The market for storing electricity is drawing not only startups building new technology but also new comers that want to build and install new projects. Meet Solar Grid Storage, a two-year-old, angel-funded startup which just completed a project that mixes batteries with solar panels and electric car charging stations in Maryland.
The Philadelphia-based company is one of a growing crop of storage project developers that has materialized in recent years to stake a claim in a young market that’s being shaped by public policies to promote clean energy use and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Solar Grid’s CEO, Tom Leyden, compares his company to SunEdison and PowerLight, the two early players in designing and building solar power generation projects.
Solar Grid develops projects that pair an array of solar panels with energy storage equipment that could not only provide backup power but also sell energy delivery services to local utilities and grid operators. It buys all of the necessary components and hires others to create lithium-ion battery packs using cells from Panasonic or LG, the inverters and the rest of the gear. It then puts the equipment inside a steel container and ships it to a customer. The company’s intellectual property lies in the designs of its inverters and algorithms for managing the charging and discharging of batteries, Leyden said.
gigaom
AES Surpasses Milestone: 100 MW of Grid-Scale Energy Storage
With the recent christening of the 40-megawatt Tait energy storage array, AES Energy Storage has now installed more than 100 megawatts of energy storage in the U.S. It stands as a milestone for the vendor, as well as the grid-scale energy storage market as a whole.
The 40-megawatt project at Dayton Power and Light’s Tait generating station in Moraine, Ohio provides fast-response frequency regulation and grid stabilization services to the PJM Interconnection. The project "helps to meet the needs otherwise provided by power generation from inefficient or retiring power plants," according to a statement from the company.
AES is not in energy storage trials -- it's in the business of extracting value from energy storage, and it operates the biggest fleet of battery-based energy storage resources in North America. As this firm builds and scales, it's worth watching as it develops its project pipeline in this nascent market.
The Tait project is notable as one of the first big storage project to benefit financially from PJM’s new tariff for fast-response regulation designed to comply with FERC Order 755. Enacted in 2011, Order 755 increased the pay for “fast” responding sources like batteries or flywheels that are bidding into frequency regulation service markets.
AES Energy Storage's parent company, AES, had 2012 revenues of $18 billion and $42 billion in total assets. In addition to AES' obvious bankability and strong balance sheet, the power company is a built-in customer that knows how to maximize value in its generation assets with energy storage.
greentechmedia