Energy Storage News

Today’s energy landscape is changing. There is a global energy transition underway in which renewable energy sources, led by wind and solar power, will ultimately replace legacy thermal generation. Falling supply costs, coupled with technology innovations in energy storage, software, and automation, are facilitating this change. This sponsored white paper explores:

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The world has watched on as some of its leading regional markets, China, South Korea, Australia, Japan, parts of the US, the UK, and many parts of Europe have raced ahead in deploying energy storage in the last five years. Record-breaking figures have been reported in the US and other territories such as the UK, year-on-year. In those leading regions, the rapid rise is happening both in front of and behind the meter, with economic cases that are finally starting to make sense and often – but not always – with specific policy support.

California is embracing energy storage as a reliability solution for an electrical grid that’s adopting more renewable, intermittent generation. Public agencies such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power have set ambitious energy storage targets while companies across the state are developing cutting edge storage technologies such as zinc-air batteries and renewable hydrogen. The goal is to ensure a dependable energy supply for the state as it races toward its target of 100% carbon-free energy by 2045.

The Energy Storage Association and US Solar Energy Industries Asssociation joined forces to promote a ‘Day of Action’ in calling for an Investment Tax Credit to be applied to standalone energy storage technologies. Figures out today in research company Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables' quarterly Energy Storage Monitor, produced in partnership with the ESA, forecast that the ITC could add an extra 0.3GW of annual deployments by 2024: from 4.8GW in its base case scenario to 5.1GW with the tax incentive. ESA is also encouraging Twitter users to use the hashtag #storageITC in supportive tweets.

GlidePath Power Solutions has acquired eight wind projects in North Texas with a total capacity of 149MW. The portfolio, purchased from Exelon Generation, will be optimised by GlidePath while it plans how best to add energy storage on-site at each project. The projects are all north of Amarillo and sell into the Southwest Power Pool (SPP). According to GlidePath, they will be the first battery storage projects in the SPP.

A report out today on the causes of the UK’s recent blackout, where electricity supply to 5% of National Grid’s customers was cut off “to protect the other 95%”, highlighted that 475MW of batteries were used to help bring the network back online.

The US Energy Storage Association has expressed “deep concern” that additional tariffs slapped on Chinese goods will adversely affect the domestic energy storage industry. The increase in prices in a price sensitive industry “could stymie projects already underway or cancel others altogether”, which could threaten livelihoods. The decision will “have an immediate and adverse economic effect on grid energy storage deployments in the United States,” a statement from the association said.

Battery storage assets were called into action last week after the UK suffered country-wide power outages following a transmission system stress event. On August 9th, two large generators were disconnected from the UK’s power system almost simultaneously, effectively taking 2GW worth of electricity generation within minutes of each other. That collapse in generation sent the country’s transmission grid frequency to dip, so National Grid, the country’s electricity system operator, called on reserve and flexible generation capacity to respond, with many operators dispatching battery storage capacity to meet National Grid ESO’s calls.

Wholesale power provider Southern Power is to develop up to four utility-scale energy storage projects totalling 86MW / 345MWh. Of the four projects, all in California, one has already closed financing. Southern Power is working with developer esVolta on the portfolio.

Australian authorities have rallied behind what is arguably the largest solar-plus-storage project to be conceived in the world’s history: a scheme mixing 10GW of solar with 20-30GWh of energy storage. The developer intends to set up a 3,800 km high-voltage direct current submarine cable to transfer most of the installation’s output to Singapore, where it could cover 20% of power needs, while various reports also link it to the potential ASEAN grid. The plan, however, is to also link the mega-installation to Australia’s own electricity grid so that it can supply Northern Territory capital Darwin and others.

Canadian company Hydrostor has just received approval to build the first grid-scale compressed air energy storage system in Australia. Hydrostor will deploy a 5MW / 10MWh system at a former zinc mine near Strathalbyn, South Australia. The advanced compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) project, expected to cost AU$30 million (US$21.09 million) in total, received development approval and has been welcomed in statements by local politicians

Lithium-ion batteries are far more widely recycled than many people think, while China and South Korea are already leaders of the emerging circular economy of lithium, a report commissioned by the Swedish Energy Agency has found. The report has been republished in English after a launch in Spring in Swedish. The author stated that many misconceptions and poor observations are made and repeated around lithium recycling and that more than 70% of lithium-ion batteries recycled today are processed in China and South Korea, with “high” recovery rates of materials.

Utility Georgia Power wants to own and operate 80MW of battery energy storage systems in its service area, building on the state’s early recent steps to investigate the value of storage both in front of and behind the electricity meter. Georgia Power has just made a request to raise residential rates in order to invest in the state’s “energy future” by 7% next year, filed with the Georgia Public Service Commission.

Plummeting solar-plus-storage costs could help electrify millions worldwide by facilitating a ten-fold explosion of mini-grid systems, a new report from the World Bank has said. Its report said most new mini-grids will feature a mix of PV with batteries, adding that the 10-15GW of solar / 50-110GWh of mostly lithium-ion batteries expected by 2030 would bring CO2 savings of 1.5 billion tonnes.

The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has put numbers on the significant potential for energy storage to replace peaking capacity on the grid in the US, albeit with an understanding that as the peak changes, the goalposts will also move. NREL has said in a report just-published that around 70GW of peaking capacity in the US - from a total base of about 261GW - could be served by energy storage systems of four, six and then eight hour durations.

San Diego International Airport in California will be home to a battery energy storage system paired with onsite solar PV that is set to reduce electricity costs as well as deliver much-needed reductions in carbon emissions and peak demand charges. Comprising as much as 40% of the airport's monthly energy bills, the energy storage system will help reduce these demand charges.

Failing to create an investment tax credit as part of the ongoing tax extenders legislation, a coalition of clean energy trade bodies in the US have urged. Writing to Representative Richard Neal (D-MA), chairman of the Committee on Ways & Means, the group said the storage investment tax credit offered a short-term jobs boost and a contribution to addressing the climate crisis.

Flexibility providers including grid-connected energy storage systems sprung into action late last week after Britain’s interconnector with France suffered a trip, causing around 1GW of capacity to fall off the system in moments, causing fluctuations in the frequency of the grid.

Two of the best known system integrators in the energy storage field have just completed work on large-scale battery systems on the eastern coast of the US, NEC in Massachusetts and Aggreko in New York. The two latest projects demonstrate how states in the US, and not just the usual solar industry ‘hotspots’ such as California, Arizona or Texas can use energy storage systems to cost-effectively increase reliability of electricity supply while also lowering energy costs through either high value single applications or a combination of appropriate applications for the technology.

Ontario’s policy of rewarding large users of energy that reduce their demand for grid energy at peak times has resulted in Shell New Energies announcing 21MWh of projects with Convergent Energy + Power. The main policy mechanism through which developers of Ontario energy storage projects have found a profitable niche is the Global Adjustment Charge. Like demand charges in most of the US, commercial and industrial users of electricity have to pay a premium for energy drawn from the grid at times of peak demand.

An open source software tool to help developers and other stakeholders in the US to analyze the viability of their energy storage system projects has been released by Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia this week launched QuESt v1.2, which it describes as “open source software for energy storage valuation.”

A push to establish an Investment Tax Credit for energy storage has not only been welcomed by clean energy advocates and the industry, but might also meet the some stated aims of the Trump administration’s energy policies, an analyst has said. Michael Doyle, a Democrat, has proposed in the US House of Representatives the bill HR2096, an amendment to the tax code to issue credits “for energy storage technologies and other purposes”.

Many of the most polluting thermal power plants on the US grid today are also the most lucrative to run, but the service they provide could already be done twice as cheaply using solar and storage, developer 8minutenergy has claimed.

While many in the industry have been enthusiastic about the potential of residential and other forms of behind-the-meter energy storage for some time, and the technology is ready to go, it’s been difficult to really demonstrate the total value that home storage systems could provide. This year we’re seeing evidence that that has changed. It allows individual users to become more independent of big utilities and to maximize their use of solar energy, but it can also help the grid, by connecting together - or aggregating - dozens, hundreds or even thousands of units at once and providing a sort of combined and controllable single asset to the grid operator or utility.