[Graeme]

Can We Achieve A Smoother and More Secure Grid with Energy Storage?

At RenewableEnergyWorld.com, we’ve had our eye on energy storage for some time. For years we told you that if the industry could solve the energy storage problem, it would unlock gigawatts of renewable energy capacity all over the world. About a year ago, progress started really picking up. At Intersolar in Munich in 2013, more than 200 energy storage companies were present, exhibiting their solutions. As we were setting our 2014 editorial calendar, we realized that the topic had became so hot that we would run at least one story on energy storage in every issue of Renewable Energy World magazine.

Today, it seems that energy storage momentum just can’t be stopped. Our very own Jim Montgomery has published article upon article about energy storage companies from WattJoule to Primus.

Almost every day, I receive another announcement about a new energy storage initiative. Last Friday’s release was about a company in Japan that is about to switch on an innovative commercial-scale storage system on Yume-shima Island in Osaka. According to the company, Sumitomo Corporation, the system will test the smoothing effects of energy storage on the output of the Hikari-no-mori solar farm and will be a world first because the batteries it will be using have been recycled from electric vehicles. The company said that the project was selected as part of the government-sponsored “verification of the battery storage control to promote renewable energy” initiative for fiscal year 2013.

renewableenergyworld

[Graeme]

Advanced Batteries for Utility-Scale Energy Storage Applications Will Surpass $2.5 Billion in Annual Revenue by 2023, Forecasts Navigant Research

Batteries have not traditionally been an integral part of the utility grid, primarily due to concerns about cost, safety, durability, and efficiency. Today, however, technological advances in electrochemistry have enabled a new generation of advanced batteries to start playing an important role in grid management. Click to tweet: According to a new report from Navigant Research, worldwide revenue from advanced batteries for utility-scale energy storage applications will grow from $164 million in 2014 to more than $2.5 billion in 2023.
“Unlike most other networked systems, the electricity grid functions mostly without any stored resources”
“Unlike most other networked systems, the electricity grid functions mostly without any stored resources,” says Sam Jaffe, principal research analyst with Navigant Research. “Innovative electrochemistries – particularly lithium ion and its subchemistries – have solved many of the challenges inherent in battery energy storage, and there are more than a dozen individual applications that could utilize batteries for energy storage.”
The clear market leader in utility-scale applications of batteries is lithium ion, which offers the best mix of performance specifications (including energy density, volumetric density, cycle life, calendar life, safety, and cost) for most energy storage applications. Other battery technologies, however, remain viable, according to the report. Flow batteries have been shown to excel at long-duration energy storage applications, and advanced lead-acid batteries have proven to be excellent performers in power-intensive applications.
The report, “Advanced Batteries for Utility-Scale Energy Storage”, analyzes the global market for advanced batteries for large-scale grid applications. The study examines the business case for various utility-scale energy

mfrtech

Liquefied Air to Store Energy on U.K. Grid

When it comes to storing energy on the grid, giant batteries are the only game in town. Now, a number of companies are building mechanical systems that use air as the storage medium.

U.K.-based Highview Power Storage last week said that it has been awarded an £8 million grant from the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change to build a commercial-scale facility that uses liquified air to store energy. Highview is already running a smaller pilot plant, but the full-scale version will be able to store enough energy to deliver five megawatts of power for three hours. That puts it on a scale that would entice utilities to use the technology, says company CEO Gareth Brett.

"We're treating this (demonstration plant) as a shop window on the technology," he says. "Utility companies are pretty conservative and they want to see this bit of kit working at a scale that they can buy one."

Liquid air energy storage is similar to compressed air energy storage in that air is compressed and released to store and then generate power. With Highview’s technology, though, ambient air is compressed, then cooled and liquified. That liquefied air, which is almost -200 °C, is stored in large tanks.

When power is needed, the liquid air is released and pumped to high pressure. That causes the liquid to evaporate, turning it into a high-pressure gas which is then run through a turbine to generate power. The planned demonstration plant will be located at a waste processing center. Heat from the waste plant’s gas turbines, which run on captured landfill methane, will be piped in to improve the efficiency of the evaporation process.

ieee

[Graeme]

New York joins California as leader in energy storage

In my last article for Smart Grid News, I discussed energy storage legislation and why it is so essential to preserving the energy grid. California’s Public Utility Commission had just proposed an aggressive energy storage mandate for its three largest utility companies to incorporate 1.3 GW of storage into the grid by 2020. That mandate has since passed, the first of its kind in the world.

Now, New York is taking an aggressive stance on energy storage. It started with an announcement by New York’s governor Cuomo in early February pledging to increase funding for smart grid projects in order to add resilience and efficiency to the electric grid. A few days later, Con Edison, New York City’s primary utility company, announced the preliminary details of the Indian Point Center Demand Management Plan. The proposed incentive plan will leverage energy storage technology to preserve the stability of its power grids and will be administered jointly with NYSERDA, New York’s Energy Resource and Development Authority.

smartgridnews

[yellowcanoe]

New York joins California as leader in energy storage

In my last article for Smart Grid News, I discussed energy storage legislation and why it is so essential to preserving the energy grid. California’s Public Utility Commission had just proposed an aggressive energy storage mandate for its three largest utility companies to incorporate 1.3 GW of storage into the grid by 2020. That mandate has since passed, the first of its kind in the world.

There is something wrong with the article. A GW is a measure of power, not energy. Now it may be that the storage facilities they contemplate can produce 1.3 GW of power but then the question becomes for how long? Perhaps they meant to say 1.3 GW hours.

[Graeme]

According to wiki, energy storage unit is GW not GW hours.

Energy storage became a dominant factor in economic development with the widespread introduction of electricity. Unlike other common energy storage in prior use such as wood or coal, electricity must be used as it is being generated, or converted immediately into another form of energy such as potential, kinetic or chemical. A very traditional way doing this on large scales is pumped-storage hydroelectricity. For example the pumped-storage hydroelectricity in Norway has a capacity of 30 GW, which could be expanded to 60 GW, which would be enough to be the battery of Europe.[1]

Terrafore Looks to Cut Molten Salt Energy Storage Costs in Half

As we have seen in recent months, energy storage is becoming a pretty big deal. California has the country's first energy storage mandate in place, and plants like Solana in Arizona have started trying to incorporate storage in from the beginning. Solana uses molten salt energy storage, a common idea wherein salts are heated, retain that energy for relatively long periods of time, and then discharge it by heating steam to turn a turbine. Solana, a concentrating solar thermal plant, can keep running for six hours after the sun drops below the horizon.

Storage like that, though, is still expensive. A company called Terrafore Technologies wants to cut the price almost in half. Terrafore was an exhibitor at the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy Summit this week in Washington, D.C., and the company's CEO Anoop Mathur told me he was hoping to raise $5 to $10 million (maybe from the gaggle of venture capital folks that wandered the Summit's halls) in order to scale up his process.

That process, essentially, involves creating a capsule inside which a salt such as potassium nitrate could expand and contract. The capsule itself—think of a peanut M&M, around 10 or 12 mm in size—is made of clay along with some proprietary additives surrounding a polymer layer. The polymer layer (specifically a methyl cellulose polymer), coated on to the spherical salt "prills", is designed to gasify at temperatures below the melting point of the salt. The clay layer is added on above the solid polymer, and then the whole clay-surrounding-polymer-surrounding salt package is heated to a point at which the polymer gasifies and escapes through the pores of the clay, yielding some hollow space inside (see this video for a full explanation). Further heating lets the salt melt and expand into the hollow space; the salt then cools and solidifies and can melt again to act as the thermal storage mechanism. With this system, three different salt capsule types of differing temperatures can be stored in a single tank instead of the two tanks that Solana and traditional salt storage must use—essentially one tank for the hot salts storing energy, and one for colder salts that have just discharged that energy.

ieee

[Graeme]

Energy Storage Market in the US 2012-2016: By 2035, the Global Energy Demand is Predicted to Increase By Up to 75 Percent

The analysts forecast the Energy Storage market in the US to grow at a CAGR of 18.17 percent over the period 2012-2016. One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the benefits of using such storage in solar plants. The Energy Storage market in the US has also been witnessing an increase in Research and Development initiatives. However, the lack of awareness of energy storage technologies could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.

The key vendors dominating this space are Abengoa Solar S.A., Areva Solar Inc., GE Energy LLC, and Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne Inc.

Commenting on the report, an analyst from the Clean Tech team said: ''The increasing demand for energy is one of the major trends observed in the Energy Storage market in the US. For instance, the governments of various countries have forecast that their nationwide energy demand will double within the next decade. The energy consumption pattern is likely to undergo variation in each country across the world. For instance, in 2009, China used energy that was equivalent to only half of what the US consumed. However, in 2010, China exceeded its previous consumption and stood in first place in terms of energy consumption in the world. Furthermore, the current global demand for energy is expected to more than double globally by 2020. With the existing power generation capacity, it will not be possible to meet the future energy demand. The storage of energy will help maintain a backup for catering to the high future energy demand. Large-scale and small-scale grid energy storage systems will meet this need, thus boosting the growth of the Energy Storage market in the US.''

According to the report, the benefits associated with the use of energy storage technologies in the Solar industry include increased solar plant efficiency, access to back-up power, peak load management, and power saving.

businesswire

[Graeme]

Nonsense. We are going to need energy storage and as I said in the centralized vs decentralized solar power thread, this issue of energy storage is also rapidly developing (demand is increasing) so it will not go away. Elon Musk's "megafactory" for Li-batteries may well be a game changer.

[Graeme]

FC Business Intelligence: New guide to commercialization of energy storage in the USA released

Energy Storage Update has recently completed work on their guide to Commercializing Energy Storage in the U.S, that explores the role of funding bodies in bringing storage technologies to market.
Furthermore, it examines the impact that California’s 1.325GW procurement target will have on market growth, and highlights what energy storage companies can learn from the commercialization of wind and solar technologies over the last decade.
In a recent interview Jack Ahearne, the leading researcher at Energy Storage Update, said that “2014 is shaping up to be a critical year for the commercialization of a diverse range of energy storage technologies”. He explained that “the guide provides a detailed market update that assesses the critical roadblocks companies must overcome to ensure growth in the project pipeline”.
The guide is free to download and can be found here: http://goo.gl/5sQQIt

prweb

[Graeme]

Follow The Money: Who Is Funding Energy Storage And Why

Green Charge is a newbie in the very young energy storage market, which is expected to start to bloom in a few states such as California thanks to a new state program that requires utilities to use energy storage for managing the intermittent solar and wind energy that flows into the grid. The program allows utilities to own storage projects or buy storage services from developers, including those who operate systems leased to home and business owners.

Since California regulators approved the storage program last October, we’ve seen several storage installers and tech developers raising funds and announcing new services.

Stem, an installer, lined up a $5 million fund to finance leased storage systems for business customers. SolarCity said it would start doing the same and make use of batteries from Tesla Motors TSLA +1.61%, whose CEO, Elon Musk, is chairman of SolarCity SCTY -0.86%. Solar Grid Storage, which offers solar panels with storage, was working on raising a $50 million fund when I caught up with the company last October. Green Charge, Stem, SolarCity and Solar Grid Storage all use lithium-ion batteries.

Meanwhile, companies working on alternative batteries, also are attracting investors. Primus Power recently raised $20 million in venture capital to bring its flow battery to market.

Battery systems are mostly too expensive and require a greater deployment to reduce costs and become more affordable. A system includes not just the cells that produce power but also electronics and the software to control the cooling and operation of the charging and discharging. California regulators hope their new energy storage program help to lower the costs of the equipment and installation. Tesla is planning a huge, $5 billion lithium-ion battery factory to do something similar, though it would mainly serve the electric car market.

forbes

[Graeme]

Battery Storage May Vie with US Oil Boom as Energy Game Changer, Says Moniz

The rapid development of rooftop solar and battery storage technology could be as transformative to the economy and modern life as the U.S. oil and gas boom, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said.

“It’s pretty dramatic,” Moniz said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg News at the IHS CERAWeek conference in Houston. “They are growing very, very fast.”

Batteries allow customers with solar panels to store energy during the day and then tap the excess overnight when the sun goes down. The widespread use of electric vehicles could reshape the development of cities, and applying the same battery storage technology to transform the U.S. energy system has “huge potential,” Moniz said.

Battery storage advances could threaten the 100-year-old monopoly utility business model that books about $360 billion in annual power sales. An increasing number of customers are reducing their dependence on the grid, turning to solar panels and battery storage as a way to reduce their bills.

“Storage is a huge deal,” Moniz said.

renewableenergyworld

MIT’s Liquid Metal Stores Solar Power Until After Sundown

A 40-foot trailer loaded with 25 tons of liquid metals may be the solution to the renewable-energy industry’s biggest challenge: making sure power is available whenever it’s needed.

A Boston-area startup founded by MIT researchers is working to turn this new concept into a commercial product, liquid-metal batteries that will store electricity for less than $500 a kilowatt-hour. That’s less than a third the cost of some current battery technologies.


Sadoway, who is also the John F. Elliott professor of materials chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wouldn’t say what goes into liquid-metal batteries. They use materials that are “abundant” and easy to harvest from the earth, which is key to making them cost effective.

bloomberg

Modular 5 MW Energy Storage System To Be Built This Year

In what could be a potential gamechanger for wider adoption of renewable energy as a bigger component of utility grids, a large modular battery storage system is planned for construction later this year in Aachen, Germany.

The system, which is being billed as the world’s first modular large-scale battery storage system, is called the Modular Multimegawatt, Multitechnology Medium-Voltage Battery Storage System (M5BAT), and as its name suggests, isn’t comprised of a single energy storage technology, but instead combines different battery technologies for optimal usability. The M5BAT includes lithium-ion batteries for short-term demand, high-temp batteries for power supply over several hours, and lead-acid batteries for discharges of an hour or less.

cleantechnica

[Graeme]

UltraBattery a Boon to Renewable Energy, Grid Storage, and EVs

Batteries pack a lot of energy into a small space, but they’re slow to charge, they lose their capacity after several charge-discharge cycles, and many are not environmentally friendly. Supercapacitors (also known as ultracapacitors) can be charged very quickly, can survive a near limitless number of charge-discharge cycles, and are made from relatively benign materials.


Electric and hybrid vehicles (EVs and HEVs) need the benefits of both technologies, and often employ a blend of batteries and supercaps, with the former providing a long driving range and the latter storing energy from regenerative braking and giving quick bursts of energy for rapid acceleration.


Grid-level storage combined with renewable energy has the potential to replace gas fired “peaker plants,” but like the EV, it requires the high energy density of batteries and the quick response time and long life of supercaps.


Using batteries and supercaps together requires control circuitry to move electricity to and from the different storage elements. But what happens if you combine the battery and the supercap in one package? You get the best of both worlds: the UltraBattery®, developed by a team from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and now produced by CSIRO spinoff company Ecoult. The UltraBattery is a lead-acid battery with a built in supercapacitor, as shown here:

engineering

[Graeme]

The article is correct. It looks like either unit can be used. Here is another article where both units are used (including MW-hr for batteries).

A Guide to 123 Gigawatts of Grid-Scale Energy Storage

Grid-scale energy storage, long the province of utility and government pilot projects, is primed for a push into the harsh world of energy economics pretty soon. We’ve seen a good deal of news on this front recently, including California’s decision last week to commit to becoming the first major economy in the world to mandate grid storage targets, with a required 1.3 gigawatts of energy storage by 2020.

That’s quite a lot, considering that even the biggest grid storage vendors, such as AES Energy Storage, are just now passing the 100 megawatts of installed capacity mark. While efforts like California’s may be necessary to create the regulatory and economic frameworks to jumpstart widespread grid storage development, it’s worth asking where worldwide grid storage capacity stands today, and how California’s goals stack up against those figures.

Luckily, the Department of Energy has been tracking global energy storage projects and putting them into a public database. This week, it announced that the running tally now includes some 420 projects in 34 countries around the world, adding up to 123 gigawatts of energy storage.

greentechmedia

[Graeme]

I now think you are right. The reporters do not know their units. Stored energy equals potential energy, which has the unit of joule (2.7778×10−4 watt-hour; 1 kilowatt hour = 3.6×106 J (or 3.6 MJ)).

[Graeme]

Energy Storage Roundup: Gridtential, Coda, Tesla, Japan’s Battery Subsidy

There's a surge of newly funded and incumbent businesses looking to tackle large- and medium-scale energy storage in a broad spread of grid edge applications.

We just covered Panasonic's aim to use lithium-ion batteries in solar-equipped buildings to solve Japan’s post-Fukushima energy crisis. The Japanese giant is looking to California and other U.S. markets for the business models to make this distributed energy system work.

We went deeply into Elon Musk's $5 billion Tesla Giga battery factory and his plans for automotive and stationary energy storage in partnership with cousin company SolarCity.

AES Energy Storage now sells a prepackaged, modular energy storage system.

Large-scale energy storage startup LightSail Energy added former GE executive Volker Schulte as COO and Neel Sirosh, former CTO at Quantum Technologies, as VP and GM of its energy storage group. Schulte was GM of engineering for GE’s gas engine business. LightSail is intent on developing a more efficient approach to compressed air energy storage. Investors in the early-stage firm include Khosla Ventures, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Total Energy Ventures.

We published some new slides and information about liquid metal battery startup Ambri and its commercialization efforts.

Here are the recent RFQs and RFIs for energy storage coming out of utilities in Hawaii, Ontario, New York, and Califonia. More details on the New York program are on the way.

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) just launched a $100 million subsidy scheme for lithium-ion battery-based stationary storage systems, citing the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear incident as the drivers for a focus on energy storage, according to reports in PVTech.

That's just in the last few weeks. Here are some other important recent developments:

greentechmedia

Efficiency: a critical success factor for solar storage systems

Storage is potentially the game changer for the solar market nowadays, allowing self-consumption to be increased by using solar energy also to supply loads at night.

Other than the reduction of storage cost and the introduction of possible incentive schemes, the maximization of the storage efficiency is a key factor to increase the system profitability, making the investment on solar plus storage actually viable for end-users.

Feed-in tariffs for solar energy are decreasing continuously, whereas the electricity tariffs are increasing.

As a consequence, self-consumption of the energy produced by the PV plant has already become practically the sole business model to make the investment on solar viable in different regions, especially in European countries.

This is why, as well as for grid support in utility-scale applications [1], energy storage is in the spotlight today at the residential and commercial level [2], allowing self-consumption to be increased by using part of the produced PV energy at night.

Obviously, storage will actually become the game changer for the solar market only if it is profitable for end-users.

To this aim, the first key aspect to be controlled is evidently the price of storage systems, which is predicted to halve over the coming years going from about 700$/kWh (500 €/kWh) to about 300$/kWh (200 €/kWh) in 2020 [3].

To mitigate the relatively high current cost of storage, incentive programs are emerging, such as in Germany wherein up to 30% of the storage cost is reimbursed.

However, other than the reduction of storage cost and the introduction of possible incentive schemes, there is a further key success factor, which is often underestimated: the storage efficiency.

In fact, because of energy losses in both the inverter and the battery, a fraction of the solar energy used to re-charge the storage system is merely wasted rather than self-consumed. This is a “hidden” economical loss for the user, because the energy wasted has to be balanced by additional energy purchased from the grid.

intelligentutility

[Graeme]

IEA: R&D, not ‘silver bullet’ hype required on energy storage

Energy storage technologies are not the “silver bullet” they have sometimes been hyped as, but nonetheless have a crucial role to play in a decarbonised electricity system, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The IEA has published a technology ‘roadmap’ for energy storage, covering electricity and thermal storage systems.

The document attempts to address the three questions of where energy storage technology is today, what long-terms goals for energy storage development and deployment might be and finally what priority actions are required to put increased development and deployment of energy storage into practice.

The roadmap is aimed at increasing stakeholders’ understanding of electrical and thermal energy storage and how the corresponding technologies can be deployed at various points along transmission and generation systems, IEA said.

In addition, the roadmap attempts to point the way towards success in accelerating the deployment and development of storage technologies in the short and long term by identifying actions to support the embryonic industry. The IEA identifies ‘short term’ as within 10 years while ‘long term’ represents the period up to 2050.

The report identifies the current and possible future roles of energy storage, including the integration of higher levels of variable renewable energy penetration, supporting an increase in electricity consumed nearer to generation sources and making grids more flexible, reliable, resilient and stable.

pv-tech

iea

[Graeme]

Will energy-storage-by-rail get sustainability on track?

A new way of storing energy soon could take off — energy-storage-by-rail, developed by Advanced Rail Energy Storage North America. The first project is set for Nevada, which would help stabilize the regional power grid so it can handle more renewable energy.

It's a low-tech approach to large-scale energy storage. When rates are low, a train drives uphill. Then, when market prices are high, it simply rolls downhill to produce power. Nevada's Valley Electric Association is hosting a $40 million, 50 megawatt rail energy storage plant that connects to California's grid.

The technology is designed to provide energy storage without the use of water, while also enhancing grid security and reliability and supporting increased use of renewable energy. In the past few years, railroads have started to be repurposed to send energy back to the grid, but this process does it on a much larger level.

Here, we excerpt an article from SNL that explains the technology.

The storage-to-rail concept

"The basic concept is: How do I move mass with the force of gravity?" Advanced Rail Energy Storage North America (ARES) CEO James Kelly said in an interview. "It finally dawned on us to use 100-year-old technology, and that's electric railroads, and to add modern digital control systems to automate electric railroads for storage."

Rail energy storage can serve much larger energy storage needs than batteries and flywheels, and at half the price of hydro, said Kelly, a former Southern California Edison Co. grid executive. The ARES website says the company could build projects with up to 3 GW in capacity and 24 GWh of storage. All it needs is space and a steady incline to run its tracks.

greenbiz

[Graeme]

Green Charge Networks: In Some Markets, Cost-Effective Energy Storage Is Already Here

Early in March, Green Charge Networks announced receipt of a $10 million financing program from TIP Capital that would allow the company to finance storage products for their customers and eliminate upfront costs.

The announcement generated significant buzz, because storage is quite clearly the next frontier in the electricity game, helping to integrate renewables and improving the efficiency and reliability of the power grid. The fact that Green Charge was lining up customers with actual projects at that potential scale was somewhat of an eye opener.

The announcement also created excitement, since it is third-party financing that has put the U.S. on-site solar industry on steroids. Last year, $3.3 billion was raised for solar third-party financing, and the majority of on-site solar is third-party financed. If the $10 million trickle ultimately turns into a steady stream for storage, this could have a huge impact on the future shape and activity of the nation’s power grid.

forbes