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https://www.energy-storage.news/news/challenges-still-plague-energy-storage-in-emerging-markets-cifs-event

The energy storage industry still faces many challenges, particularly in emerging markets, but the opportunity is huge too, industry members argued at a recent Climate Investment Funds event in London.

At the beginning of the day, Amy Grace from Bloomberg NEF said that over the next two decades $662 billion of investment will be needed in stationary energy storage for example.

But how to secure financing, and fitting the best form of storage to a markets specific needs provide hurdles for the industry.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/safrica-eskom-moodys/update-1-moodys-lowers-s-african-eskoms-rating-deeper-into-junk-idUKL8N27L6I8

JOHANNESBURG, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Moody’s pushed state power firm Eskom’s credit rating deeper into sub-investment territory on Tuesday, saying a government plan to reorganise the cash-strapped South African firm would be hard to implement without explicit support from the cabinet.

Moody’s cut Eskom’s long-term corporate family rating, or unguaranteed debt, to B2 from B3, six notches below the investment grade level, with a negative outlook.

The rating firm also cut the rating on the power company’s zero coupon eurobonds to B2 from B3.

The agency on Friday kept South Africa’s sovereign debt at Baa3, the lowest rung of investment grade, but revised the outlook on that rating to “negative”.

The government announced a sweeping overhaul of the power sector in a paper published last Tuesday, confirming the break up of Eskom over the next three years and opening the industry up to more competition.

The paper set out a vision for a restructured electricity supply industry, where Eskom could relinquish its near-monopoly and compete with independent power producers (IPPs) to generate electricity at least cost.

Moody’s said the plan could bring modest financial benefits for the company over the medium term but failed to address pressing, immediate issues.

“Important questions, including how the rights of existing creditors will be respected as Eskom is reorganised, remain unanswered,” the ratings agency said.

“This makes any turnaround of the company’s operations very difficult without a clear steer and support from the government.”

Local analysts have said the plan does not appear to have full buy-in from President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet and the ruling African National Congress.

Moody’s said weak corporate governance and political sensitivity around Eskom’s tariffs and its high employment levels would compound the constraints on the turnaround plan.

In response, Eskom noted Moody’s decision “with disappointment” but said it was working to resolve its challenges.

“Liquidity levels remain low. We have, however, seen a considerable amount of support for Eskom paper from the local markets and coupled with the financial support announced by the government, we are cautiously confident that our debt obligations are not at risk.”

The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which supported Ramaphosa’s campaign for the ruling party presidency in 2017, has threatened to cause more power cuts over the government’s decision to forge ahead with the plan to break up Eskom.

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/324422-south-africa-to-get-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-battery-storage-systems.html

Eskom is installing a flagship 360MW battery energy storage system at 90 sites in the Western Cape, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal.

This 360MW/1440MWh flagship battery energy storage systems (BESS) project was first announced by Eskom in October 2018.

Eskom said at the time that the distributed battery storage infrastructure would be installed in containers at its sub-stations, including sub-stations located at renewable energy plants.

The battery storage system will allow increased energy storage capacity from future wind and solar-powered projects.

Eskom said the battery storage system will assist in its plan to increase solar and wind power in its energy mix from the current 7.2% (installed) to 25.6% in 2030 – a 350% increase.

The battery system will also be used to assist peak shaving, frequency support, and ancillary services in the distribution network.

How the project is funded
The battery energy storage project is funded by the African Development Bank and the World Bank, and is essentially a replacement for a planned concentrated solar power plant.

As part of its funding application for Medupi and Kusile, Eskom committed to building clean energy power plants.

One of these commitments included a 100MW concentrated solar power (CSP) plant which did not materialise.

Prince Moyo, Eskom’s general manager for power delivery engineering, explained that it was decided that a battery storage system with some solar power makes more sense.

“The size of the battery system would be similar to the energy the CSP would have generated, which is 1440MWh per day,” he said.

Eskom said it does not know how much the project will cost, but that it is expected to be in line with the “published cost/MW or cost/MWh”.

Project benefits
Eskom told MyBroadband that there is not an update on the project, but said the first phase is expected to be completed at the end of 2020, and the second phase at the end of 2021.

It added that the battery storage installations across the country will assist the company in various ways, which include:

PV smoothing, where solar energy is stored during the day for despatch at peak times – typically at night.
Wind energy firming, where battery storage is used to complement variable wind generation.
Energy arbitrage, where energy is stored during low generation cost and tariff periods for despatch at high generation cost and tariff periods.
Frequency and Voltage support, where battery capacity can be used in power mode as a generator when needed.
Peak clipping, where the discharge of energy during peak times can be used to save costs.
Moyo said the battery energy storage system has clear business value for Eskom at a local and network level.

Since the BRI was enshrined in the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) constitution in 2017, the nation’s biggest banks are obliged to offer preferential loans towards its projects. There are also tens of billions of dollars set aside in dedicated cash pools like the Silk Road Fund. The Import-Export Bank of China, for one, loaned enough money to fund 85% of the Cauchari solar farm in Argentina at just 3% annual interest over 15 years, according to Reuters. (That compares favorably to the more typical 4.5%-7% interest bank loans for such projects.) The proviso is that three quarters of materials used on the project are sourced from Chinese firms such as Huawei.

Apart from the obvious headache of having allies and partners in hock to Beijing, national security concerns loom large. The Trump Administration has accused Huawei—the world’s biggest supplier of telecoms equipment as well as solar inverters, which turn the energy produced by solar panels into a grid-ready electrical current—of installing illicit “backdoors” in equipment that could be used to spy on or cripple users’ networks, and has threatened to cut off intelligence sharing with nations that embed it. (Huawei vehemently denies this, and hard evidence is scant.)

Suspicions regarding Chinese firms persist, however, with the E.U. in March even branding Beijing a “systemic rival.” Last year, Germany blocked a deal in which China’s state-owned State Grid, the world’s largest utility company, would have purchased a $1.2 billion stake in Germany’s national high-voltage energy network, on apparent “national security” grounds.

However, since State Grid’s cutting-edge high-voltage transmission lines, which are far more efficient than existing technology for long-distance transmission, are seen as vital for linking remote and underutilized renewable energy plants into the national grid, many nations believe the benefits outweigh any risk.

Few have embraced Chinese renewable technology and investment as warmly as Brazil, where State Grid is the largest power generation and distribution company. Another Chinese behemoth, China Three Gorges (CTG), the world’s largest hydropower provider with operations across 47 countries, controlling 14 out of a total of 48 hydro-plants in Brazil, amounting to 8% of the nation’s total hydropower capacity, as well as 11 wind farms. CTG Brazil CEO Li Yinsheng tells TIME that Brazil is attractive for investment because it has the resources, demand and necessary regulatory framework. “And by combining [Chinese and Brazilian] equities we are in a unique position to be more competitive in the market,” he says.

It’s not all blue skies ahead for China. The country still generates 70% of its power from coal, and will continue to consume about half the world’s coal until 2023, according to the International Energy Agency. It also approved 141 million tons of new annual coal mining capacity in the first half of this year; in the whole of 2018, Beijing approved

The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords under President Donald Trump provided China an opening to seize. America’s abandonment of global leadership on the issue was thrown into sharper focus by Trump’s empty chair during a climate change discussion at August’s G7 meeting in France. “The U.S. administration is not particularly interested in renewables at home let alone overseas,” says Simon Nicholas, an analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Now, China has firmly established its leading position in renewable energy output, as well as in related technologies such as electric vehicles, transmission lines and battery storage, and Beijing is managing to weaponize green technology in a way that strategic rivals like the U.S. may struggle to counter.

For many Chinese investors, a combination of rising domestic competition and rolling back of subsidies at home has widened their gaze. In solar firm Sungrow’s six-story, steel-and-glass headquarters in China’s eastern province of Anhui, CEO Cao Renxian explains how “struggles with the U.S. trade war” forced him to relocate production to India in order to dodge the 25% tariffs the Trump Administration slapped on imported made-in-China panels last year.

After overcoming the significant cultural, legal and linguistic barriers to secure a foothold abroad, Cao now has designs on growing his foreign portfolio. Sungrow currently has stakes in two solar farms of a combined 90 MW in Vietnam, and is constructing a new 60 MW solar farm to soak up the cerulean skies 100 miles north of Melbourne, Australia. Cao explains his global efforts as something of a rapturous calling “to boost environmental protection for our nation and the whole world,” while adding that his firm now sees annual revenues of 10 billion RMB ($1.4 billion).

The geostrategic corollaries are vast. These green investments chime with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a metaphorical repaving of the ancient Silk Road though a $1 trillion transcontinental trade-and-infrastructure network largely bankrolled by Beijing. It has the potential to be the world’s greatest building project since the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe in the aftermath of World War II. The BRI will extend China’s presence across the globe while reorienting nations away from the U.S.-and-Eurocentricism of the last half century.

https://time.com/5714267/china-green-energy/

Perched on the ochre scrub of Argentina’s sunbaked Puna Jujeña plateau, the $400 million Cauchari power station is the world’s highest-altitude solar farm at 13,000 ft (about 4,000 meters) above sea level. In Kenya’s volcano-strewn Rift Valley, a newly green-lit, super-efficient electrical substation will soon funnel clean power from the nearby Olkaria Geothermal Plant about 50 miles (80 km) to downtown Nairobi. Some 14 miles off blustery northeastern Scotland, Moray East is set to become the world’s largest offshore wind farm, helping to heat and light up to a million homes.

Three distinct renewable energy projects utilizing cutting edge technology in far-flung corners of the globe sharing one uniting characteristic: Chinese finance. Over the past five years, Chinese bankrolling of green energy projects overseas has soared as the world’s number two economy and number one polluter rebrands itself as an environmental champion.

Not only is China today the world’s largest producer of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles, but it has also been the top investor in clean energy for nine out of the last ten years, according to the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. Since 2014, Chinese equity investment has supported a total of 12,622 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar projects in South and Southeast Asia alone, according to new research by Greenpeace. That’s the equivalent of 21 standard coal plants or enough to power New York City. The shift from simply exporting to bankrolling green tech—driven by both a drying up of domestic subsidies in China and new incentives to invest abroad—is a boon since “it means China really cares about the future profitability of each project,” says Greenpeace campaigner Liu Junyan.

Beijing’s refocus from fossil fuels to renewable energy is a net positive for a myriad of reasons: protecting scarce resources, cutting carbon emissions that spur global warming, and boosting energy security by reducing reliance on costly fuel imports. While only a hatful of nations boast significant oil and gas reserves, nearly all have the potential to develop clean energy themselves, whether via solar, wind, tidal, geothermal or hydroelectric plants, mitigating geopolitical tensions by making the world less dependent on restive regions like the Middle East.

Chinese export of renewable energy technology around the globe is set to boost Beijing’s clout as the influence of major oil exporters like Russia and Saudi Arabia wanes. China has by far the most renewable energy patents with the U.S., Japan and Europe lagging behind. “No country has put itself in a better position to become the world’s renewable energy superpower than China,” says a recent report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation, chaired by former Iceland President Olafur Grimsson.

https://www.arcweb.com/blog/electrical-energy-your-smart-city-0

Battery/energy podcast

So basically that hydrogen fuel cell is what's called a flowing battery. It has a flowing electrolyte that flows in the electrolytes. In this case it would be hydrogen and oxygen. Now in the, there's a number of other flow technologies that exist in stationary batteries. I recently toured a vanadium redox flow battery from a, from a local startup here in Massachusetts. And, and there's a number of other companies that are going in there and basically they have, a large, they have a stack. All right, well let's go. So called the stack and electrolytic stack where liquid flows of two different vanadium. valence is one, I think vanadium plus two in one tank and vanadium plus three and the other. And it takes energy to move from one to the other. and as they flow, as electric power is brought into that grid, they basically convert all of the lithium ion.

Rick Rys: excuse me, the vanadium ion, components into a, a different valence charge. And that has an energy storage in a water solution of vanadium. and the, they can reverse that at any time. All right. And, suddenly consume that. And so the, the, the, the power generation depends on the size of the stack, the energy generation, however, it depends on the size of the tanks to store the liquids. And so this has a huge scaling factor compared to lithium batteries, which are for twice the storage capacity of energy, you pay twice the price cause you need twice as many batteries cause the whole battery is, is stored in the battery. But in a, in a flow battery for twice the energy content, you just need bigger tax tanks and you don't need, the difference in the stack.

Rick Rys: But vanadium redox flow battery that I looked at had very fast response. They actually said they could compete in the frequency response market. All right. Mostly because of the way the inverters were arranged that they could immediately change between generating and, and consuming power. So at a very fast rate that these are still a kind of a guess, you call it an emerging technology. There is a definite competition. There's a, there's almost a half a dozen, vanadium redox flow battery companies with different patents. And I, I T you know, intellectual property that are kind of competing to get a foothold. They, their disadvantage of courses that they don't have, the advantages that lithium has in terms of manufacturing production level and the economies of scale of producing these things at scale. So the first lithium batteries, you could expect to be a little bit expensive, but there certainly is the potential that that, F, flow battery, even though it's way too heavy to put in a vehicle, for example, would, would be a, a, a viable solution for electric grids. You know, beyond four hours of storage.

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