Morning Brief: BMW signs $2.3 billion battery deal with Sweden’s Northvolt, DOE storage challenge

Also in the brief: U.S. could create 860,000 full-time jobs if targeted clean energy investments were included in the next round of federal stimulus investments — and ‘peaker’ gas plants may have peaked after all.

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BMW signed a deal with Northvolt for $2.3 billion of battery cells to power the automaker’s electric cars: Northvolt, a Swedish company started by two former Tesla executives, will manufacture the cells using renewable electricity at a new plant in northern Sweden, BMW said in a statement. Local access to batteries is becoming key for automakers trying to become less dependent on dominant suppliers in Asia. Northvolt will become BMW’s third major supplier for the technology, along with China’s CATL and South Korea’s Samsung. Northvolt raised $1 billion last year from Volkswagen Group, Goldman Sachs and BMW to build the battery-cell factory. Source: Automotive News Europe

DOE releases draft energy storage grand challenge roadmap: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released the Energy Storage Grand Challenge Draft Roadmap and a Request for Information seeking stakeholder input on the Draft Roadmap. Announced in January 2020 by U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, the Energy Storage Grand Challenge is a comprehensive program to accelerate the development, commercialization, and utilization of next-generation energy storage. Over the Fiscal Years 2017-2019, DOE has invested over $1.2 billion into energy storage R&D.  Source: DOE

A new E2 analysis finds that the U.S. could create 860,000 full-time jobs for at least five years and add $66 billion to the nation’s economy every year for five years if targeted clean energy investments were included in the next round of federal stimulus investments. The report modeled the economic benefits of $99.2 billion of federal stimulus invested in existing programs and funding vehicles in three specific areas: renewable energy, energy efficiency and grid modernization. Source: E2

‘Peaker’ gas plants may have peaked after all: A new study by three California utilities is good news for solar-plus-storage developers. California’s three investor-owned utilities have released the results of a study called for by the California PUC  to assess the “effective load carrying capability” of various energy technologies—in other words, how much of a wind or solar plant’s total theoretical capacity can be counted on when the grid needs it most.  The findings are striking and significant for California’s future electricity mix, and really for the future of any grid aiming for, say, 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035. The study determined that wind energy will have a 19% effective load carrying capability in 2022 — a 100-MW wind power plant, in other words, would be capable of supplying 19 megawatts of energy. Source: Bloomberg

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