Energy Storage News

Elon Musk didn’t need 100 days after obtaining a connection agreement to switch on the Tesla big battery in South Australia. In fact, it took him less than 100 minutes. That’s how quickly the battery was up and running after the ink dried on the connection deal with the state’s transmission company ElectraNet last Friday. By the early evening, some 300 Tesla Powerpacks already in place were delivering all the power for the unveiling event, stored from the adjoining Hornsdale wind farm, a three-hour drive north of Adelaide.

Earlier this year, a first-of-its-kind microgrid was commissioned at the Marcus Garvey Apartment complex in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood in New York City. Like many microgrid projects, it combined renewable energy (in this case, solar PV) with battery storage, as well as a fuel cell. It’s connected to the grid and provides multiple local benefits, including clean energy generation and resiliency. The system also generates revenue and savings through demand charge reduction, capacity relief, and other grid services.

Storage has long been hailed as the holy grail of the renewable energy market, as it allows for a greater integration of technologies like solar PV and wind into the electrical grid. So, a lot of people have asked why energy storage hasn’t taken off in a more substantial fashion and at a more rapid pace, and many would agree that one of the issues is the bankability of energy storage technology. “Bankability” is a term used in the renewable energy world to describe the likelihood that any particular technology or manufacturer will be funded by financiers. If a technology is new and unproven, banks and other financial institutions will be unlikely to fund associated projects until they have developed an industry track record through the performance of such technology, and have gained maturity in the marketplace.

Deepwater Wind, the de facto leading offshore wind developer in the United States, has announced ambitious plans to develop a 144 MW offshore wind farm near Martha’s Vineyard that will be equipped with a 40 MWh Tesla battery storage system. Of course, Deepwater Wind is most well known at the moment as being the leading US offshore wind developer. Considering that it is the only developer with an actual working offshore wind farm, this is something of a moot point — though, the US offshore wind industry is finally beginning to gather some steam.

A new report released by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reveals that solar jobs in the U.S. (and other nations) are expanding quickly. As of November 2016, the American solar industry employed 260,077 workers. This is an increase of 24.5% from 2015, with a growth rate that is 17 times faster than the United States economy as a whole.

How much damage can one image do? We may find out soon enough. US President Trump’s own Department of Energy is circulating an infographic that wipes the floor with the President’s pro-coal message, pitches wind and solar, and makes mincemeat out of the entire Trump Administration energy policy. Seriously, what is going on over at DOE? Energy Secretary Rick Perry keeps playing along with President Trump’s pro-coal rhetoric, but all the while he has been taking one poke after another at the beleaguered President — and he keeps getting away with it.

More developing markets are now considering storage solutions for better and efficient integration of solar power projects into the existing grid. The Department of Energy in the Philippines recently approved four large-scale solar power projects to assess the impact of their integration into the existing transmission network. These projects include two of 70 megawatts capacity each, one of 22 megawatts, and another of 30 megawatts with battery storage.

The lithium-ion battery manufacturer LG Chem has officially launched its residential battery systems line in the North American market. This news follows the completion of UL certification. The company’s residential battery systems line in North America is comprised of a variety of AC- and DC-coupled solutions, with system capacities ranging to up to 9.8 kilowatt-hours (kWh). There are two different voltage options available (which are paired with compatible inverters). These are a low-voltage 48V option and a high-voltage 400V option. The low-voltage option is available in system capacities of 3.3 kWh, 6.5 kWh, and 9.8 kWh. The high-voltage option is available in system capacities of 7 kWh and 9.8 kWh.

President Trump talks a great game when it comes to US coal miners and coal jobs but he sure is walking the renewables walk. The latest item in the flood of renewable energy news pouring from the Energy Department since Inauguration Day is a new study that charts a do-able path for global energy producers to harvest 5-10 terawatts of solar power by 2030. That’s quite a big feat considering that the current scope of global solar generation is still measured in gigawatts, but then again President Trump is known to be a huge fan of the bigly.

As Australia’s renewable energy industry awaits the imminent outcome of the South Australian government’s inaugural large-scale energy storage auction, the CFO of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency has described two of the key competing technologies – large-scale battery systems and pumped hydro – as neck and neck on pricing. Speaking at the 2017 Large-Scale Solar Conference co-hosted by RenewEconomy and Informa in Sydney on Monday, ARENA CFO Ian Kay said projects pairing 100MW of renewable energy generation with 100MWh of energy storage were “about equal” in cost.

In Chile’s last auction for power, SolarReserve bid a world-record-breaking low price at just 6.3 cents per kWh ($63/MWh) for dispatchable 24-hour solar. SolarReserve’s CSP technology with integrated thermal storage provides 24-hour solar power, and is ideally suited for Chile’s grid with round-the-clock power needs due to its huge mining industry. To bid 24-hour solar at 6.3 cents per kWh is a world record for CSP (Concentrated Solar Power), a form of solar utilizing heat from the sun that can be stored thermally. Chile has open auctions for both fossil energy and renewables, and no subsidies.

The US firm Tesla and South Korea’s LG Chem are tipped to dominate the US battery storage market, which is expected to be worth as much as $US50 billion by 2020. Analysts at investment bank Morgan Stanley suggest Tesla and LG Chem are best positioned to take big market shares in a market that it predicts will grow faster than most others expect. Morgan Stanley says the “addressable” battery storage market in the US is 85GWh, or around $US30 billion. But if regulators come on board and allow it to compete in deregulated power markets, then that forecast is nearly doubled to 140GWh or more than $US50 billion.

Spurred by state mandated renewable energy goals, Panasonic, Xcel Energy, and Younicos have formed a public/private partnership with the city and county to promote a microgrid centered around the Peña Station NEXT, a 382-acre transportation hub located near Denver International Airport. The Xcel Energy feeder for Peña Station NEXT already has 20% solar penetration and is expected to have 30% solar penetration by the time the microgrid project is completed in the first half of 2017.

Renewable energy is now the cheapest option, on average, for new electricity capacity around the world — developed countries like the US as well as developing countries. As I noted the other day, we need to keep channeling this message to the broader public, and especially decision-makers, but there are other things to do in order to increase renewable energy growth. 

Britain’s largest domestic supplier of natural gas and electricity has its eyes on the low carbon future. Nuclear plants and wind farms produced 54% of the power Centrica sold in the domestic market during 2015. Last week the company announced it will be building one of the world’s foremost battery storage plants in the UK.

Daimler may begin manufacturing Mercedes-Benz electric vehicles and batteries in China in order to boost local sales, going by recent comments made by firm board member Hubertus Troska. Daimler’s growth in the Chinese auto market has apparently been rapid as of late (~429,000 sold so far in 2016) and the aim is apparently to keep this growth going. As air pollution is a major concern in China, expanding into the electric vehicle sector could be a means of growing in the market even faster than Daimler currently is. 

Accompanying the launch of the its Powerwall 2.0 offering, Tesla will reportedly begin completely overhauling many retail locations to focus more on the energy storage side of its business. The retail facelift will reportedly involve the installation of various interactive displays explaining how the firm’s energy storage products work in simple language. Importantly, this overhaul will also involve a transition to the company actually taking Powerwall 2.0 orders in the store, as well as online, according to Business Insider (previously, all ordering of the Tesla Powerwall was done online).

It makes more sense from an economic standpoint to recycle old plug-in electric vehicle batteries than to reuse them directly for home energy storage, according to a new report from Lux Research. The primary reason? According to Lux Research, reused plug-in electric vehicle batteries will “deliver questionable returns on account of reduced performance, limiting them to application with less frequent and shallower depth of discharge cycles.”

Trump or no Trump, the global clean energy train has left the station. A case in point is a new wind, hydropower, and energy storage collaboration between US-based GE and Germany’s Max Bögl Wind AG. The project is on track to connect its four wind turbines to the grid next year, with the hydropower component coming online in 2018. The project represents an innovative combo of two different forms of renewable energy with an energy storage bonus thrown in.  

Concentrating solar power tech has faced some withering criticism in the past, but it seems that the CSP industry is just steamrolling right past the doubters. In the latest development, the company SolarReserve let out word that it is eyeballing the construction of a 2,000 megawatt CSP plant in Nevada, to be dubbed Sandstone. The solar behemoth, if it comes into being, will be the world’s largest such facility, with 10 towers and more than 100,000 concentrating mirrors.

More than 900 MW of energy storage grid-tied inverters were shipped globally during 2015, according to new figures by IHS Markit, with Parker Hannifin and BYD leading the global market. A new report from analytics firm IHS Markit earlier this month, Energy Storage Inverter (PCS) Report, analyzed the leading power conversion system (PCS) suppliers. The energy storage grid-tied inverter market has grown in time with growth in the larger energy storage market and the decrease in storage prices, shipping more than 900 MW during 2015. Further, IHS Markit predicts the global energy storage inverter market is expected to surge over the next few years, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 38%, reaching 4.5 GW in 2020, while prices for energy storage inverters will continue to fall an average of 13% per year from 2016 to 2020.

The US company Axiom Exergy has been wasting no time getting its new thermal energy storage technology to the marketplace. Just 18 months after nailing a glowing review from the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Axiom has inked a major deal with the New York City utility Con Edison to supply its “Refrigeration Battery” to grocery stores all over Brooklyn and Queens. So, grocery stores. That doesn’t sound too sexy, but when NREL reviewers say things like “the Refrigeration Battery system could provide an economical alternative to electrochemical battery storage systems,” it’s game on for Tesla and other big players in the super-hot energy storage marketplace.

Many know that rooftop PV penetration in Hawaii far surpasses almost anywhere else in the world. Given the state’s 100% renewables mandate by 2045, the pace to explore and quickly implement renewable energy in Hawaii has exposed many challenges and has forced them to the “bleeding edge” of the newest technologies. This forced progress now includes accelerated installation of various forms of energy storage, particularly at the grid-edge. This situation underscores the growing importance of cost-effective and scalable energy storage and its synergy to greater solar generation. Importantly, a draft NARUC Distributive Energy Resources Compensation Manual says: “Energy storage can be used as a resource to add stability, control, and reliability to the electric grid. Historically, storage technologies have not been widely used because it has not been cost competitive with cheaper sources of power, such as fossil fuels. However, given the recent decline in cost as well as improved storage technologies, storage has become an option that is able to compete.”

India has issued its second solar energy storage tender as it looks to expand its capabilities to efficiently absorb the rapidly increasing solar capacity into the existing grid. The Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) issued a tender to set up 200 MW of solar capacity along with a storage facility. The power generation capacity will come up in Karnataka’s Pavagada solar power park. Projects will be auctioned in the size of 50 MW each, with each project having a storage capacity of 2.5 MWh. Pavagada solar power park is among around 25 solar parks approved by the Ministry of New & Renewable Energy. The planned capacity of the solar park is 5 GW, which would make it among the largest power projects in India.