How startup Britishvolt got £200m funding for a Midlands test facility?

Published
October 21st, 2022

UK battery startup to lease site in Hams Hall to test manufacturing methods for planned ‘gigafactory’

The UK battery startup Britishvolt has said it will invest more than £200m in a new facility in the West Midlands to test manufacturing methods that will be used at the factory it has planned for in Northumberland.

The company will lease a site in Hams Hall, Warwickshire, from the warehouse developer Prologis, with equipment installation expected by the end of autumn 2023.

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is planning a battery assembly centre at Hams Hall, while the German carmaker BMW produces petrol engines there as well.

Britishvolt has pursued partnerships and investments as it pursues its ambition to build electric car batteries from scratch. In January it secured £100m in government funding, alongside backing from the investment firm Abrdn and the fund manager Tritax which is eventually expected to reach £1.7bn. Britishvolt has also recently secured investment from the Monaco-based shipping company Scorpio Group, which suggests it will branch beyond the automotive industry for customers. However, it has signed memorandums of understanding with the UK carmakers Aston Martin and Lagonda.

Britishvolt chose to build its “gigafactory” – referring to battery plants with an annual capacity of more than 10 gigawatt-hours – in Cambois near Blyth in Northumberland. That site was selected in part because of access to renewable energy from offshore wind farms.

Paul Franklin, Britishvolt’s property director, said he wanted the company to “lead the UK’s journey into re-industrialisation with the first full-scale battery gigaplant”, and added that the Hams Hall facility would “help the UK build on its home-grown battery intellectual property and level up the country ready for the energy transition”.

The only other planned battery plant of a similar scale is an investment by China’s Envision at a site in Sunderland that was formerly owned by Nissan to produce batteries for its electric models. Another effort to build a “gigafactory” at Coventry airport has yet to find a major investor.

The project hopes to attract investment from a major automotive company, with West Midlands-based JLR seen as the best fit. 

References: 

1. Britishvolt to invest more than £200m in Midlands test facility | Manufacturing sector | The Guardian

Why are industrial facilities not installing battery storage as it ‘can lower electricity costs for everyone’? How can PPA’s help these businesses?

Published
October 6th, 2022

Industrial-scale battery storage systems can help lower electricity costs greatly for the facilities they are installed at, but could also help manage the cost of power for the general public.

The Electrical Energy Storage Europe conference in Munich, Germany, discussed commercial and industrial (C&I) battery energy storage systems (BESS) could be a vital source of flexibility for grids across Europe.

On the 10^th May the top was raised if C&I storage, described as systems between 30kW to 1,000+kW and installed at different types of commercial and industrial facilities, could be a large benefit to Europe’s energy storage market.

Battery systems can lower the amount of electricity the companies need to take from the grid. If peak shaving, which is reducing grid usage at peak times, is used correctly can also reduce electricity costs dramatically.

In Germany, for example, as demand for electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure and renewable energy rises, an increasing portion of the costs of managing the network to accommodate them is levied onto C&I electricity users in the form of demand charges.

Bayernwerk Natur, a company in Bayern Munich installed a 2MW/1MWh lithium-ion BESS at a dairy farm coupled with two 800kW combined heat and power (CHP) generators. The management at the dairy farm is able to save as much as €600,000 per year on its electricity costs, from the use of the grid before installing the new equipment.

The panel discussion’s moderator, Dr Holger Hesse from the University of Applied Sciences Kempten at Technical University Munich mentioned that there has however only been a “little growth” in the C&I market despite “a lot of potential”.

Alongside this ability to reduce onsite electricity costs, batteries at industrial plants could be a great resource for the entire network, but current market design rules don’t value or incentivise this potential, various speakers on the panel today said.

‘We don’t have tariffs that value flexibility

For example, this year on 19^th March when there was an abundance of renewable energy, far more than the load on the grid to consume. However on, 20 March, plants kept running and the system went into negative pricing.

C&I storage could bring flexibility to that situation, Lars Stephan, policy and markets director for energy storage system integrator Fluence said, “but in Germany, we don’t have tariffs that value flexibility”. In California’s CAISO grid service area, time-of-use electricity pricing has been introduced, which directly links the price of power with the demand for it from the general public.

Another example Stephan gave included settlement prices in day-ahead auctions at 7 am and 9 am went above €2,700 per MWh, and 28GWh was transacted. This came about because interconnectors with other countries were down, and so was much of the country’s nuclear fleet.

Stephan claimed that if just 500MW of two-hour duration (1,000MWh) battery storage was installed on the French grid and could be used, the clearing price would have been reduced greatly for the French system, and ultimately for French consumers.

Energy storage systems have vast applications, however, only a narrow band of those applications is incentivised for C&I customers that want to invest in them, these applications generally being peak shaving and the enabling of self-consumption of onsite generated renewable energy.

Energy storage hardware and software development company Fenecon’s CEO,  Franz-Joseph Fellmeier, said that as well as recognising and capitalising on the multi-use potential of energy storage, it’s important to derisk investment in the technology and develop an open source ecosystem for hardware and software.

How the energy crisis and PPA’s create incentivisation?

A PPA is a fully funded solar PV model with no, or low, upfront costs which offers reduced energy costs and the opportunity for long-term savings. It allows a developer to design, finance and install a solar PV system on a client’s property. In return, the developer sells the generated energy back to the customer, at a lower and better rate. This is funded by investors who see huge potential in the future of Green Energy. C&I businesses have used this to their advantage as with energy prices ever rising this is a solid plan to reduce energy bills now and eventually be free of grid usage and depending on the energy usage be fully renewable.

References: 

1. Industrial battery storage could lower Europe’s electricity costs (energy-storage.news)
2. https://www.lightsolar.co.uk/funding/ 

Deep Green Solar Has Arrived

Recently there has been a larger focus on the importance of biodiversity on solar farms, due to the intersecting forces of sustainable finance and the UK Environment Act. These positive influences will hopefully change the viewpoint of solar farms for the industry and the public, as they evolve into biodiversity hotspots that lead the charge on the recovery of nature. Everoze Partner Ellie van der Heijden discusses how boosting biodiversity can be an opportunity for solar developers and investors to increase their positive impact.

The solar industry has historically focused on low-carbon energy production and playing a key role in preventing the climate crisis. But we are also facing a biodiversity crisis. Britain, for example has lost more of its biodiversity than almost anywhere else in western Europe and is among the most nature-depleted countries in the world. That is shocking.

The climate and biodiversity crises are strongly linked, and their solutions are interrelated. The recent emergence of two intersecting forces – sustainable finance (the carrot) and tougher biodiversity legislation (the stick) – mean this could be a turning point for nature, and in particular, the way the industry and the public view solar farms.

Carrot and stick

Investment in “sustainable funds” has intensified over the past two years, as these types of funds have been shown to perform well financially. Solar farms that have a positive biodiversity impact above and beyond the basic mitigations required by the environmental impact assessment score well on these funds’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores. Investors and lenders are asking more and more questions about the sustainability and environmental performance of solar assets, and this trend will continue. Improving biodiversity on solar farms will give developers extra kudos with potential investors. Developers that go the extra mile in terms of biodiversity will be rewarded with easier access to finance, in addition to easier access to permits from the local authorities.

In addition to the influential rise of sustainable finance, new legislation in the UK and EU is supercharging the focus on biodiversity. Governments seem to be finally waking up to the urgent need to do more to address the catastrophic biodiversity loss we are experiencing. This has been catalysed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the growing realisation that biodiversity isn’t just nice to have. It’s essential to our health, economy and human existence on this planet.

The UK and EU already have legislation in place that protects habitats and species, but this has proven not enough to stop the rapid decline in biodiversity. As a result, the UK Environment Act will bring into law the requirement for all new developments to deliver an increase of at least 10% in biodiversity from 2023. Similarly, one of the key actions of the EU Biodiversity strategy is to prioritise renewable energy solutions that can be favourable to biodiversity, such as solar farms.

Biodiversity hotspots

This is a huge opportunity for the solar industry to demonstrate innovative approaches that truly integrate habitat creation and nature with energy generation. Solar farms by their very nature, if you’ll excuse the pun, present the ideal circumstances to allow biodiversity to recover and produce clean energy that helps to regenerate nature.

When an area is turned over to solar energy generation, the land is no longer intensively managed, either by plowing or the application of chemicals. This in itself has a positive impact on soil health, which is vital for rebuilding healthy ecosystems and removing carbon from the atmosphere. But additional active steps which improve habitat and promote biodiversity encourage nature to come flooding back in, with positive knock-on effects for surrounding areas. The good news is that further intentional actions to increase biodiversity don’t have to be elaborate or expensive – it just requires some thought from the early stages of development.

It is best to work with an experienced ecologist to establish the baseline conditions and then identify classes of species. For example: Insects, bees, butterflies, birds and reptiles could be encouraged to thrive through specific habitat enhancements. The recently published British

Standard for designing and implementing biodiversity net gain sets out a solid process and tools for developers and solar farm designers to follow when undertaking this exercise.

Clever biodiversity improvements don’t always have to involve additional areas of land. It can be as simple as using the awkward corners of a site to locate a pond or habitat pile. Raising fencing up a few centimetres so that small mammals can pass underneath has no extra cost. In fact, some biodiversity measures, such as cutting hedgerows and mowing less frequently, may even save money during the operational phase.

Revenue stacks

I can foresee a future where solar farms have evolved from just energy generation facilities into biodiversity hotspots that are leading the recovery of nature in our landscape. The biodiversity gains they produce will not only benefit nature and the climate, but may become sought after by development projects in other industries that are unable to deliver the required biodiversity net gain. Solar farms may be able to “trade” any additional biodiversity credits they have and reap further benefits.

In summary, the solar industry is uniquely positioned to help mitigate both the climate and biodiversity crises. We are at the dawn of a new “greener” era whereby regenerating nature will be of equal importance to generating energy. Solar farms five to 10 years from now will look and feel very different to the solar farms of today, and hopefully that will be because they support the levels of biodiversity: birds, bees, butterflies, insects and mammals, not seen or heard since our grandparents were young. This is the hope we all need in the face of crisis and makes it an exciting time to be part of the solar industry.

Information sourced from – https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/06/11/the-weekend-read-the-

dawn-of-deep-green-solar/

For the First Time, perovskite-silicon solar cells break the 30% efficiency barrier

They just set two certified world records.

A collaborative effort led by EPFL’s Photovoltaics and Thin Film Electronics Laboratory in partnership with the famous innovation center, CSEM, has smashed through the efficiency record for tandem silicon-perovskite solar cells.

This is significant as the researchers have surpassed the milestone of 30 percent for the first time using low-cost materials and established two certified world records,

pushing the technology beyond the limits of silicon.

“We have passed a psychological barrier,” explains Christophe Ballif, Head of the EPFL Photovoltaics Laboratory and CSEM’s Sustainable Energy Center, in a press release. “We have validated experimentally the high-efficiency potential of perovskite-on-silicon tandems. The 30 percent efficiency mark had already been achieved with other types of materials, namely III-V semiconductors. However, these materials and the processes used to make them are too expensive to sustain the energy transition – these devices are a thousand times more expensive than silicon solar cells.”

“Our results are the first to show that the 30 percent barrier can be overcome using low- cost materials and processes, which should open new perspectives for the future of PV,” he continued.

Breaking the limits and going beyond

Solar cells are bound to the limits of whatever material they were made from. Today, silicon is the most widely used material for solar cells; however, despite its success, it does have its drawbacks as it has a theoretical efficiency limit of roughly 29 percent. This technology’s current efficiencies stand at a little less than 27 percent, giving a very small margin for potential efficiency advancements.

To overcome this barrier, scientists have added more complementary solar cells to silicon, resulting in “tandem” solar cells. The press release explains that the sun’s higher-energy visible light is absorbed in the top cell, while the lower-energy infrared light is absorbed in the silicon cell at the tandem’s rear. Halide perovskites reportedly have been discovered as an appropriate silicon partner as they can convert visible light to electrical power more efficiently than silicon alone. Moreover, they don’t increase fabrication costs significantly. In the latest development, the researchers at EPFL and CSEM have succeeded in developing and improving the efficiency of tandem silicon-perovskite solar cells with high efficiencies using two different designs.

Tandem silicon-perovskite solar cells

The first consists of perovskite layers deposited from a liquid solution onto a flat silicon surface, which achieved a 30.93 percent efficiency for a 1 cm2 test cell (0.2 in2).

The second one used a hybrid vapor and liquid solution approach to deposit perovskite onto a textured silicon surface, achieving a 31.25 percent efficiency for a 1 cm2 solar cell. According to the experts, more research is needed to determine how well the novel designs can be scaled up to greater surface areas. This could allow for scaling up to larger surface areas and ensure that these new cells can maintain a stable power output on our rooftops and elsewhere over a standard lifetime.

“Tandem perovskite-on-silicon technologies have been said to have the potential to exceed the 30% efficiency benchmark, but this is the first time this long-predicted potential has been demonstrated, which should hopefully pave the way for even cheaper sustainable electricity in the future,” Christian Wolff of EPFL said.

Information sourced from – https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/in-a-world-first-

perovskite-silicon-solar-cells-break-the-30-efficiency-barrier

Britishvolt to invest more than £200m in Midlands test facility

UK battery startup to lease site in Hams Hall in order to test manufacturing methods for planned ‘gigafactory’

The UK battery startup Britishvolt plans on investing more than £200m in a new facility in the West Midlands to test manufacturing methods, that will be used at the upcoming factory it has planned to be built in Northumberland.

The company plans on leasing a site in Hams Hall, Warwickshire, from the warehouse developer Prologis, with equipment installation expected by the end of autumn 2023.

The move will give Britishvolt access to the significant number of engineers working in the West Midlands, which has long been at the centre of the British automotive industry. Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is planning a battery assembly centre at Hams Hall, while the German carmaker BMW produces petrol engines there as well.

Britishvolt has pursued a flurry of partnerships and investments as it pursues its ambition to build electric car batteries from scratch. In January it secured £100m in government funding, alongside backing from the investment firm Abrdn and the fund manager Tritax that is eventually expected to reach £1.7bn. Britishvolt has also recently secured investment from the Monaco-based shipping company Scorpio Group, in an indication that it will look beyond the automotive industry for customers. However, it has signed memorandums of understanding with the UK carmakers Aston Martin and Lagonda.

Britishvolt chose to build its “gigafactory” – industry jargon generally used to refer to battery plants with annual capacity of more than 10 gigawatt hours – in Cambois near Blyth in Northumberland. That site was selected in part because of access to renewable energy from offshore windfarms.

Paul Franklin, Britishvolt’s property director, said he wanted the company to “lead the UK’s journey into re-industrialisation with the first full-scale battery gigaplant”,

and added that the Hams Hall facility would “help the UK build on its home-grown battery intellectual property and level up the country ready for the energy transition”.

The only other planned battery plant of a similar scale is an investment by China’s Envision at a site in Sunderland that was formerly owned by Nissan to produce batteries for its electric models. Another effort to build a “gigafactory” at Coventry airport has yet to find a major investor.

The project hopes to attract investment from a major automotive company, with West Midlands-based JLR seen as the best fit. However, JLR did not deny a report by Bloomberg last week that it is considering sourcing batteries overseas, from Sweden’s Northvolt or China’s SVOLT Energy Technology, for a range of electric cars that it may assemble in Slovakia.

Information sourced from – https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/31/

britishvolt-to-invest-more-than-pounds-200m-midlands-testing-site-uk-battery- startup-hams-hall-gigafactory

Batteries at Europe’s industrial facilities ‘can lower electricity costs for everyone’

Industrial-scale battery storage systems can effectively lower electricity costs when installed, additionally they can also help manage the cost of power for consumers when used correctly.

Speakers at the Electrical Energy Storage Europe (ees Europe) conference in Munich, Germany, have stated that commercial and industrial (C&I) battery energy storage systems (BESS) could be a vital source of flexibility for grids across the continent.

A panel discussion held on the 10th May asked if C&I storage, defined loosely as systems between 30kW to 1,000+kW and installed at different types of commercial and industrial facilities, could be “the next big thing” in Europe’s energy storage market.

Battery systems can significantly lower the amount of electricity a facility needs to draw from the grid. If used strategically, reducing grid consumption at times when demand is at its peak – an application called peak shaving – can also reduce electricity costs dramatically.

For example, In Germany, as demand for electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure and renewable energy rises, an increasing portion of costs of managing the network to accommodate them is levied onto C&I electricity users in the form of demand charges.

One company headquartered in Southern Germany, Bayernwerk Natur, installed a 2MW/ 1MWh lithium-ion BESS at a dairy farm coupled with two 800kW combined heat and power (CHP) generators. Bayernwerk Natur general manager Matthias Jacob said the dairy farm is able to save as much as €600,000 (US$63,240) per year on its electricity costs, such was the intensive nature of its use of power from the grid before installing the new equipment.

The panel discussion’s moderator, Dr Holger Hesse from the University of Applied Sciences Kempten at Technical University Munich (TUM), noted that there has however only been a “little growth” in the C&I market despite “a lot of potential”.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news in March, a team of experts found that during 2021, just 27MW/57MWh of C&I storage was installed in Germany compared to more than a gigawatt-hour of residential energy storage.

Alongside this ability to reduce onsite electricity costs, batteries at industrial plants could be a powerful resource for the entire network, but current market design rules don’t value or incentivise this potential, various speakers on the panel today said:

‘We don’t have tariffs that value flexibility’

Lars Stephan, policy and markets director for energy storage system integrator Fluence highlighted a day in March this year when there was an abundance of renewable energy, far more than load on the grid to consume. Yet on that day, 20 March, thermal generation plants kept running and the system plunged into negative pricing.

C&I storage could bring flexibility to that situation, he said, “but in Germany we don’t have tariffs that value flexibility”. So for example in California’s CAISO grid service area, time of use electricity pricing has been introduced, which directly correlates the price of power with the demand for it from end users.

Another example Lars Stephan gave was 4 April this year, in France. Settlement prices in day ahead auctions at 7am and 9am went above €2,700 per MWh, and 28GWh was transacted. This came about because interconnectors with other countries were down, and so was much of the country’s nuclear fleet.

Stephan claimed that if just 500MW of two-hour duration (1,000MWh) battery storage was installed on the French grid and could be called upon, the clearing price would have been reduced substantially for the French system, and ultimately for French consumers.

Energy storage systems are noted for their versatility and range of applications they can provide. However, with things being as they currently are, only a narrow band of those applications is incentivised for C&I customers that want to invest in them, these applications generally being peak shaving and the enabling of self-consumption of onsite generated renewable energy.

Energy storage hardware and software development company Fenecon’s CEO, Franz- Joseph Fellmeier, said that as well as recognising and capitalising on the multi-use potential of energy storage, it’s important to derisk investment in the technology and develop an open source ecosystem for hardware and software.

In other words, compatibility across different energy storage systems and adjacent technologies such as EV chargers and heat pumps that BESS can be used to manage and control would help lower costs and increase accessibility. Fellmeier drew the example of the smartphone, where multiple app developers can benefit from a shared operating system platform, be it Android or Apple. Among the ways of derisking investment that can work are rental models for BESS, which lower the capital cost for customers.

Information sourced from – https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-at-europes-

industrial-facilities-can-lower-electricity-costs-for-everyone/