London South East | The UK's favourite investor portal.

Everyone’s Favourite Climate Solution Has a Fire Problem
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-28/everyone-s-favorite-climate-solution-has-a-fire-problem
Fire at 20MW UK battery storage plant in Liverpool
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/live-updates-fire-rips-through-18934842
Arizona Lithium battery explosion
https://youtu.be/j0c_PwD3blI
Body camera video released from APS battery storage facility explosion
https://www.abc15.com/news/region-west-valley/surprise/body-camera-released-from-aprils-aps-battery-storage-facility-explosion
A deadly explosion that occurred in a flagship battery storage project in Beijing resulted in at least two deaths and marks the worst accident that occurred in China’s battery storage in years
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202104181888978937.html&prev=search&pto=
South Korea Identifies Top 4 Causes for ESS Fires
https://liiontamer.com/south-korea-identifies-top-4-causes-that-led-to-ess-fires/
Lithium-Ion Battery Fires in Electric Vehicles - Safety Risks to Emergency Responders
https://youtu.be/J6eS6JzBn0k
Aggressive load-shifting could increase battery fire risk- investigators
https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/aggressive-loadshifting-could-increase-battery-fire-risk-inves.html
The Environmental Impact of Lithium Batteries
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-environmental-impact-of-lithium-batteries/
Explosion occurs at China Dynanonic's LFP battery plant
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2179050-explosion-occurs-at-china-dynanonics-lfp-battery-plant?backToResults=true
Massive explosion at a Chinese battery factory sends a huge mushroom cloud into the air, killing one and injuring 20
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9125633/China-explosion-Huge-blast-battery-factory-Hunan-kills-one-injures-20.html#v-3170385140564967852
A small ferry's Lithium battery fire deserves global attention
https://www.shipinsight.com/articles/a-small-ferrys-battery-fire-deserves-global-attention
New Hybrid Tour Boat Suffers Battery Fire Under Way
https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/newly-built-hybrid-passenger-vessel-suffers-battery-fire-under-way
Fire Aboard Cosco Boxship Caused by Container Load of Batteries
https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/fire-aboard-cosco-boxship-caused-by-container-load-of-batteries
Lithium-ion Battery Waste Fires Costing the UK Over £100m a Year
https://www.eunomia.co.uk/lithium-ion-battery-waste-fires-costing-the-uk-over-100m-a-year/
The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact

In some coastal areas, for instance, energy systems lacked adequate protection against humid air. In other cases fuses designed to interrupt the flow of current had failed. Investigators even found simple bad wiring, as if in a house built by careless contractors.
Logan Goldie-Scot, head of clean-power research at BloombergNEF, pins many of those problems on the Korean battery industry’s rapid growth. Spurred by government incentives, energy storage installations grew more than five-fold between 2017 and 2018. “It’s companies with relatively limited experience in installing and integrating these systems doing a lot in a very short space of time,” Goldie-Scot said.
The investigation led to tighter government safety requirements for energy storage systems in Korea, in their design as well as operation, and more frequent inspections. But the new measures haven’t completely stopped the fires, leaving the South Korea market in limbo.
Pinnacle West Capital Corp.’s Arizona Public Service, owner of the battery system that burned in April, remains committed to deploying 850 megawatts of energy storage on its grid, one of the largest commitments by a U.S. utility. But APS has halted installations while it investigates the fire’s cause, said Brad Albert, the company’s vice president of resource management.
“The most important aspect of this is safety for us,” he said. “We need to understand whatever we can learn from this.
Another APS battery facility suffered a fire in 2012, and the two incidents prompted a member of the Arizona Corporation Commission to write in an August letter that the batteries “are not prudent and create unacceptable risks.” The energy storage industry wants to ensure that sentiment doesn’t spread. Its trade association has been developing standards for safe operations.
“We just want to get out ahead of it,” said Kelly Speakes-Backman, chief executive officer of the U.S. Energy Storage Association. “Energy storage is growing quickly, but it is still a relatively small market. We want to make sure standards are in place by the time we hit a large penetration in the market.”

“If the percentage of failures holds, that could mean a lot of problems,” said Mike Simpson, senior technical leader at the Electric Power Research Institute. “Even a one-in-10 million likelihood of failure on the assembly line could still lead to many failures on the road.”
Fear of fires isn’t killing global battery demand, which BloombergNEF predicts will grow more than seven-fold by the end of the decade. But the incidents have, at times, shaken public confidence. South Korea, the world’s third-largest battery maker, went on an installation binge of utility-scale batteries until a string of nearly two dozen fires prompted a backlash and government probe. In the end, the investigation blamed many of the fires on sloppy installation and operational errors.
“This is early growing pains for a new technology and a new industry,” said Daniel Kammen, chair of the Energy & Resources Group at the University of California at Berkeley. “We didn’t even have grid-scale batteries a few years ago.”
Some fires can be traced to manufacturing defects in the battery cells themselves, or physical damage after installation. Overcharging can also be a problem, Simpson said, as can poor integration with other electrical systems.
Each of those factors can tip a battery cell into a dangerous, uncontrolled chain reaction known as thermal runaway. The flammable electrolyte inside the cell suddenly heats up and causes the same thing to happen in adjacent cells. Once ignited, the batteries can emit toxic fumes.
Firefighters are learning on the fly how to respond. Dousing the flames takes a large amount of water, and cells can re-ignite hours after the initial fire has been extinguished. Following the explosion last year at the Arizona energy storage facility, investigators spent months carefully removing racks of batteries so they could be drained of energy.
Brian O’Connor, an engineer with the National Fire Protection Association, said first responders need far more training on how to handle burning batteries. The association, which develops fire codes, recently issued standards for energy storage installations in buildings, including how far they should be spaced apart and which fire suppression systems to use. “The technologies do not come without risks,” O’Connor said.
At a recent conference, the fire association hosted several sessions on the safety of battery installations. One was titled, “Energy Storage in Your Home: Can You Sleep at Night?”
South Korea showed what can happen when battery fires cause alarm. A booming market that had seen more than 4 gigawatt-hours of capacity added in 2018 suddenly froze up. Installations in South Korea last year could have fallen 75 percent or more, according to preliminary BNEF estimates.
Government investigators did not blame the fires on any inherent flaw in the batteries themselves. Instead, they faulted the design and operation of energy storage systems that included the batteries.

The path away from fossil-fuel power means more giant batteries—and more risk of dangerous fires.

The explosion ruptured the dusk settling over the desert in Surprise, Arizona. For hours, smoke had poured from a metal shed packed with lithium-ion batteries at a small electric substation. The batteries were tied to the electric grid, and somehow they had caught fire.
Firefighters searching for the source of the smoke opened the shed door, and minutes later gases seeping from damaged batteries caused the explosion. Body-camera footage from the scene showed a firefighter dazed and breathing heavily as blood ran down his forehead. Two of the four people injured had to be airlifted to a hospital.
It’s likely that few people living near the substation, on the edge of suburban Phoenix, realized the facility held the kind of supersized batteries seen as key to unleashing renewable energy upon power grids and helping solve the climate change crisis.
Plunging prices and intensifying efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions have touched off a battery boom. Energy companies are plugging more battery packs into the grid as a way to store renewable power and replace fossil-fuel plants. Megaprojects are becoming the norm. Last year, regulators approved a battery installation in New York City that will be big enough to power 250,000 homes for eight hours. Developers near Las Vegas plan a similarly huge system to store energy from a 690-megawatt solar plant.
But the April explosion in Arizona illustrated a lingering problem that has long dogged lithium-ion batteries: fires that can be difficult to douse. In South Korea, a global leader in battery manufacturing and adoption, there have been at least 23 fires over a roughly two-year period, according to BloombergNEF, spooking customers and prompting a government investigation.
In little more than a decade, the rechargeable batteries invented in the 1970s have become a cornerstone technology of 21st century life. They are seldom far from any of us, powering toothbrushes and smartphones, toys and ear buds, laptops and Teslas. Global production is expected to triple within the next three years, according to BloombergNEF.
If lithium-ion batteries started as consumer convenience, now they have emerged as an indispensable tool to combat global warming. Electric utilities need a way to soak up solar energy during the day for use after dark and bottle the output of wind farms for when breezes fade. Automakers are rolling out a fast-growing fleet of electric vehicles—not just cars, but pickups, buses and big rigs—to clean up transportation, the source of nearly a quarter of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. The battery’s moment has arrived.
But rapidly swelling numbers will likely bring more battery fires. The incidents remain rare compared to the volume of batteries, but experts expect a surge as the technology becomes ever more inescapable.

https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/proposed-regulation-lifting-embedded-generation-licence-exemption-cap-to-10-mw-released-for-comment-2021-04-23

Proposed regulation lifting ‘embedded generation’ licence-exemption cap to 10 MW released for comment

Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe has released, for public comment, an amendment to the Electricity Regulation Act, proposing an increase in the licensing-exemption threshold for embedded power generation plants from 1 MW to 10 MW.
The Gazette notice, which was published on April 23, follows President Cyril Ramaphosa’s February State of the Nation announcement that Schedule 2 of the Electricity Regulation Act would be amended to increase the licensing threshold for embedded generators.

The current cap is set at 1 MW, with projects above that size required to apply for a generation licence with the National Energy Regulator of South Africa.
Ramaphosa said that between 4 000 MW and 6 000 MW of additional generation capacity would be required over the next five years, over and above that which would arise from independent power producer procurement programmes and the completion of Eskom’s much-delayed coal projects.

“Recent analysis suggests that easing the licensing requirements for new embedded generation projects could unlock up to 5 000 MW of additional capacity and help to ease the impact of load-shedding,” Ramaphosa said, referring to a report produced by Meridian Economics in January.
The report, which gained the support of Eskom, proposed that the licence-exemption cap be increased to 50 MW, but Mantashe announced in March that it would be raised to 10 MW instead and called for Eskom to “stay in its lane”.
The proposed amendment also falls short of making some of the changes that the industry has been calling for with regards to wheeling of electricity to multiple customers.
Interested persons and organisations had 30 days, from April 23, to submit written comments to the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy on the proposed amendments.

World Bank ESKOM BESS Tenders Phase 1 - Total of 827 MWh
Package 1
Skaapvlei 80MW/320MWh
Pre-bid clarification meeting 8th April 2021
Site meeting 14th April 2021
Closing Date for Bids 4th May 2021
Bid Evaluation/Recommendation for Award Planned 3rd June 2021
Signed Contract Planned 8th July 2021
Contract Completion Planned 8th April 2022

Package 2
Lot A:
Melkhout 35MW/140MWh
Pre-bid clarification meeting 9th April 2021
Site meeting 19th April 2021
Closing Date for Bids 7th May 2021
Bid Evaluation/Recommendation for Award Planned TBA
Signed Contract Planned TBA
Contract Completion Planned TBA

Lot B:
Pongola 40MW/160MW
Pre-bid clarification meeting 9th April 2021
Site meeting 21st April 2021
Closing Date for Bids 7th May 2021
Bid Evaluation/Recommendation for Award Planned TBA
Signed Contract Planned TBA
Contract Completion Planned TBA

Elandskop 8MW/32MWh
Pre-bid clarification meeting 9th April 2021
Site meeting 22nd April 2021
Closing Date for Bids 7th May 2021
Bid Evaluation/Recommendation for Award Planned TBA
Signed Contract Planned TBA
Contract Completion Planned TBA

Package 3
Lot A:
Paleisheuwel 9.5MW/45MWh
Pre-bid clarification meeting 12th April 2021
Site meeting 15th April 2021
Closing Date for Bids 18th May 2021
Bid Evaluation/Recommendation for Award Planned TBA
Signed Contract Planned TBA
Contract Completion Planned TBA

Graafwater 5MW/30MWh
Pre-bid clarification meeting 12th April 2021
Site meeting 15th April 2021
Closing Date for Bids 18th May 2021
Bid Evaluation/Recommendation for Award Planned TBA
Signed Contract Planned TBA
Contract Completion Planned TBA

Lot B:
Hex 20MW/100MWh
Pre-bid clarification meeting 12th April 2021
Site meeting 16th April 2021
Closing Date for Bids 18th May 2021
Bid Evaluation/Recommendation for Award Planned TBA
Signed Contract Planned TBA
Contract Completion Planned TBA

Info collated from :
World Bank - Eskom Investment Support Project P116410 - Procurement Tab
https://projects.worldbank.org/en/projects-operations/project-procurement/P116410
World Bank - Eskom Investment Support Project P116410 - Documents Tab (Last Updated 18th March)
https://projects.worldbank.org/en/projects-operations/document-detail/P116410?type=projects
Eskom Tender Bulletins
https://tenderbulletin.eskom.co.za
Search “BESS”

* WB BESS Phase 2 to follow on @ 640 MWh+

* IRP2019 513 MW+ of Storage Tenders Due Aug 2021
(Additional 1575 MW+ to follow up to to 2029)

World Bank’s 17.5 GWh energy storage roll-out programme
https://www.esmap.org/energystorage
World Bank has an Energy Storage Partnership with the South Africa Energy Storage Association (SAESA) of which Mikhail is the Chairman.
The World Bank Group (WBG) has committed $1 billion for a first-of-its kind program to accelerate investments in battery storage for electric power systems in low and middle-income countries. The WBG financing is expected to mobilize another $4 billion in con

A deadly explosion that occurred in a flagship battery storage project in Beijing resulted in at least two deaths and marks the worst accident that occurred in China’s battery storage in years

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202104181888978937.html&prev=search&pto=aue

At 12 o'clock on April 16 2021, many citizens near the South Fourth Ring Road in Beijing were disrupted by a burst of smoke. The energy storage power station of Beijing Jimei Home Furnishings Dahongmen caught fire. Beijing dispatched 15 fire stations, 47 fire trucks, 235 soldiers arrived at the scene to deal with it; at about 14:15, there was a sudden explosion in the north area of the power station.
Sadly, the accident resulted in the death of two firefighters, one firefighter was injured, and one employee in the power station lost contact.
The investigation revealed that the fire site was the energy storage power station of Beijing Guoxuan Fuweisi Optical Storage and Charging Technology Co., Ltd. Before the incident, the power station was undergoing construction and commissioning. It is reported that the energy storage power station where the accident occurred was put into use in the previous year, mainly for the home market and surrounding businesses to supply power, and to provide charging services for new energy vehicles.
The accident of the energy storage power station can be regarded as a stone on the road to the rapid development of energy storage. In recent years, the market generally believes that with the intensive implementation of mandatory storage policies and the approaching inflection point of energy storage economy, as well as the increase in global photovoltaic penetration after parity, the importance of energy storage and smooth power generation has become prominent, and the energy storage industry has begun to grow at a high rate. From the perspective of other race tracks, some accidents in the history of wind power have caused supervision to tighten the progress of approval of related projects. So, does the occurrence of this accident mean that there is a phased turning point in the development of energy storage, or is it just a small wave of energy storage heading to the blue ocean?

According to the data, the energy storage project located in Dahongmen Jimei Furniture City, Fengtai District is divided into two phases: the first phase of the project is to build 1.4MW of rooftop photovoltaic, 12.7MWh of energy storage, 24 charging parking spaces, and 12 sets of DC double gun charging piles; the second phase of expansion The project includes roof photovoltaic 1.73MW, outdoor 8MWh energy storage and 35 sets of charging piles have been installed in place, indoor 20MWh energy storage battery and related DC control and power distribution equipment.
According to industry speculation, the most prominent safety risk of lithium battery energy storage is thermal runaway. Excessive temperature may c

https://www.miningweekly.com/article/profound-benefits-for-metals-in-store-once-us-infrastructure-plan-passes-2021-04-15
When US President Biden announced a $2-trillion Bill on March 31, becoming known as his infrastructure plan, it made commodity research company Fastmarkets, for one, excited about the opportunities it may hold for metals.
The Bill has been dubbed the American Jobs Plan, despite a political debate that ensued for a few days about what “infrastructure investment” should include beyond bridges & roads.
Central to this plan is its focus on the environment & the technologies of the future, while it has the transition to a lower carbon economy at its heart.
Fastmarkets pricing director Alex Harrison explains in a statement that the White House has been explicit about its intention to out-compete China, about its electric grid being vulnerable, its roads crumbling & how the US has fallen behind on research & development.
“When passed, the plan will be a big deal for the commodities markets, its producers, consumers, traders & end-users, with strong effects on steel through copper to other materials such as cobalt & lithium, which are integral to the moves towards cleaner power & lower carbon emissions.
“Take steel first. According to estimates from the American Iron & Steel Institute, every $1-billion of investment in infrastructure creates 50 000 t of steel demand.
“US hot-rolled coil prices indexed daily by Fastmarkets are at all-time highs & US rebar prices are at almost ten-year highs on tight supply, long lead times for delivery & resurgent demand,” Harrison explains.
He continues that the positive implications for steel demand from the successful passage of an infrastructure Bill are immense, with increases in steel consumption generated from greater investment in both traditional infrastructure as well as green infrastructure initiatives.
While traditional infrastructure spending will support the consumption of rebar & other long products in particular, development of wind energy infrastructure, for example, will see elevated demand for steel plate in wind turbine structures.
Demand growth is coinciding with a period of domestic steel supply shortage, as US steelmakers opt to focus on value over volumes, prompting the record-high prices in the US market.
Harrison believes the viability of new electric-arc furnace steelmaking capacity expected to come on stream in the US over the next several years is no longer in question, with both current & expected future market conditions demonstrating both the need for new US steelmaking capacity, as well as the likely profitability of such investments.
“While US steel prices are not forecast to remain at all-time highs indefinitely, positive underlying supply and demand fundamentals will prevent prices from collapsing as we have seen in numerous previous market cycles, and instead, we are forecasting annual average steel prices to remain well above long-term historical average

Latest Share Chat

Member Info for Floyd81

Followers

Following

Posts (Last 30 Days)

Posts (All Time)

Last Post

Member Since

Share Chat Post Distribution (Last 30 Days)

Activity Log (Last 30 Days)

Latest Share Chat

Member Info for Floyd81

Followers

Following

Posts (Last 30 Days)

Posts (All Time)

Last Post

Member Since

Share Chat Post Distribution (Last 30 Days)

Activity Log (Last 30 Days)

Please enter at least 2 characters

No results found

Search results

Recently viewed

Trending