British start-up
leads world in
energy storage
T
he curse of intermittency
for wind and solar power
may be conquered sooner
than almost anybody
thought. A beautifully
simple technology from a
British start-up has slashed costs to
levels that drastically alter the calculus
of long-term energy storage.
Highview Power is pioneering the
use of “cryogenic” liquid air to store
electricity for long enough periods to
cover the lulls in renewable energy. It
appears close to doing so at levelised
costs that will undercut competition
from fossil fuel plants once scale is
reached. Highview will almost
certainly be the biggest company of its
kind in the world by the early 2020s.
If it can deliver the full promise – big
caveat – the cost breakthrough
overcomes a key barrier for a global
economy driven primarily by
zero-carbon energy. One oft-repeated
argument against Britain’s North Sea
wind expansion falls away.
There are rival technologies in this
field. Energy storage is a playground
for hedge funds and venture capital, as
fashionable as fintech. Siemens
Gamesa is working on hot rock thermal
storage. A team at Harvard is betting
on organic flow batteries using
death-defying “zombie quinones” from
material such as rhubarb.
The US Energy Department’s
ARPA-E programme is – despite
Donald Trump’s rhetoric – still
supporting a string of energy storage
projects in league with top US labs and
universities. The Japanese and Chinese
are pursuing the great prize as well.
Energy storage is not a fundamentally
difficult challenge for science, and will
be solved one way or another.
The race comes down to cost,
simplicity and who can get there first
with utility-sized plants. Highview’s
chief executive, Javier Cavada, says
nobody today can match his liquid air
formula at gigawatt scale. “We are
ready, we are scalable, we are muchnecessary, but it is trickier. Mr Cavada
said the “round trip” efficiency of the
Highview process so far is 60pc (ie two
fifths is lost). This can be raised to 70pc
with the capture of wasted heat from
industrial plants. It is safe and clean.
“We have no combustion particles, and
no risk of explosions,” he said.
Liquefaction extracts CO2 from the
air as a by-product. The gas turns into
solid dry ice. “We capture all the
carbon and we can sell it,” he said.
Several companies around the world
are devising ways to turn CO2 into
bricks or carbon-rich concrete.
Highview began in 2005 with the
help of Leeds University at a time when
few energy analysts – beyond a handful
of tech-visionaries – had any idea how
quickly renewable costs would reach
fossil parity. The venture was backed
by £12m of state grants from the
Government and Innovate UK.
It is chiefly funded by “angel
investors”, City tycoons doing their bit
to save the environment. Normally
they are resigned to losing money. On
this occasion they may get a bumper
reward for virtue.
Expansion has reached take-off. The
company is in talks to build 20 large
plants over the next three years. “We
will be the biggest energy-storage
company on the planet,” he said.
It is something to cheer us up as the
Amazon blazes.These are remarkable figures. Lazard
estimates the levelised costs for gas
peaker plants at $152-$206, new
pumped-hydro at $152-$198, or a
lithium-ion equivalent at $285-$581.
Lithium batteries are superb for a few
hours but the economics are not viable
for utility power over long periods.
“Four hours is nothing for us, five is
even better, six is fantastic, and at 10
we’re making music,” said Mr Cavada.
Liquid air is well-suited to overnight
back-up for solar farms in sunbelt
zones. Highview teamed up with
Spain’s TSK in March to develop
gigawatt plants in Spain, South Africa
and the Middle East.
In Britain it makes most sense for
wind. The company hopes to launch a
250MWh project in North Yorkshire
soon (awaiting clearance) as the first of
a string of plants in the UK and Europe.
The technology is not magical.
Liquefaction was around in the 19th
century. Use for energy storage was
first explored in academic papers in the
Seventies. This came to little because it
was not needed. It is urgently needed
now. Renewables are reaching critical
scale at a breathtaking speed.
Solving intermittency has leapt up
the priority ladder for the UK grid.
Renewables topped 50pc of the
country’s power this summer at peak
moments of combined wind and sun.
The blackout on Aug 9 was linked to asystems glitch at Orsted’s 1.2GW
Hornsea 1 wind farm off Grimsby.
Gas peaker plants offer quick
back-up but they are costly to maintain
and depend on LNG imports. Highview
says liquid air can do the same job
better. “We are faster than a gas plant”
said Ed Scrase, the project manager.
The Government is targeting
offshore wind capacity of 30GW by- This may rise to 40GW given the
plummeting costs achieved by the
giant new turbines, smart blades and
economies of scale. The last round of
bids in 2017 came in at £57.50 per
MWh. The next set later this month
may be closer to £50 and below market
spot prices. Subsidies turn into
revenue for the Exchequer.
The Committee on Climate Change
wants to go for broke with 75GW of
offshore wind to meet the UK’s
net-zero 2050 target. Such scale means
a wash of surplus power in the middle
of the night or at times of low demand.
This implies “free” or ultra-cheap
electricity for energy storage, since
otherwise it would have to be curtailed
by shutting down turbines – “off-peak
waste electricity” in the trade jargon.
The UK plans makes cryogenic liquid
air almost unbeatable.
The excess power can of course be
used as well to make hydrogen green
gas through electrolysis for trains,
trucks and home heating. This may be
Highview is using
‘cryogenic’ liquid air
to stockpile wind and
solar power, Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard finds
The world’s first
grid-scale liquid air
energy storage
plant in Bury, near
Manchestercheaper and we are going to stay much
cheaper,” he says.
The first viable Cryobattery is
already up and running. A Highview
plant is producing electricity for the
local grid at a 15 megawatt/hour
(MWh) plant in Bury, storing power
during times of low demand and
releasing it back when most needed. It
is an arbitrage play on the variable
costs of power.
The site shared with Viridor is
tucked behind trees and is so discreet
that my taxi had trouble finding it. The
source of power is methane, from a
local landfill in this case. In the future
it will be wind and solar.
Highview cools air to minus 196C
relying on the standard process used
for the chemical industry for liquefied
natural gas. As the air turns into liquid
the volume is compressed 700-fold.
This concentrate is then stored in
insulated steel towers at low pressure.
The liquid re-expands with a blast of
force when heated and drives a
turbine. Bingo: clean, dispatchable
power on demand.
The beauty is that it can be scaled-up
to provide unlimited storage at
diminishing extra cost. “We’re like a
hydro plant in a box. We can cover
times when the wind doesn’t blow, One
to two weeks is totally doable, even a
month,” said Mr Cavada.
“The storage tanks are the cheapest
component. It is the turbine that costs
money. We can double the MWh for
30pc extra investment. As we get
bigger the ratios change exponentially,”
he said. The efficiency loss or “boil off ”
rate from the storage vats is just 0.1pc
each day. Much of this loss is
recaptured by the closed system.
Last month the company teamed up
with the US energy group Tenaska
Power to build four vastly larger
“gigawatt-scale” plants in Texas over
the next two years, chiefly intended to
back up Texan wind power. This is a
revealing venture. Highview is
competing toe-to-toe with gas
“peaker” plants in a region of the world
where pipeline gas is almost given
away thanks to shale. If the sums work
in Texas, they certainly work in
Europe. Mr Cavada said the levelised
costs for a one gigawatt (GW) plant
comes in “way below” $100 (£82) per
MWh. This is already cheaper than
any other back-up option on the
market, fossil or not. “In 10 years
from now, I can see that being $50.”Business
Solarplicity runs out of gas with a
growing trail of broken promises
I
t has been a summer like no
other for David Elbourne, the
Solarplicity boss. When the
green energy executive jetted off
to Portugal for a golfing getaway,
he left behind a trail of missed
payments, furious customers and a
business on the brink of collapse.
In the space of several extraordinary
months, Elbourne’s Hertfordshire-
based company has gone from
supplying renewable energy to
thousands of households, to being
banned from taking on new customers
by the industry regulator, Ofgem. A
fortnight ago the company’s energy
supply division crashed out of the
market just days before losing its
licence to operate.
US private equity giant Apollo has
branded its 28pc stake in some of
Solarplicity’s assets as “worthless.” The
company had also received funding
from ABN AMRO’s investment arm.
The latest events mark a fall from
grace for the renewable energy
company – which until recently
supplied energy to around 7,500
household customers and just under
500 businesses. Ofgem says that debt
owed to Smart DCC, the company
which runs the UK’s smart meter
infrastructure, and National Grid Gas
had spiralled to nearly £500,000.
Who or what is to blame for the
demise of Solarplicity, which has
become the latest in a line of small
energy suppliers going bust? Was it
the chaotic culture of a company
whose long list of disgruntled
customers earned it 3,324 formal
complaints this year, including 583 in
July alone?
Or was Solarplicity’s failure the
result of Ofgem intervention, as
Elbourne recently suggested.
That would be ironic. Solarplicity is
one of many companies that has
benefited in the past decade, as
regulators have swept aside the
barriers to entry in the energy market
to boost competition. Once dominated
by the big six providers – E. ON, British
Gas, Scottish Power, npower, EDF and
SSE – the number of players has grown
to as many as 70.
More recently, however, the string
of supplier collapses have prompted
questions about the state of the
industry for small providers. “It hasThe renewable energy
company is the latest small
supplier to go bust, reports
Vinjeru MkandawireSolarplicity racked up 3,324 official complaints this year before Ofgem intervenedPAbecome a very competitive and
price-driven space,” says Oliver
Archer, analyst at Cornwall Insight.
“Customers are increasingly shopping
around for cheaper deals. As a result,
there is pressure to price cheaply.
“A number of small providers have
grown fast but they are not collecting
anywhere near enough direct debits to
cover their costs,” Archer says.
Recent weeks have seen mass exits
from Solarplicity’s offices. Last month
staff were dismissed without the final
month’s pay and given scant detail on
future redundancy packages, several
former employees say. Further rounds
of redundancies have followed.
It follows a backlog of missed or late
payments by Solarplicity to feed-in
tariff generators, or FITs, who are paid
fixed tariffs for electricity generated
and exported to the National Grid.
“We were getting a lot of grief from
customers and generators but
whenever we asked the directors for
help or direction, our requests were
ignored and calls were left
unanswered,” says one ex-employee.
Ofgem issued the utility firm with a
provisional order in May, ordering it to
pay up the money it owed. At the time,
it also upheld an earlier provisional
order on Solarplicity for customer
service failures.
Meanwhile, customer complaints
against the business including issues
with billing, switching to other
providers and people being signed up
without their consent, continued to
roll in. There were also long-standing
concerns – raised by the industry
regulator – about the company’s
treatment of vulnerable customers.Matthew Vickers, the chief
executive of Ombudsman Services,
highlighted Solarplicity’s failure to
refund customers as another major
concern. “Its collapse doesn’t come as
a huge surprise, but it will be another
source of stress for the company’s
customers – many of whom have
already experienced problems,”
according to a statement.
Solarplicity’s grip on its internal
finances had also come under
pressure. A “disorganised”
environment within the company
meant that its engineers were
routinely left without meters and
other equipment required for their
day-to-day work. This went on “for
months,” a person familiar with the
company says.
“The directors oversaw a
complicated group structure and
mastered a sequence of setting up lots
of small businesses before running
them into the ground,” says another
person who worked for Solarplicity.
Companies House records list
Elbourne as a director of 70
companies, nearly a third of which
have either been dissolved, liquidated
or are in administration.
Solarplicity blames Ofgem’s
provisional order for its demise. “We
informed Ofgem in February this year
of the ultimate effect that this would
have on the business... the events now
taking place are exactly what was
predicted,” according to a Solarplicity
spokesman. The company says that it
had secured investment for the
business which would have helped it
to “flourish” but that Ofgem’s decision
cut the power.‘We are
ready, we are
scalable, weare much
cheaper andwe are going
to stay much
cheaper’15 MWh
Output of first
Cryobattery-196C
Temperature of
liquid air in tanks0.1pc
Daily loss of efficiency
of each tank20
Cryobattery sites
planned over three years30 GW
UK offshore wind
capacity target by 2030The Daily Telegraph Tuesday 27 August 2019 *** 29
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