potential that Goodenough, then in his 50s, accepted a position as professor and head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at Oxford University, England. He had been contemplating a move to the Ariya Mehr University in Iran to establish an energy institute there when a letter arrived inviting him to apply for the position at Oxford.

The choice of university would have

“As a young man in search of a calling for my life, I became fascinated by the philosophy of science while struggling to come to terms with a spiritual awakening” www.energystoragejournal.com

SPOTLIGHT: JOHN GOODENOUGH

Goodenough in Oxford after becoming professor and head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the university

world-changing consequences.

For more than 20 years Goodenough had worked as a research scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, where he had been part of an interdisciplinary team that developed the first randomaccess memory digital computer.

Goodenough’s contribution was to the development of the ferrimagnetic, ceramic memory element, a contribution that put him in charge of a ceramics laboratory and that gave him a decade in which to explore the magnetic, transport and structural properties of transition-metal compounds.

After moving to Oxford, Goodenough recognized that the layered sulfides would not give the voltage needed to compete with batteries using a conventional aqueous electrolyte, but that an oxide would provide a significantly higher voltage. From previous work, he knew that layered oxides analogous to the layered sulfides would not be stable, but that discharged LiMO2 oxides could have the same structural architecture as discharged LiTiS2.

Goodenough assigned a visiting physicist from Japan, Koichi Mizushima, the task of working with Goodenough’s postdoc, Philip Wiseman, and a student, Philip Jones, to explore how much lithium could be extracted reversibly from layered LiMO2 cathodes, and with M = Co and Ni he found he could extract electrochemically over 50% of the lithium at a voltage of around 4.0V versus a lithium anode, nearly double that for the sulfides, before the oxides began to evolve oxygen.

Their groundbreaking findings with Li1-xCoO2 were published in the Materials Research Bulletin 15, 783-789, (1980).

The report concluded with the statement, “Further characteristics of the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of this new system are being made.”

However, when Goodenough went

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to patent his cathodes, no battery company in England, Europe, or the US was interested in assembling a battery with a discharged cathode, so he gave the patent to the AERE Harwell Laboratory.

Nevertheless, with his postdoc Peter Bruce, now a professor in St Andrews, Scotland, and a new student, MGSK Thomas, Goodenough continued work at the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, South Parks Road, in Oxford to demonstrate that the lithium-ion mobility in Li1-xCoO2 is even higher than that in the sulfide cathode LiTiS2. This finding meant that a Li1-xCoO2 cathode would provide the needed voltages and rates that would usher in the “wireless revolution”.

Meanwhile, Rachid Yazami in Switzerland, exploring Li insertion into graphite, reported that a discharged graphite anode did not have a problem with dendrites if the carbon/LiCoO2 cells were not charged too rapidly, and Akira Yoshino in Japan then assembled the discharged cell Carbon/LiCoO2 to demonstrate the Li-ion battery that was licensed to the SONY Corporation, which marketed with it the first cell telephone.

Today, almost everyone from five years upwards has an application of this battery in his or her pocket.

Michael Thackeray was working on the Zebra battery, a modification of the sodium-sulfur battery, in South Africa when he read the article in the Materials Research Bulletin. He immediately applied for a sabbatical to work with Goodenough in Oxford.

He came to South Parks Road with the announcement that he was inserting lithium reversibly into magnetite, the ferrimagnetic spinel Fe3O4 used by Greek sailors in an early version of the compass. He wished to replace cobalt, which is expensive and toxic, with iron, which is abundant and benign.

The spinels A[B2]O4 contain a three-

dimensional framework of BO6/3 octahedra sharing edges; in the layered LiMO2 oxides they form 2-dimensional layers.

The A atoms of a spinel occupy interstitial tetrahedral sites that are bridged by empty, face-sharing octahedra, and Goodenough realized from his earlier work on spinel memory elements that the Li inserted into Fe[Fe2]O4 was entering and displacing that interstitial A-site Fe into the bridging interstitial octahedral sites to create a rock-salt structure with the [Fe2]O4 framework remaining intact.

Bill David, now at the Rutherford Laboratory, had just joined Goodenough’s group from the Clarendon with a PhD involving structural analysis, so he and Thackeray demonstrated that Goodenough’s hypothesis was correct.

Meanwhile, Goodenough told Thackeray to investigate the electrochemical reversible insertion of Li into the spinel Li[Mn2]O4; it gave a voltage of 3.0V versus lithium. Manganese (Mn) is also abundant and benign. On his return to South Africa, Thackeray showed his students that extraction of Li from Li[Mn2]O4 gives a voltage of 4V versus lithium. A modification of the Li1-x[Mn2]O4 spinel cathode is now used by the Nissan Corporation to power their Leaf electric car.

Goodenough’s own story John Bannister Goodenough was born of US parents in Jena, Germany, on July 25, 1922. At that time, his father, Erwin Goodenough, was at Lincoln College, Oxford, writing a D Phil on the Church Fathers. In 1923 the family returned to New Haven, Conneticut, where his father had been appointed assistant professor of history of religion at Yale University. John was the second son; he went away to Groton School at the age of 12.

To keep fit, the teenage Goodenough enjoyed playing individual and team

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 35

SPOTLIGHT: JOHN GOODENOUGH sports of all kinds, and in the summer of 1939 he kayaked from the lakes of Finland down the Ivalo River in the north to Kirkenes in Norway, where his Finnish companion had to return home to prepare for the Russian invasion.

After 10 days walking in the Jotunheimen Mountains of Norway, his six German companions were called home to serve the ambitions of Hitler, whose army had already marched into Poland.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for service, but was not called up until January 1943. This gave him time to complete his undergraduate degree in mathematics. He had entered Yale as a freshmen with a background in Latin and Greek and little idea of what he would do after the war was over.

Goodenough had taken an introductory course in chemistry during his freshman year as the science requirement for a liberal arts degree, but he had no thought of a career in science.

“As a young man in search of a calling for my life, I became fascinated by the philosophy of science while struggling to come to terms with a spiritual awakening,” he says.

“While reading Whitehead one night, I decided that if I were ever to come back from the war and if I were to have the opportunity to go back to graduate school, I should study physics.”

During hostilities, as an Army Air Force meteorologist, Goodenough dispatched tactical aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean.

“In 1946, while I was still stationed on the tiny island of Terceira in the Azores awaiting my turn to go home, a telegram arrived telling me to report back to Washington in 48 hours.

“In Washington I was informed that I had been selected to study physics or mathematics at the University of Chicago or Northwestern University. My spirit recalled my earlier resolve, so from Washington I went immediately to the University of Chicago to register as a graduate student in Physics.

When I arrived, the registration officer, professor Simpson, said to me, ‘I don’t understand you veterans. Don’t you know that anyone who has ever done anything interesting in physics had already done it by the time he was your age; and you want to begin?’”

In 1946, Goodenough married Irene Wiseman, a history graduate, at Chicago who also had helped him on his spiritual journey. In the decades to come, the couple were to enjoy travel, mountain walking, and meeting scien-

36 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

Recognition of his achievements

Over the years Goodenough has been recognised for his work in a variety of fields, culminating in receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019.

Goodenough is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the French Academy of Sciences, the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales of Spain and the Royal Society of the United Kingdom.

He has written more than 700 articles, 90 book chapters and reviews, and five books, including two seminal works, Magnetism and the Chemical Bond (1963) and Les oxydes des métaux de transition (1973).

In 2001, Goodenough received the Japan Prize for his discoveries of the materials critical to the development of lightweight rechargeable batteries.

Goodenough is co-recipient of the 2009 Enrico Fermi Award. This presidential award is one of the oldest and most prestigious given by the US government and carries an honorarium of $375,000. He shares the honour with Siegfried Hecker, professor at the Management of Science and Engineering Department of Stanford University.

The RSC John B Goodenough Award (previously advertised as the Materials Chemistry Forum Lifetime Award), was established in 2008.

The John B. Goodenough Award is to recognize exceptional and sustained contributions to the area of materials chemistry.

On November 30, 2010, the latest presentation of a Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) National Chemical Landmark plaque took place in the

Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory of the University of Oxford. The plaque reads: “Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory where, in 1980, John B Goodenough with Koichi Mizushima, Philip Jones, and Philip Wiseman identified the cathode material that enabled the development of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery. This breakthrough ushered in the age of portable electronic devices.”

At the ceremony greetings were received as a pre-recorded speech from Professor Goodenough from his laboratory in the US. Present at the ceremony itself were Mizushima, Wiseman, and Jones.

In 2010 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. On February 1, 2013, Goodenough was presented with the National Medal of Science by US president Barack Obama.

He was awarded the Draper Prize in engineering. In 2015 he was listed, along with M. Stanley Whittingham, for pioneering research leading to the development of the lithium-ion battery on a list of Clarivate Citation Laureates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by Thomson Reuters.

In 2017 he received the Welch Award in Chemistry and in 2019 he was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society.

The Royal Society of Chemistry granted a John B Goodenough Award in his honour.

Goodenough received an honorary CK Prahalad award from Corporate EcoForum (CEF) in 2017.

CEF’s founder Rangaswami said, “John Goodenough is evidence of imagination being put to work for the greater good. We’re thrilled to recognize his lifetime of achievements and are hopeful that his latest discovery will have major implications for the future of sustainable battery storage.”

Goodenough was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 9, 2019 for his work on lithiumion batteries, along with Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino. He is the oldest person to have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

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SPOTLIGHT: JOHN GOODENOUGH tists and Christians from many countries; invitations every year to lecture abroad would introduce them to western and eastern Europe, Russia, India and Nepal, the Middle East, North Africa, Australia, Mexico, and Argentina.

Irene passed away in 2016 after 70 years of marriage.

By 1952, still at the University of Chicago, Goodenough had completed his PhD under the supervision of Clarence Zener. This included taking two courses from Enrico Fermi on quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.

In 1952, he joined the group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory charged with the development of a ferrimagnetic ceramic to enable the first random-access memory for the digital computer.

“The air defence of this country depended on having a large digital computer, and the computer had no memory!” Goodenough says. “The rolled alloy tapes first tried did not switch fast enough. Although the Europeans who had developed ferrimagnetic spinels were convinced that it would be impossible to obtain the required squarish B-H hysteresis loop in a polycrystalline ceramic, the magnetic-core RAM was delivered within three years of my arrival with a read/rewrite cycle time of less than the required six microseconds.”

In the course of this work, Goodenough showed how cooperative orbital ordering gives rise to crystal distortions, and he used this ordering to articulate the rules for the sign of the spin-spin magnetic interactions in solids.

These rules have subsequently provided a true guide to the design as well as the interpretation of the magnetic properties of solids; they are known as the Goodenough-Kanamori rules, and they inspired the title of Goodenough’s first book, Magnetism and the Chemical Bond (Interscience-Wiley, 1963).

Since his proposals in the early 1970s to work on energy materials were assigned to the National Energy Laboratories because the Three-Mile Island incident had halted development in the USA of nuclear-power plants, Goodenough debated over the invitation to go to Oxford.

“My wife did not hesitate to recom-

Above on the blackboard — nullius in verba, “Take nobody’s word for it” — slogan for the UK’s national science academy and wise words to us all. Below, from left to right Goodenough’s colleagues who helped him advance his theories, Phil Wiseman, Koichi Mizushima and Phil Jones.

mend that I put my name in for nomination; and I thought, ‘If the people at Oxford have that much imagination, then perhaps that is what I should do’.

I was duly elected, and in 1976 I took up the post at Oxford,” he said.

Leaping over the Oxford years, by 1986, Goodenough was 64 years old.

“With the approach of mandatory retirement in England in 1986, I was delighted with an invitation from the University of Texas at Austin to occupy the Virginia H Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering.”

Since then, as a member of the ME and ECE Departments, he helped to establish the Texas Materials Institute.

With the help of now professor Arumugan Manthiram, who had come with him from England as a postdoc in 1986, and of professor Jianshi Zhou, who came to him in 1987 as a PhD student, Goodenough has been able to establish a laboratory that includes in one group solid state chemistry, structural characterization, electrochemistry, and a variety of physical measurements as a function of temperature and pressure.

This organization has enabled him to return to studies of the unusual physical properties imparted by orbital order, structural transformations, and the lattice instabilities encountered at the crossover from localized to itinerant electronic behaviour.

“Professor Simpson said to me: ‘I don’t understand you veterans. Don’t you know that anyone who has ever done anything interesting in physics had already done it by the time he was your age; and you want to begin?’”

38 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

Some of this is summarized in his volume Localized to Itinerant Electronic Transitions in Perovskite Oxides (Springer-Verlag, 2001).

He has also continued to develop solid electrolyte and electrode materials for the Li-ion battery and the solid oxide fuel cell (see his book with K Huang: Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Technology: Principles, Performance, and Operations (Woodhead Publishing, 2009).

The olivine cathode Li1-xFePO4 he developed in Texas is now being used for power tools and in a large battery being constructed in Quebec for the storage of electrical energy generated by a wind farm there.

Among his many publications is a very personal one: “Witness to Grace” (Publish America, 2008) in which he describes how his intellectual journey has also included “a religious quest for meaning in what or whom I would choose to serve with my life.”

“Witness to Grace” also chronicles a struggle to find a calling to a career in the science of the solid state, a career that brought together physics, chemistry, and engineering. He leaves to the reader the decision as to what was the result of chance and what was the leading of the spirit of love.”

Over this past decade his research continues. Goodenough still works at the university aged 98, hoping to achieve another breakthrough in battery technology.

On February 28, 2017 Goodenough and his team at the University of Texas published a paper in the journal Energy and Environmental Science on their demonstration of a glass battery, a lowcost all-solid-state battery that is noncombustible and has a long cycle life with a high volumetric energy density, and fast rates of charge and discharge.

Instead of liquid electrolytes, the battery uses glass electrolytes that enable the use of an alkali-metal anode without the formation of dendrites.

However, this paper was met with scepticism by some in the battery research community and remains controversial after several follow-up works.

The work was criticized for a lack of comprehensive data, spurious interpretations of the data obtained, and that the proposed mechanism of battery operation would violate the first law of thermodynamics.

In April 2020, a patent was filed for the glass battery on behalf of the LNEG (National Laboratory of Energy and Geology) in Portugal, the University of Porto, Portugal and the University of Texas.

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POWERING THE SMART GRID www.energystoragejournal.com

Meet the team

Debbie Mason, editor

Jade Beevor, advertising manager

Karen Hampton, publisher

Mike Halls, editor-in-chief

Having trained as a journalist after university back in the nineties, Debbie then spent a decade in China working for various media before coming back to the UK and joining the world of B2B journalism. She joined the Batteries International and Energy Storage Journal teams in 2016.

Jade’s our drama queen. She has been with ESJ since April 2015. She knows how to help companies drive their businesses forward by identifying the most effective marketing opportunities for print and digital platforms.

She’s never happier than when she’s tailoring bespoke packages to help businesses grow.

In her years of working within the energy storage business Karen has become a well-known figure at conferences. “My job,” she says, “is to get the maximum benefit for our advertisers to make sure their name and brand is out there, while maintaining the integrity, fairness and excellence our publications are renowned for.”

Mike, a former journalist with the UK newspaper the Financial Times, has been involved in journalism, publishing and print for three decades. “I’m particularly fond of writing about the energy storage industry,” he says. “It’s an unusual mixture of being fastpaced but slow to change.”

Antony Parselle, page designer Better known in the office as ‘Ant’ he’s been working in magazine design and layout since the early 1990s. Not so good on showing his best side however!

Juanita Anderson, business development manager Juanita is our new financial guru, who loves playing with numbers. Everything balances, she says — in the end.

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Hillary is the newest member of our editorial team, and is quickly getting to grips with the twists and turns of the energy storage sector. Watch out for her at events!

More than just a historian on energy storage and batteries as he’s written about many things. He’s the inspiration behind our Heroes of the Grid section.

EDITORIAL Mike Halls +44 (0) 7977 016 918 editor@energystoragejournal.com

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FORTHCOMING EVENTS

Disruption to the events programme As the spring conference season approached for the battery and energy storage industry, hosts and organizers were struggling to decide whether to go ahead with events that have been in the diary for months, if not years.

As this issue was released, and with the situation changing on an hourly basis, a variety of energy conferences and meetings had been postponed. While we have taken every effort to ensure these details are correct, please contact the conference organizers with any queries, or check websites throughout the listings.

International Battery Seminar Virtual March 9 – 11 V Virtual Event As the longest-running annual battery industry event in the world, this meeting has always been the preferred venue to announce significant developments, new products, and showcase the most advanced battery technology.

Founded in 1983, the International Battery Seminar & Exhibit has established itself as the premier event showcasing the state of the art of worldwide energy storage technology developments for consumer, automotive, military, and industrial applications.

Key thought leaders will assemble to not only provide broad perspectives, but also informed insights into significant advances in materials, product development, manufacturing, and application for all battery systems and enabling technologies.

Contact Cambridge Enertech www.internationalbatteryseminar.com

Intersolar Middle East March 15 – 17 Dubai, UAE Rescheduled for June 14 – 16

Bühler Virtual World March 22 – 26 V Virtual Event Following the success of our event in 2020, we are pleased to announce that we will be hosting a second Bühler Virtual World on March 22-26, 2021. Our motto is ‘get connected’, reflecting both the opportunity to get together virtually and the tremendous opportunities available with connected devices and services.

Connectivity underpins the solutions to many of the challenges and opportunities we face today, whether that is in terms of machines, plants, people, companies, industries, or even countries. The level, depth, and reliability of these connections will determine how we will perform economically in the future, how we will maintain a livable planet, and how we will ensure a better quality of life for the next generations.

March 19 – 21 Shenzen, China China International Battery Fair (CIBF) is an international meeting and the biggest exhibition activity on battery industry, which is sponsored by China Industrial Association of Power Sources. It includes all kinds of activities, such as exhibition, technical seminar, information meeting, trade fair, etc.

CIBF2021 provides an opportunity of information and product exchange for domestic and foreign battery enterprises, and makes a great contribution to promoting the integration and development of battery technology at home and abroad.

Contact China Industrial Association of Power Sources — CIAPS www.en.cibf.org.cn/

ESA Energy Storage Annual Conference & Expo April 21 – 22 V Virtual Event ESA brings the stakeholders of the energy storage industry together through ESA Energy Storage Conference & Expo, working to provide content to Accelerate markets, Connect its members and Educate stakeholders about the power of energy storage.

Contact Energy Storage Association www.esacon.energystorage.org

Contact Bühler Group https://virtualworld.buhlergroup. com/?region=en_GB

Energy Storage Europe March 16 – 18 Düsseldorf, Germany Rescheduled for Spring 2022

Take your chance to join the most powerful platform in the MENA region.

Middle East Energy (MEE), Intersolar, and ees, the leading energy exhibitions are joining hands to co-deliver an outstanding renewables and energy storage event at Middle East Energy 2021. Renewables and energy storage at MEE is the largest gathering of solar and renewable energy industry professionals in the Middle East & Africa, offering the most effective trade focused platform to international manufacturers and distributors looking to meet regional buyers.

Those who would like to get to know the entire world of energy storage, its leading technologies and key-figures, for those there is only one destination: Energy Storage Europe in Düsseldorf.

The unrivalled focus on the topic of energy storage can only be found here in Düsseldorf. Only here the entire range of technologies in all its diversity can be discovered: Electrical, thermal, chemical and mechanical solutions.

Only here the energy storage of future energy systems can already be experienced today.

Contact Informa Exhibitions & Intersolar www.intersolar.ae/en/home.html

Contact Messe Düsseldorf www.energy-storage-online.com

40 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

China International Battery Fair — CIBF

Dusseldorf, Germany

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FORTHCOMING EVENTS

Frankfurt, Germany

Battery Experts Forum Frankfurt, Germany

Battcon

Rescheduled for October 5 – 7

May 4 – 7 Hollywood, Florida. USA

In order to meet the great demand, the Battery Experts Forum will be taking place in the financial metropolis of Frankfurt am Main. With even more exhibition space, additional capacity in the conference halls and a great backdrop, the Battery Experts Forum is growing in the premises of the Forum Messe Frankfurt. Be there when over 100 TOP experts in the battery industry report on the latest technology!

Rescheduled for November 2 – 5 Battcon is a high-energy mix of industry-specific presentations, panels, seminars and workshops, plus a trade show. More than 600 stationary battery users meet at Battcon for three days of professional development and networking with industry experts and peers. It’s a forum focusing on design, selection, application and maintenance for those in the data center, telecom and utility industries, who can learn from and network with industry experts.

Contact Battery Experts Forum www.battery-experts-forum.com

International Advanced Battery Conference Online 2021

Contact Vertiv Group E: Events@Battcon.com www.battcon.com

April 27 – 29 V Virtual Event For the first time webcasted live: the annual International Conference Advanced Battery Power organized jointly

by Haus der Technik, Essen, ISEA Institut, RWTH Aachen und MEET Batterieforschungszentrum Münster will in 2021 be hosted on a virtual conference platform and meet the networking needs of the community of battery experts in science and technology.

The Conference 2021 will again create an exceptional schedule with international key-notes in our usual good spirits presenting up-to-date information on the cutting-edge of technology, the latest research results and forwardlooking concepts.

Contact Haus Der Technik E: hdt@hdt.de www.hdt.de

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The Battery Show & EV Tech Europe Digital Days May 18 – 20 V Virtual Event

The Battery Show Europe May 18 – 20 Stuttgart, Germany Rescheduled for Nov 30 – Dec 2

Until we can meet in person, meet us where you are at our first virtual event.

The Battery Show & EV Tech Europe Digital Days is a virtual event filled with technical sessions, panels, workshops, networking opportunities, and digital sourcing—all delivered through a state-of-the-art virtual platform.

The Battery Show is presented in partnership with the Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Technology Expo and together they bring more than 350 International suppliers to Stuttgart. Combined, the two shows make up Europe’s largest advanced battery and H/EV technology trade fair manufacturing solutions across the battery and H/EV supply chain.

Contact Informa Markets E: thebatteryshowcs@informa.com www.thebatteryshow.eu/en/Home.html

Contact Informa Markets E: thebatteryshowcs@informa.com www.thebatteryshow.eu

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 41

FORTHCOMING EVENTS

Adelaide, Australia

European Graphene Automotive 2021

Australian Energy Storage Conference & Exhibition

May 24 – 25 Manchester, UK

June 2 – 3 Adelaide, Australia

This year’s conference is set to become the world’s leading exhibition and conference exclusively for graphene researchers and automotive manufacturers to meet and explore new uses of graphene in automotives, and to address the specific challenges associated with the commercialisation of graphene for use in a multitude of new applications.

With the theme “Powering Change”, the Australian Energy Storage Conference (AES) 2021 is proud to return to Adelaide in partnership with the Government of South Australia, Adelaide Convention Bureau and Adelaide Convention Centre. AES 2021 will showcase the newest and most topical projects and innovations in this space whilst expanding to incorporate a focus on PPA’s, commercially sited renewable energy and energy efficiency projects helping to transition business, government, and networks towards 100% renewable energy. This content will be featured in a third stream at AES 2021.

Contact IQ Hub Email: delegates@iQ-Hub.com www.graphene-automotive-conference.com

ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit May 24 – 26 National Harbor, Maryland, US

Contact Exhibition & Trade Fairs www.australianenergystorage.com.au

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Intersolar Middle East June 14 – 16 Dubai, United Arab Emirates Middle East Energy (MEE), Intersolar, and ees, the leading energy exhibitions are joining hands to co-deliver an outstanding renewables and energy storage event at Middle East Energy 2021. Renewables and energy storage at MEE is the largest gathering of solar and renewable energy industry professionals in the Middle East & Africa, offering the most effective trade focused platform to international manufacturers and distributors looking to meet regional buyers.

Contact www.intersolar.ae/en/home.html

The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit (The Summit) is an annual conference and technology showcase that brings together experts from different technical disciplines and professional communities to think about America’s energy challenges in new and innovative ways.

ARPA-E is the U.S. Department of Energy’s advanced research projects agency. ARPA-E advances high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too high-risk for private-sector investment.

ARPA-E awardees are unique because they are developing entirely new ways for Americans to get, store, and use energy.

49th Power Sources Conference

EUROBAT General Assembly/Forum

June 7 – 10 Jacksonville, Florida, US

June 17 – 18 to be confirmed Brussels, Belgium

The Power Sources Conference is the oldest continually held biennial conference devoted to research and development of power source, energy conversion, power distribution and management technologies for military use.

The conference goal is to bring Government, industry and academic researchers and developers together to discuss advances in power and energy technologies to support the growing power demands of military platforms and electronic systems.

Contact ARPA-E & Department of Energy E: arpa-e-comms@hq.doe.gov www.arpae-summit.com

Contact Samantha Tola Email: stola@pcm411.com www.powersourcesconference.com/index

EUROBAT is the association for the European manufacturers of automotive, industrial and energy storage batteries. EUROBAT has 52 members from across the continent comprising more than 90% of the automotive and industrial battery industry in Europe.

The members and staff work with all stakeholders, such as battery users, governmental organisations and media, to develop new battery solutions in areas of hybrid and electro-mobility as well as grid flexibility and renewable energy storage.

42 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

Contact EUROBAT www.eurobat.org

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FORTHCOMING EVENTS International Automobile Recycling Congress — IARC 2021 June 23 – 25 Geneva, Switzerland V Virtual Event + Onsite IARC 2021 is the international platform for discussing the latest developments and challenges in automobile recycling, bringing together more than 250 decision-makers in the ELV recycling chain such as car manufacturers, metal and plastic scrap traders, recyclers, shredder operators, policy-makers and many more.

Contact ICM AG Susann Schmid Tel: +41 62 785 10 00 Email: info@icm.ch

European Fuel Cell Forum June 29 – July 2 Luzern, Switzerland V Virtual Event + Onsite The European Fuel Cell Forum continues to be one of the most prominent meeting platforms for the exchange of scientific and technical information, as well as an ideal event for networking towards future solutions.

The technical programme will range from fundamental science and new materials, through cell, stack, and system development, to the latest results from commercial deployment. There are also topics covering manufacturing, lifetime, characterisation, modeling and optimisation. Under the title “industrial achievements” product and novel concepts, P2X, chemical processing applications, standardisation, studies and others such as training and education are addressed.

Contact EFCF E: forum@efcf.com www.efcf.com

Future Energy Asia June 30 – July 2 Bangkok, Thailand Future Energy Asia Exhibition & Conference (FEA 2021) will present a hybrid business platform that brings together the region’s most influential energy players across the complete energy value chain in one unique meeting place.

Endorsed by the Ministry of Energy of Thailand, FEA 2021 looks to set the stage for NOCs and IOCs; power producers and utility companies; cleantech providers; service companies and engineering contractors to foster a se-

cure, affordable and low-carbon energy mix across Asia.

Contact DMG Events E: info@dmgevents.com www.futureenergyasia.com/about/aboutfuture-energy-asia/

Battery Cells & Systems Expo and Conference July 7 – 8 Birmingham, UK Battery Cells & Systems Expo will bring together automotive manufacturers, electric utilities, battery system integrators, cell manufacturers and the entire manufacturing supply chain.

A truly unique showcase, companies from around the world will use the show to launch products and demonstrate their technology to an audience of over 4,000 professionals.

Co-Located with Vehicle Electrification Expo and The Advanced Materials Show, this will be a highly concentrated two days of networking, lead generation and education featuring the leaders and innovators responsible for shaping the future of this industry.

Contact Event Partners www.batterysystemsexpo.com

The Battery and Energy Storage

CONFERENCE WATCH MONTHLY The definitive guide to battery energy storage conferences and meetings for the year ahead

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE www.energystoragejournal.com

Contact Jade Beevor jade@energystoragejournal.com

Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021 • 43

FORTHCOMING EVENTS PlugVolt Battery Seminar July 13 – 15 Plymouth, Michigan, US PlugVolt will be hosting Battery Seminar 2021 in Plymouth, featuring an entire day of in-depth technical tutorials presented by world renowned professors from Top 50 US universities on Day 1, followed by Days 2 and 3 with industry subject matter experts presenting on Automotive and Stationary Storage applications respectively. Attendees will also get an exclusive opportunity to tour A123 Systems’ new Novi, Michigan (USA) facility.

Contact PlugVolt - JC Soman E: juratesoman@plugvolt.com www.bateryseminars.com

Intersolar North America July 13 – 16 Long Beach, California, US Intersolar North America and Energy Storage North America come together for the first time July 14-16, 2021, connecting installers, developers, utilities, technology providers, policy makers, and key stakeholders from around the world to advance the clean energy future.

As the first major solar + storage event of the year in North America, Intersolar North America highlights the latest energy technologies, services, companies, and organizations striving to create positive impact on climate change and support our planet’s transition into a more sustainable energy future.

Munich, Germany

most visited exhibition for batteries and energy storage systems is the industry hotspot for suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and users of stationary electrical energy storage solutions as well as battery systems.

In 2021, more than 450 suppliers of products for energy storage technology and systems will be present at ees Europe and the parallel exhibitions of The smarter E Europe taking place in Munich.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a two-day energy storage conference where leading experts delve into current questions of this industry.

Contact Solar Promotion www.ees-europe.com/en/home

All Energy & Dcarbonise Summit August 18 – 19 Glasgow, Scotland

July 21 – 23 Munich, Germany

All-Energy takes pride in being the UK’s largest low carbon energy and full supply chain renewables event for private and public sector energy end users. Each year, we connect suppliers of renewable and low carbon energy solutions and policy makers to developers, investors and buyers from around the world to discuss new technologies, and blow us in the right direction to tackle the biggest challenges of our time.

Discover future-ready solutions for renewable energy storage and advanced battery technology at ees Europe! Europe’s largest, most international and

Contact Reed Exhibitions E: EnquiryREC@reedexpo.co.uk www.all-energy.co.uk

Contact Diversified Communications www.intersolar.us

ees Europe + Power2drive

Shanghai, China

Shanghai International Lithium Battery industry Fair — CNIBF August 25 – 27 Shanghai, China The Shanghai International Lithium Battery Industry Fair will be held on Shanghai New International Expo Center, China. The exhibitions of new energy vehicles, super capacitors, charging equipments and energy storage will be held at the same time.

The show area is expected to reach 30,000 square meters, while more than 600 exhibitors from the whole industry chain will show their latest products and technology at the scene. Furthermore, over 100 visitor groups and 35,000 people are going to visit the site with a purpose to purchase or communicate, making sense to promoting industrial innovation and development.

Contact www.cnibf.net

Glasgow, Scotland. UK

44 • Energy Storage Journal • Spring 2021

www.energystoragejournal.com

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