Battery Metals

The 13,500 solar modules sandwiched by hillsides of sagebrush, pinyon and juniper near Glenwood Springs capture the eyes. It’s the four shipping containers of lithium-ion batteries, capable of five megawatts of storage, that will briefly set a new high mark for Colorado.

Battery storage is coming on in Colorado. This project narrowly eclipses the previous record in Colorado set four years ago. Late next spring, the 275 megawatts of battery capacity planned by Xcel Energy at Pueblo and in Adams County will dwarf this record of 5 megawatts. More yet will be coming after that.

We need storage to complement the intermittency of the renewables but also because this makes economic sense. This transition to an energy system with fewer emissions has so far slowed or stopped increase costs in prices of electricity. If only we could be so lucky with organic food.

Storage capacity within Colorado will rise significantly in the next five years. Imagine driving on Interstate 70 across the Great Plains into Denver. In the city’s western suburbs, the highway rises slightly. In this analogy with battery storage, we’re still in the suburbs. Lying immediately ahead is the sharp rise to Floyd Hill with plenty of uphill beyond.

Mike Kruger, the chief executive of Colorado Solar and Storage Association, a trade organization, rejects this analogy. Instead of uphill struggle, he describes downhill glide. Lithium-ion storage will expand, he explained, because of rapidly declining costs that parallel those of solar panels a decade before.

In his view, we’re about to descend from Loveland Pass.

“Imagine the tiniest thing you can think of,” Kruger said at a Colorado Renewable Energy Society webinar. “That’s storage in Colorado today. Now think of the biggest thing you can think of. That will be energy storage in the future.”

All of Colorado’s larger utilities plan significant storage but in somewhat different ways. Platte River Power Authority recently received 31 bids for various non-carbon generation and storage proposals in and near the four communities it serves in northern Colorado. For example, Estes Park, whose frightened residents had to flee in 2020 as two megafires approached, might need both storage and solar panels if power deliveries get interrupted.

Wildfire threat also figures into the solar and storage at the college campus near Glenwood Springs. Should outside power be cut off, students could shelter in place.

Colorado Springs Utilities, the state’s fourth largest utility, is soliciting bids for batteries with 400 megawatt-hours of storage to become operational in 2024. Utilities spokesman Steve Berry predicts growing importance of battery storage as long as the technology becomes increasingly cost-effective, efficient and reliable.

“Battery storage will help us better manage the intermittent characteristics of renewable energy, but it will also provide greater grid resiliency, help insulate customers from market volatility, and help us modernize our grid for emerging technologies,” he says.

We are also beginning — just beginning — to see batteries in homes and businesses. In a program called Power+, Holy Cross has assisted in placing batteries at 68 homes and businesses. Supply chain issues have 122 still on the waiting list. It is doing this partly to learn how to draw on these batteries to meet peak demands, such as when the snowmaking guns at Aspen and Vail power up as temperatures dive during November evenings.

Now come state and federal programs that Kruger describes as a “really amazing confluence of incentives” via tax rebates. A new Colorado law will award an income tax credit equal to 10% of the purchase price for storage systems purchased in 2023 and 2024. The systems are also exempt from sales tax. The federal Inflation Reduction Act provides an even bigger tax incentive of 30%.

Xcel customers will be eligible for additional incentives next year: $500 per kilowatt of storage up to 50% of the cost of the battery and $800 per kilowatt for income-qualified (up to 75% of the cost of the battery)

Supplies of batteries remain tight, but manufacturing capacity has been ramping up and prices should fall. Globally, capacity grew by a third last year to reach 600 gigawatt-hours in manufacturing capacity. Wood Mackenzie, a consultant, reports 3,000 gigawatt-hours being planned or under construction.

In “The Big Fix,” Aspen-reared Hal Harvey and co-author Justin Gillis describe how scaling up of industrial process has caused prices of everything from Model T’s to computer chips to tumble. They call it “the learning curve.” The most recent examples were wind and then solar.

Cheaper lithium-ion batteries alone will not alone allow Holy Cross and other utilities to realize their goals of 100% emissions-free electricity by 2030. We also need longer-term storage. Options include molten salt, hydrogen and pumped storage-hydro, the latter a technology use in Colorado since the 1950s that remains the state’s largest “battery.” Nuclear and geothermal are other options. All will take time to deploy. Likely a decade.

For now, it’s time to charge the batteries.

Canada’s government will introduce tax incentives for clean energy technologies, including solar PV, battery storage, and hydrogen.

Announced yesterday by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland as part of Canada’s Fall Economic Statement 2022, the move has already been welcomed by renewable energy, energy storage and manufacturing trade groups.

The government proposes to introduce a refundable tax credit equivalent to 30% of the cost of capital investment into electricity generation systems, stationary electricity storage systems, low-carbon heat equipment and industrial zero-emissions vehicles and related charging or refueling equipment. Projects that do not meet requirements on local labour conditions will get a 10% reduction in the minimum tax credit rate

A higher rate of investment tax credit, 40%, will be available for hydrogen projects that meet all eligibility requirements on carbon intensity, with incentives reducing as related carbon emissions go up. As with generation and storage, meeting labour conditions will be worth 10% of the credit.

“With major investment tax credits for clean technology and clean hydrogen, we will make it more attractive for businesses to invest in Canada to produce the energy that will power a net-zero global economy,” Freeland said.

The move comes close on the heels of the US’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which introduced an investment tax credit for standalone energy storage projects, extended the existing solar PV ITC and wind production tax credits for 10 years and introduced incentives for manufacturing and hiring domestically.

Canada’s government has sought to close a competitive gap that the US’ IRA legislation’s US$369 billion of climate spending and investment looks set to open.

As with the IRA in the US, the details or the implementation of new tax credit incentives in Canada are still to be determined.

However, the Canadian government did say that electric generation systems eligible include solar PV, small modular nuclear reactors, concentrating solar power (CSP), wind, hydroelectric, tidal and wave power.

All forms of electricity storage systems that do not use fossil fuels are eligible, with the government highlighting that this includes but is not limited to: batteries, flywheels, supercapacitors, magnetic energy storage, compressed air energy storage, gravity energy storage, thermal energy storage and pumped hydro.

Also in response to the IRA, Canada wants to boost its own competitiveness and attractiveness to investment with the creation of a CA$15 billion (US$11.05 billion) ‘Canada Growth Fund’. The country’s past economic stability has been built largely on natural resources and emissions-heavy industries, but the fund is aimed at facilitating private investments into an increasingly low-carbon economy.

The government hopes that the CGF can be set up in the first half of next year, with its strategic aims including reducing emissions and helping Canada meet climate targets, and accelerating investment into technologies like low-carbon hydrogen and carbon capture and storage.

Tax credits welcomed by industry

National renewable energy association CanREA welcomed the Fall Economic Statement and said the inclusion of the clean energy and hydrogen tax credits reflected recommendations it had made in its advocacy work.

“This is a positive sign that Canada’s government is taking bold action to decarbonise with investment certainty for solar energy, wind energy and energy storage,” CanREA’s VP of policy and government affairs Brandy Giannetta said.

The generation and storage ITC is expected to cost CA$6.7 billion over five years and will be available as of the first day of the 2023 budget and will then be in place until 2035, with a phase-out period from 2032.

Earlier this week, Energy-Storage.news published a Guest Blog from Justin Rangooni, executive director of trade group Energy Storage Canada.

Rangooni wrote that energy storage has a vital role to play in the future electricity system in all provinces of the country, but that policy and regulation haven’t yet caught up. With a recent report commissioned by the trade association finding that Canada needs between 8GW and 12GW of storage by 2035 to be on the right path to net zero by 2050, the need for supportive policy is urgent, he said.

The country has less than a gigawatt of installed energy storage capacity today and “policy makers and government agencies need to coordinate a revamp of the entire regulatory and legislative framework to include and accommodate energy storage,” Rangooni wrote in the blog.

Yesterday, Energy Storage Canada reacted enthusiastically to the Fall Economic Statement with the following tweet from its official account:

“We’re thrilled to see the govt’s commitment in their fall economic statement to keeping pace with the US Inflation Reduction Act with a 30% refundable ITC for all forms of #EnergyStorage. Such competitive measures are critical to ensuring Canada’s success on its path to #NetZero.”

In early October, the provincial government of Ontario began a push to procure between 1,500MW to 2,500MW of energy storage to help meet projected shortfalls in electricity at peak times, which despite happening just a few weeks ago, was perhaps the most significant energy storage policy development in Canada until yesterday’s announcement.

Commercial EV startup Canoo has announced is setting up a battery module manufacturing facility at MidAmerica Industrial Park in Pryor, Oklahoma.

Located in proximity to Canoo’s future MegaMicro Factory vehicle assembly plant and the company’s battery cell supplier Panasonic, the new site will produce modules in a total annual capacity of 3.2 gigawatt-hours (GWh) once fully ramped.

“We are accelerating our hiring plans in Pryor with the establishment of our EV Battery Module Manufacturing Facility, which will produce our proprietary battery modules, energy management system and thermal control technology for our MPP platform.”

Tony Aquila, Chairman and CEO at Canoo

The executive added that this is the first building block for Canoo’s production ramp strategy, “with more news coming very soon.” Aquila also noted that Canoo will be the first EV company to produce its battery modules with hydroelectricity from the Grand River Dam Authority.

The company will begin renovations on its 100,000-square-foot (9,290-square-meter) building located on a 10-acre (4-hectare) campus in Q4, 2022, with the delivery of secured manufacturing equipment to follow in Q1, 2023. The Battery Module Manufacturing Facility will produce proprietary battery modules on high-capacity assembly lines with state-of-the-art automated machinery.

Canoo has refined and validated its battery module manufacturing over recent months and is awaiting delivery of machinery at the new facility.

The battery facility will be located next to Canoo’s MegaMicro Factory, a 400-acre (161-hectare) industrial complex located near some of the nation’s most highly traveled thoroughfares. When fully operational, the MegaMicro Factory will employ more than 2,000 people and will include a full commercialization facility with a paint, body shop and general assembly plant.

In recent months, Canoo announced several significant fleet orders for its Lifestyle Delivery Vehicle (LDV). Kingbee ordered 9,300 units, Zeeba 5,450 and Walmart 4,500—with an option to extend the order to 10,000.

Production of the LDV is scheduled to begin in 2023, but Canoo announced in August it would outsource initial production to an unspecified contractor. The company previously said it would assemble its own vehicles at a small facility in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Canada’s government ordered three Chinese firms on Wednesday to divest their investments in Canadian critical minerals companies on grounds of national security.

The three firms ordered to divest their investments are Sinomine (Hong Kong) Rare Metals Resources Co Ltd, Chengze Lithium International Ltd, also based in Hong Kong, and Zangge Mining Investment (Chengdu) Co Ltd.

The government ordered the divestiture after a “rigorous scrutiny” of foreign firms by Canada’s national security and intelligence community, Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said in a statement.

Sinomine was asked sell its investment in Power Metals Corp, Chengze Lithium asked to divest itself of its investment in Lithium Chile Inc and Zangge Mining is required to exit from Ultra Lithium Inc, according to the statement.

“While Canada continues to welcome foreign direct investment, we will act decisively when investments threaten our national security and our critical minerals supply chains, both at home and abroad,” Champagne said.

Last week, Ottawa said it must build a resilient critical minerals supply chain with like-minded partners, as it outlined rules meant to protect the country’s critical minerals sectors from foreign state-owned companies.

“The federal government is determined to work with Canadian businesses to attract foreign direct investments from partners that share our interests and values,” Champagne said.

Canada has large deposits of critical minerals like nickel and cobalt, which are essential for cleaner energy and other technologies. Demand for the minerals is projected to expand significantly in the coming decades.

Earlier this year, Canada, the United States, Britain and a few other countries established a new partnership aimed at securing the supply of critical minerals as global demand for them rises.

The market for rechargeable batteries is growing rapidly, but the necessary raw materials are limited. Sodium-ion batteries, for example, could offer an alternative. A joint research group from HZB and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin has investigated new combinations of electrolyte solutions and electrode materials for this purpose.

“In contrast to lithium-ion batteries, which are based on the storage of lithium ions in the positive and negative electrodes of the battery, we are working on the one hand with sodium ions, as they also occur in cheap table salt. On the other hand, we store the sodium ions together with their solvate shell, i.e. solvent molecules from the electrolyte solution that separate the two electrodes. This makes it possible to realize completely new storage reactions,” explains Prof. Philipp Adelhelm, who heads the research group “operando battery analysis,” which was jointly founded by Humboldt University and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin in 2020.

The storage of ions when accompanied by their solvation shell in a crystal lattice is referred to as co-intercalation. Up to this point, this concept was limited to the negative electrode of the sodium-ion battery. Now the researchers around Adelhelm have succeeded in extending the concept to the positive electrode of the battery.

Dr. Guillermo A. Ferrero, first author of the publication, explains: “With titanium disulfide and graphite, we have for the first time combined two materials that absorb and release the same solvent during charging and discharging of the battery.”

The scientists could observe changes in the material during charging and discharging via operando measurements performed in the X-Ray Core Lab at HZB on the LIMAX 160. This helped them to assign the co-intercalation mechanism inside the battery. They could then use this new knowledge to realize a battery with two electrodes that both rely on reversible co-intercalation of solvent molecules.

“We are still in the early stages of understanding the implications of the co-intercalation batteries. But there are a few possible advantages we can envision,” Dr. Katherine A. Mazzio, HZB, explains. “The process of co-intercalation could improve upon efficiency by enabling better low temperature performance. It could also be utilized to improve upon alternative cell concepts such as using multi-valent ions instead of Li+ or Na+ storage that are particularly sensitive to the solvation shell.”

The research was published in Advanced Energy Materials.

Honda has installed its first EV battery exchange station in Tokyo, Japan through a partnership with battery sharing service Gachaco. The debut of the Honda Power Pack Exchanger e: in Tokyo marks the beginning of what Honda hopes will be a large network of battery swapping stations in Japan, where riders can quickly and easily exchange their EV motorcycle’s depleted batteries.

The concept of a battery swapping station was hardly pioneered by Honda, however, as the Verge reports. Taiwanese scooter company Gogoro has been using similar technology for years, even partnering up with Hero in India to make battery exchange stations viable. The company plans to make battery swapping commonplace in one of the largest two-wheeler markets in the world.

Now that Honda is putting its resources towards the same goal, it seems like battery exchanging could become the dominant method for charging, or rather recharging, electric motorcycles. Well, at least in countries to the East.

The Honda Power Pack Exchanger e: can store and charge up to 12 batteries, but can be expanded to fit more in cities or locations where a dozen batteries wouldn’t be enough. The idea is to provide a flow of battery packs, as riders pull up and swap spent cells for fresh ones. As soon as riders deposit a battery pack into the Exchanger e:, the station automatically begins recharging the battery. Doing so will take about five hours in total, which is a long time to wait, but riders would never know it.

Honda says it’s paying close attention to the ease of use and efficiency of the battery exchange process. Electric motorcycle riders will use the system via NFC, through IC or “Smart” cards — kind of like using a metro card in any major city, or tapping a credit card to pay at a store.

The Honda Exchanger e: will authenticate the rider and use whatever settings they saved to tell them which batteries (and how many) to reach for using LED lights to make it clear. Ideally, these settings will have been saved when riders first registered to use the Power Pack Exchanger e:, but Honda says the whole process can be completed at any of the stations. That’s important for first-time users, although it might be annoying for battery swapping pros who are eager to swap batteries and go.

The Exchanger e: will even operate during power outages by drawing power away from full batteries to charge fully-depleted ones. It can also be used to power nearby homes or shops, since it features bidirectional charging. It even has a cooling system to stop heat-induced degradation of battery packs.

But I think it’s an even bigger deal that Honda’s partners for its nascent battery network include other major motorcycle makers from Japan: Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki. They’ve agreed to use Honda’s Mobile Power Pack e: batteries to power upcoming electric models. Meaning that Honda’s MPP e: packs, and now this Power Pack Exchanger e:, will underpin the transition to EV motorcycles in Japan. Ah, standardization is good.

Now, standardization is going to make owning an electric motorcycle abroad easy by eliminating long charging times. We can only hope the U.S. will get the Power Pack Exchanger e: stations as the company charges headlong into its EV bike strategy.