Inventory: The largest projects, financings and acquisitions in the global energy storage sector in 2022

Crimson Energy Storage will be operational in 2022 with a capacity of 1,400MWh. Image: Recurrent Energy

It’s been another milestone year for the energy storage industry, as evidenced by the following news reports, which are the largest projects of their kind in 2022 (so far) and the largest ever for the energy storage industry.

Largest lithium-ion battery energy storage project: Crimson Energy Storage 1400MWh (California, USA )

Unsurprisingly, the largest lithium-ion battery energy storage system (BESS) to come online this year is located in California, a major market for energy storage.

Developer Axium Infrastructure and Recurrent Energy, a subsidiary of Canadian Solar, began operating the four-hour Crimson energy storage system in Riverside County in October.

The electricity from the 350MW/1,400MWh project will be sourced from Southern California Edison (SCE) and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) under a 14/15 year offtake agreement in a 60:40 ratio.

At the time the project was commissioned, California had about 3,000 MW of grid-scale BESS online, according to the most recent data available at the time, compared with about 4,700 MW today. Almost all of the projects that came online in the past year have been 4-hour systems, in order to comply with CAISO’s resource adequacy framework, which ensures utilities have enough capacity to meet demand.

Technically, the largest system to come online this year was Vistra Energy’s 400MW/1,600MWh system at Moss Landing, which was re-energized in July after being offline for several months due to a battery overheating incident. The system was originally scheduled to be online before 2022.

The largest proposed lithium-ion BESS project: 4-4.5GWh co-located BESS (Philippines)

In June, an infrastructure group owned by billionaire Enrique K Razon proposed a solar-plus-storage project in the Philippines with 4,000-4,500MWh of battery storage capacity.

Razon’s Prime Infrastructure Holdings (Prime Infra) will oversee the project, which will combine BESS with 2,500-3,500MW of solar PV.

Largest non-lithium/non-PHES project commissioned: 400MWh vanadium redox flow battery (Liaoning Province, China)

July also saw the announcement of another of the world’s largest energy storage projects, which does not use lithium-ion batteries or pumped hydroelectric storage (PHES), the two technologies currently dominating the sector.

In May this year, a 100MW/400MWh vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) came online, the first half of a larger system connected to the Dalian grid.

Image: Rongke Power

This system, located in Liaoning Province in northeast China, is by far the largest VRFB in the world, with a total installed capacity that easily exceeds that of all other VRFBs combined.

Rongke Power, a spin-off from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, provided the battery technology for the project.

Largest Energy Storage Project Financing: Gemini Solar + Storage (Nevada, USA )

The latest reports say Gemini has secured $1.9 billion worth of debt and equity financing for a 690MWac/966MWdc solar PV project with a 380MW/1416MWh BESS project in Clark County, Nevada.

System integrator IHI Terrasun is deploying the BESS, which will use lithium-ion batteries from supplier Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. (CATL) and is expected to come online by the end of 2023.

Gemini was originally developed by Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners and its subsidiary Primergy, which sold a 49% stake in the project to Dutch pension asset manager APG in October.

Largest offtake agreement between supplier and system integrator: 28.5GWh battery supply agreement between FREYR and Powin

The deal was announced in May when Norwegian lithium-ion battery gigafactory group FREYR agreed to sell 28.5GWh of batteries to system integrator Powin Energy between 2024 and 2030.

The batteries will initially be supplied by FREYR's gigafactory in Norway, which is due to be operational in 2023/24, and later by the plant FREYR plans to build in the U.S. The company recently acquired a site in Georgia for the latter and has accelerated its timeline and capacity plans, although it is not yet clear when the U.S. facility will begin production.

Powin plans to integrate FREYR’s batteries into its global BESS solutions.

(Original source: Energy Storage News Global Energy Storage Network, New Energy Network Comprehensive)