The need to reduce climate change by transitioning to electric mobility and renewable energy sources is driving up the global demand for batteries. Despite the tendency of analysts to underestimate the energy generated from renewable sources, the forecasts for battery demand often fail to accurately predict the market size and are frequently revised upwards.
About the Episode: This episode of the PSI Podcast is, for the first time, featuring two guests with a focus on battery manufacturing and battery end-use. David Van Hek is joined by a Pangea SI expert/CEO of an IPP platform company dedicated to utility-scale and rooftop solar power projects in Southeast Asia and Australia. We were also joined by an additional guest who is a co-founder and CEO of a company capitalizing on 7 years of research to address key issues faced by flow batteries.
About the guests: We were joined by two upstanding members of the market and have each taken part in the foundation of battery-related platforms/companies. They have each been able to offer an insight into their experience within battery manufacturing, the challenging aspects of the market, the future of the BESS market and more.
Guest 1: So you need data points to consider bankability. Solar was not bankable 12 years ago. But as more of them came in, it became one of the most bankable technologies that we have today. Same thing with battery. It’s likely more challenging because battery performance degrades and from your own personal experience, you will see that the no two batteries perform the same.
You might have the same iPhone, but somebody’s iPhone might die at 8 hours while yours will die at 10 hours. So that data collection emphasises there are newer insurance companies that are working with battery companies to ensure the performance so you can lock your performance such that you are sure that I get 80% of the only capacity is considered as a part of the deal and that there are certain mechanisms that need to be put in place and you can mitigate that, that bankability issues. But this will happen with more deployments, more data. The bankability will improve further.
From a financial perspective, there are insurances that are being in place to ensure performance, and you have to lock in or degrade the battery further to ensure that that data points are met, which is a challenge because battery cost is expensive.
Guest 2: Since we’re talking about bankability. I guess the key is really for a few early adopting banks to jump in and everything else follows. So long as the technology was not bankable then there was issues around the power purchase agreements in particular regions. Those were not considered bankable as well. Now everything is bankable.
Now everything became a mainstream technology and that will become the case with batteries as well. The more data base, as you said, the more data base of operating assets we have with more historical data, the more, even conservative, lending institutions will be open to join the party.
“From a financial perspective, there are insurances that are being in place to ensure performance, and you have to lock in or degrade the battery further to ensure that that data points are met, which is a challenge because battery cost is expensive.”
Expert Bio:
These experts hold deep knowledge and understanding of the batteries and energy storage systems markets.
Key Achievements:
✔ Helped their company to become the 13th biggest manufacturer in 2014 with close to 850 MW of annual sales.
✔ Served some of the biggest distributors and EPCs in the world, such as BayWa, Donauer, Phoenix Solar, etc.
✔ Overachieved Sales volume targets in 6 consecutive quarters.
✔ Through an extended network of partners in each country, achieved over 120 MW of projects in the pipeline on bilateral PPAs with governments, utilities and MNCs in different development stages.
Relevant Educational Background:
– PhD in Electrical and Electronics Engineering