Energy Storage News

Energy storage technologies have a crucial role to play in enabling the transition to a low-carbon
economy. Despite significant growth of the energy storage market in recent years, the process of connecting this technology to the electricity grid remains complex and unclear in many states across the U.S. A new project, supported by a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office, aims to simplify the interconnection process for energy storage.

The next frontier for solar energy is solutions that do not affect the performance and efficiency of the electric grid. An innovative battery-storage solution in Decorah, Iowa, jointly supported by Alliant Energy, US Department of Energy (DOE), and the Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA), looks to seamlessly connect customer-owned solar while maintaining reliable electrical service across the community.

Heila Technologies is deploying intelligent energy storage+solar systems at a demonstration project in Shreveport, La., using SimpliPhi Power technology, with the support of Southwestern Electric Power Co. (SWEPCO), an American Electric Power (AEP) company. The demo will aggregate distributed energy resources and empower SWEPCO to manage these assets as an optimized fleet. This project will serve as a model for other stakeholders who are interested in the benefits of decentralized energy generation and storage working as a virtual power plant.

The U.S. energy storage market is growing tremendously. Indeed, IHS Markit projects that over 40 GW of energy storage capacity will be installed by 2022, starting from a base of only 0.34 GW installed in 2012 and 2013. This growth of the U.S. energy storage market is driven by several commercial and regulatory factors, including an increase in recent utility-scale power purchase agreements, declining costs of lithium-ion batteries, the availability of state and, to a certain extent, federal incentives for solar + storage projects. Here are the five main factors guiding the market heading into 2020.

UL has granted its first certification to UL 1974, the Standard for Evaluation for Repurposing Batteries, to 4R Energy Corporation. Outlining how to sort and grade battery packs, modules and cells that were originally made for electric vehicles (EV) and other applications, UL 1974 helps identify a battery’s state-of-health and introduces ratings to determine the viability for their continued use. Through this process, performance-validated “second-life” batteries can be utilized for energy storage systems to provide a safe, reliable, clean energy source.

The United States will grow to be the largest global market for solar + storage this year, where peaking capacity requirements are driving procurement, according to a recent IHS Markit study. Utility-scale solar + storage projects now are online or being built in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Indiana and Florida, and the list grows. In March, NextEra Energy said it would build the Florida Power and Light Manatee Energy Storage Center’s battery system, with four times the capacity of the world’s largest battery system currently in operation.

The solar + storage value proposition is increasingly a no-brainer for commercial buildings in states out West. Demand charges in California have increased by as much as 64% since 2014, and these charges can represent more than 50% of a company’s monthly energy bill. What’s more, California experienced more outages in 2017 than any other state (430+), with outages lasting an average of 117 minutes.

Iowa-based Ideal Energy is constructing a 1.1 MW power plant at the Maharishi University of Management (MUM) in Fairfield, Iowa, using the NEXTracker NX Flow integrated solar-plus-storage system. The project will be built on University land and, when completed, it is projected to be one of the largest solar-plus-storage power plants in the state, producing enough energy to cover nearly a third of the University’s annual electricity usage. In addition to those savings, NX Flow will use peak-shaving to significantly reduce MUM’s utility bill during high-demand times.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Clean Energy Group (CEG) have released the first comprehensive public analysis detailing the potential size of the commercial behind-the-meter battery storage market in the United States. NREL analyzed over 10,000 utility tariffs in 48 states, finding that more than five million of the 18 million commercial customers across the country may be able to cost-effectively reduce their utility bills with battery storage technologies. These findings, grouped by utility service territory and state and illustrated in a series of maps and tables, are presented in NREL and CEG’s white paper, Identifying Potential Markets for Behind-the-Meter Battery Energy Storage: A Survey of U.S. Demand Charges.

Princeton Power Systems will be supplying its core technology for the first project engineered by Geninov Group of Canada, a consulting engineering firm, and funded by the World Bank to deploy microgrids in Haiti. The Triumph project, which provides light and energy storage in Champ de Mars, Haiti’s largest park located in Port-au-Prince, is a collaborative effort between Geninov, Princeton Power Systems, Saft and Home Control for L’Electricity D’Haiti (EDH) the grid authority.