Market players are adopting more sustainable ways of storing thermal energy than before. Many startups have entered the market and introduced sustainable ways of thermal energy storage. Companies are targeting new geographic locations for their projects.
Viking Cold Solutions has completed the installation of eight Thermal Energy Storage systems as part of a utility-backed demand management program in Massachusetts. These eight behind-the-meter TES systems store and facilitate management of approximately 1.3 MW of energy onsite, and do not require any additional real estate for the system components. The average size of the cold storage facilities in the program is approximately 50,000 square feet, with the largest being 157,000 square feet.
Portland General Electric Company and NextEra Energy Resources, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, plan to construct a new energy facility in Eastern Oregon combining 300 MW of wind generation with 50 MW of solar generation and 30 MW of battery storage. The new project, called the Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility, will be the first of this scale in North America to co-locate and integrate these three technologies, creating an improved zero-emissions resource and accelerating Oregon’s transition to clean energy.
Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG and its partners have begun research and development work at the company’s Container Terminal Altenwerder (CTA) to integrate the battery capacities of automated guided container transport vehicles that are in use at CTA into the German energy network as flexible storage units that contribute to the grid stability of the power supply. In less busy times, free container transport vehicles could provide battery capacity as mobile power stores to safeguard grid stability.
NEC Energy Solutions has completed an energy storage system for Consumers Energy. The NEC energy storage solution, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, includes two independent 280kW/340kWh DSS® energy storage systems and NEC’s proprietary AEROS® controls software. The energy storage system will enable Consumers Energy to investigate how energy storage can be used to avoid further system upgrades, smooth renewable energy production and support load/energy management. The storage system has been designed with the flexibility to increase the energy capacity to 1MWh or more.
Invenergy has begun commercial operations of a utility-scale battery storage system located in Knoxville, Iowa, developed for MidAmerican Energy. This followed a four-month construction process that culminated with the battery becoming operational in December 2018. The battery can provide four MWh of storage capacity, supplying one MW of power for up to four hours—enough electricity to power about 900 average Iowa homes.
The project is the first large energy storage facility built by EMC Lendlease, the joint venture between Energy Made Clean, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Carnegie, and Lendlease, an engineering, procurement and construction provider. As the module supplier, Risen Energy provided more than 30,000 mono-crystalline modules to the facility. The modules have been tested by Clean Energy Associates, an American owned and operated global solar PV engineering and quality assurance technical services advisory firm, and are highly adaptable to the local climate conditions in Western Australia in that they can maintain stable power output in hot and dry environments and ensure a high ROI by reducing costs.
Most current solar energy systems utilize storage outside of the generators that create the power. In other words, two separate systems are required to ensure successful operation. But experts from UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering have developed a way to integrate solar power generation and storage into one single system, effectively reducing the cost by an estimated 50 percent. The UT project will develop the next generation of utility-scale photovoltaic inverters, also referred to as modular, multifunction, multiport and medium-voltage utility-scale silicon carbide solar inverters.
As reported previously, AES Energy Storage and the energy storage team from Siemens recently merged, creating Fluence Energy, LLC. The new company is jointly owned by Siemens and the AES Corporation, combining the engineering, product development, implementation and services capabilities of both teams. It is now embarking on an “aggressive expansion” of the business, backed by the financial support of the two parent organizations. Fluence builds on more than a decade of grid-scale battery-based energy storage experience and the largest advanced battery-based energy storage fleet in the world with nearly 500 MW deployed or awarded across 15 countries.
The integration of advanced energy storage and software with hydroelectric generation is seen to be a world's first hybridized system of its kind to provide ancillary services. The system is scheduled to begin operation in the first quarter of 2018 and is expected to run for 20 years. It will utilize Greensmith's GEMS software platform which offers multiple storage applications. The project will serve both of PJM's (Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland) frequency regulation markets, including traditional regulation known as RegA and dynamic regulation known as RegD.
Mr Kiernan appeared before the US Congress House Energy and Commerce Committee where he said that, thanks to technological advances, wind farms are now competitive with other energy technologies with regard to reliability and resiliency. He added that grid reliability and resilience are goals that everyone can support and that efforts underway at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and by market operators are rightly focused on market-based solutions to better compensate generators for providing those essential services.
Lloyd’s Register is supporting RES in developing a live 100MW (approx. £40M) storage battery in South Australia. Demand for energy storage is expected to increase after the entire state of South Australia lost power in September. The blackout was a widespread power outage across South Australia that occurred as a result of storm damage to the state’s electricity transmission infrastructure.
BYD, a leading battery manufacturer, and Enerpoint Group, one of the top players in the international PV scenario, have established a cooperative relationship to jointly develop energy storage market in Italy.
A new report from the International Renewable Energy Agency suggests the global renewable energy share can reach and perhaps even exceed 30 per cent by 2030 at no extra cost. The rest of the power system's resources have traditionally been adjusted around wind to support a reliable and efficient system. The research that led to this report challenges that concept.