Battery Metals

Bad news for Tesla Model S and Model X buyers in Ontario, Canada. The government quietly modified its generous electric car incentive program – removing access to current Tesla buyers.

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Ontario’s government is offering one of the most generous direct electric vehicle incentive – between $6,000 and $14,000 to support the purchase or lease of eligible battery-electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

The incentive resulted in a massive 120% increase in EV sales in the province last year.

Until February 2017, Tesla buyers had no access to this full incentive since cars with MSRPs between $75,000 and $150,000 were capped at a $3,000 incentive.

The government lifted the cap a year ago and lowered the entry price of the Model S and X in Canada in the process.

It helped Tesla achieved record sales in the country last year with 75% increase in sales for the Model X and 14% increase for the Model S.

But now the Ontario government updated its website bringing back the MSRP limit and removing Tesla’s vehicles from the list of eligible cars in the process.

The unexpected change is sure to affect Tesla’s sales in Canada’s biggest province in terms of population.

When it becomes available in Canada, the Model 3 would technically be eligible under the current rules.

30MWh storage system to be combined with solar plant in Hokkaido

Sungrow is to supply a turnkey energy storage system to an unnamed Japanese developer for connection to a solar plant in Hokkaido.

The 30 megawatt-hour project will consist of 23 containers housing inverters, NCM lithium batteries and an energy management system.

A joint venture of Sungrow and Samsung SDI will supply the batteries.

The storage system will allow the solar farm to deliver electricity 24 hours a day, Sungrow said

Lithium Australia last month became the latest in a growing list of mineral extraction firms to branch out into battery manufacturing.

The Perth, Western Australia-based lithium company announced acceptance of an offer for 99.7 percent of the Very Small Particle Company (VSPC), an Australian firm that develops and produces nanoscale metal oxides for lithium-iron-phosphate electric vehicle batteries.

Lithium Australia said VSPC, of Queensland, had spent 14 years and AUD $30 million (USD $23 million) developing “the world’s most advanced cathode production technology for lithium-ion batteries.”

Lithium Australia will “expedite re-commissioning” of a VSPC pilot plant for cathode powder production and battery production and testing, “with a view to providing a range of cathode materials for assessment by major battery manufacturers,” according to a press release.

“The addition of VSPC to Lithium Australia’s technology base not only provides it with exposure to the most profitable process step in the battery production cycle — the manufacture of cathode powders — but also ‘closes the loop’ of the energy-metal cycle,” it added.

Lithium Australia’s managing director, Adrian Griffin, told GTM that “cathode powders are the biggest uplift in the value chain” for lithium.

Lithium Australia, formerly known as Cobre Montana, is aiming to become a vertically integrated lithium producer. It has a process called SiLeach that it says can extract lithium from silicates discarded by traditional extraction processes. It is also developing lithium-ion battery recycling facilities and exploring lithium extraction in Australia, Germany and Mexico. Buying VSPC’s cathode powder production assets is the final piece of the jigsaw for the company.

But Lithium Australia is not the only materials business moving downstream into battery component manufacturing.

Jiangxi Ganfeng Lithium, one of the world’s top five lithium producers, has been building lithium-ion batteries through its Jiangxi Ganfeng Lithium Battery subsidiary since 2007.

Similarly, Canada’s High Power Exploration (HPX) has a majority share in Pu Neng, a Chinese vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) maker. Other names have joined the list in the last six months.

In November, for instance, the South African vanadium and coal mining company Bushveld Minerals announced the deployment of South Africa’s first utility-scale VRFB.

Although the product was supplied by UniEnergy Technologies, its installation at an Eskom test center in Rosherville was a way to test battery technology on behalf of the mining company’s energy-storage focused Bushveld Energy subsidiary.

In December, meanwhile, Canadian lithium producer MGX Minerals snapped up another flow battery maker, ZincNyx Energy Solutions, which is hoping to launch a zinc-based product within a year.

And last month Magnis Resources, of Australia, announced it was upping its stake in a U.S. battery development consortium called Imperium3 New York, which acquired Alevo’s North Carolina factory machinery in auction as part of plans for a 1-gigawatt-hour-a-year facility.

The rationale for this spate of downstream ventures is not entirely clear. Mineral companies already look set to benefit massively from the soaring battery production needed to satisfy the electric vehicle and stationary energy storage markets.

Producing their own batteries could put these companies in direct competition with their customers. And succeeding in the battery business is not exactly easy. Against this, however, moving up the value chain could help unlock more profitable revenue streams and at the same time help mining companies hedge against volatility in materials markets.

Many of the manufacturing ventures are from companies that have yet to establish a major presence in the battery industry value chain. This means they may have less to lose from competing with established battery names.

Few companies are daring to go head-to-head with the Asian lithium-ion giants, preferring instead to focus on single components, such as cathodes in the case of Lithium Australia, or lesser known products, such as VRFBs at HPX and MGX Minerals.

Whatever the strategy, “a lot of lithium companies are looking at ways they may be able to branch downstream and do a bit more value adding,” said Andrew Miller, a senior analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

“If you can own the mineral resource and own some downstream technology, that’s obviously a big benefit.”

The hybrid concept made its debut this week.

Turkey has reached a cumulative registered unlicensed PV capacity of 3.94 GW (AC) as of the end of February 2018, according to new statistics published by the country’s state-owned grid operator, TEIAŞ, which appeared on the twitter account of the company’s general manager, Abdullah Atalay.

Overall, Turkey’s installed power generation capacity has topped 86.1 GW at the end of February. Natural gas and hydropower are the largest energy sources, with 27 GW and 27.4 GW respectively, followed by coal power, which has a generation capacity of around 19.2 GW. Wind power currently has an installed power of 6.5 GW, while geothermal and biomass power facilities have a capacity of 1 GW and 647 MW, respectively.

Official line

In a statement to pv magazine, Atalay said that all of the values provided in the statistics “refer to unlicensed operational power plants”. According to him, 522 MW of new PV systems were connected to the grid in Turkey in January and February alone, a growth trend that, if confirmed over the rest of the year, is likely to lead to stronger growth in 2018.

That the Turkish PV market may have reached or even surpassed 4 GW of registered unlicensed PV, was also confirmed by Kutay Kaleli, president of solar association, Günder, which represents the Turkish Republic in the programs of IEA PVPS (International Energy Agency Photovoltaic Power Systems).

On his Twitter account, Kaleli said, “The latest information we received at the Günder board meeting is that we have passed the 4,000 MW limit last weekend and we now have 4,061 MW of solar.”

In 2017, according to numbers published by TEIAŞ in late January, new PV additions totaled 2.5 GW. Most of this capacity, namely 1.2 GW, was registered in December alone.

Discrepancy

The figures provided by TEIAŞ at the end of January, however, have been questioned by a second Turkish solar association, Solarbaba, which claimed at the time that newly installed PV capacity for 2017 was not 2.5 GW but rather 1.7 GW.

According to the non-profit organization, TEIAŞ included PV projects that were near completion and not yet connected to the grid, on the 2017 spreadsheet. Upon pv magazine’s request to provide more details on the matter, however, the association’s president said he was not willing to further comment.

The European solar association, SolarPower Europe, which also recently reported 1.7 GW of newly installed PV power for Turkey in 2017, told pv magazine that new figures on the Turkish market will likely be provided before the association’s summit, which is scheduled to take place in Brussels next week.

U.K.-based market research company, IHS Markit has said it will also review its statistics on the Turkish market, following the publication of the new figures. “The difference between the official connection numbers of TEIAS and IHS Markit’s market estimation can partly be explained by the fact that TEIAS registers the grid connections, while market numbers of IHS Markit are based on system installations,” IHS Markit analyst, Susanne von Aichberger said in a statement to pv magazine.

“This means that IHS Markit has counted much of the installed capacity that was connected in 2017 in its 2016 number. While IHS Markit had 1.4 GW (DC) of cumulatively installed PV capacity in Turkey at the end of 2016, this cumulative connection number of TEIAS is 0.9 GW (DC) at the end of 2016.”

She continued, “The balance of 0.5 GW (DC) should be added to the number for 2017, if connections are being looked at. However, installation activity seems to have accelerated in the second half of 2017, ahead of the implementation of grid fees on 1 January 2018. IHS Markit will thus increase the installation number for 2017 to over 2 GW (DC).”

Eren Engur, CEO of Turkey-based solar consultancy company, Icarus Enerji-A, which has been operating in the local market for over 16 years, believes the country’s current operational PV is lower than that announced by TEIAŞ.

“Around 3.1 GW have been connected to grid so far,“ he said to pv magazine. This capacity, according to him, does not include the category of projects under the Temporary Acceptance (Geçici kabul) mode, which is the preliminary stage before getting grid connection approval. “Not 100% of the construction is finalized at this stage,” he said.

Rally

Outwith the question of whether installed capacity really has reached 3.94 GW, or whether some of this is still under development, a planned elimination of a grid-fee reduction, which came into effect on January 1, 2018, would have served to support an end-of-year rally.

The fee, which had been increased from 0.0076 TRL/kWh ($0.0026) in 2016 to 0.0256 TRL /kWh in 2017, has been further increased to 0.1025 TRL/kWh (around $0.027) starting from this year.

Despite this planned incentive reduction, developers appear not to have been discouraged, as the Turkish government is still granting a FIT of around $0.13/kWh to unlicensed PV projects.

“The impact of the fee on the FIT, however, may bring to a lower growth this year,” Bilal Edi, a professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic of the Faculty of Engineering of Turkey’s Hasan Kalyoncu University, and a consultant for solar project developers in Turkey, told pv magazine.

“It is still hard to say how much solar the country will deploy this year, but taking into account the current figures provided by TEIAŞ, it seems like the drop in PV project prices may also play a major role in boosting the market,” he added.

It must be stressed, however, that very few markets currently provide such a high FIT for MW-sized PV projects, and that, although in theory only PV projects up to 1 MW are eligible for this tariff, many solar parks consisting of 1 MW sub-units were built, and are being developed, in Turkey.

The history of PV in recent years has shown stronger end-of-year rallies than the one occurring in Turkey for large-scale solar. As a consequence of this tumultuous development, public entities have serious trouble securing grid-connection and managing the huge volumes of associated data.