Live from NPM Development & Finance Forum!

Tuesday was a beautiful, sunny, spring day in New York City. A perfect day for solar energy production and catching rays! Instead of sunning in Central Park, I joined 250 renewable energy professionals at the US Development & Finance Forum run by NPM Events. New Project Media (NPM) is better known for their project development research solutions, but they put on a world class intimate event with great content.

This was my second NPM Events conference and I was, once again, impressed with their level of depth on the panel discussions. I thought the most interesting conversation was Data Centers: Powering the Next Generation of Renewable Load Demand, moderated by Todd Glass at Wilson Sonsimi. Todd summed it up in stating there’s been a lot of uncertainty with this presidential administration, but the one thing that is certain is the demand for AI data centers.

I’ve been fascinated by the forthcoming energy demand (and job creation!) coming from the next generation of AI computing; I wrote about it in enerG Magazine and spoke about it on PowerUp Live. It was helpful to get the perspective of the data center experts, and not just from optimistic solar project developers trying to sell offtake. I got to hear Judith Judson from Vantage Data Centers and Colton Brown from Aligned Data Centers talk about time to power for their end user customers.

Last year, the US installed 12.3GW of storage across all segments, a 33% increase over 2023. While there was a pragmatic tone to the energy storage panel discussion, many headwinds were mentioned–Chinese import tariffs (80% of batteries are coming from China), permitting challenges due to the Moss Landing fire, and the IRA tax incentives being in limbo.

Jason Abiecunas of FlexGen, still bullish, is busy crafting battery energy storage solutions for data center load. A big driver of energy storage the last few years has been the tax credits but also increases in power density of batteries and the cost of installation. You can see Jason’s slide below which aligns with what data center operators want to hear.

While we gathered above Madison Avenue, American Clean Power (ACP) was on Capital Hill drafting a press release representing the energy storage industry's commitment to an American manufactured grid-scaled energy storage industry to the tune of $100B across 25 production facilities! Is this the answer to Chinese import tariffs? Can the US compete in price with Chinese batteries? There are a lot more questions than answers, and this idea also seems to conflict with the recent reversals of Kore Power and Freyr Battery, so we’ll see what actually transpires from this announcement.

In 2023, the US energy storage industry employed 90,000 workers. ACP is touting that a new US energy storage supply chain will help create 350,000 new jobs and supply 100% of US projects by 2030. This is a bold statement given the current state of battery manufacturing, but EnergeiaWorks is listening, and is here to help.

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