Energy Storage News

E&E News examines the future of the energy storage market. Can America take it back from Asia and create factories and jobs?

The budget outline that President Trump released yesterday proposed a historic scaling-back of R&D by the Department of Energy, upending decades of bipartisan consensus on the department's mission. Trump thinks that the federal government is meddling in the market and that it should limit itself to basic research and shift the billions of dollars it spends on applied research and commercialization to private industry. Meanwhile, many entrepreneurs who receive DOE research funding see themselves as helping the United States gain a competitive edge in a global energy sector that is being transformed by new technology. That level of private money, they say, simply doesn't exist.

An E&E News series explores how the United States could lead the coming energy storage boom, grabbing the momentum from Asia and creating jobs from Silicon Valley to North Carolina. 

How are the public and private sectors coordinating to address the increasing global threat of cyber and physical attacks on the grid? During today's OnPoint, Scott Aaronson, managing director for cyber and infrastructure security at the Edison Electric Institute, discusses the vulnerabilities facing the U.S. grid and the latest strategic planning between the federal government and utility industry on managing these threats.

Whether it's electric cars or smoothing over the ever-shifting output from solar panels, saving and supplying electricity on demand is an important part of the technical solution to climate change. But as the technology inches forward, smartphones still struggle to make it through a whole day without charging up, battery-powered cars are too expensive or too limited in range for most consumers, and grid operators are still scratching their heads over how to price energy storage alongside power plants. Getting energy storage to the right performance and price targets would be a huge boon to many clean technologies, but progress has been frustratingly slow, especially for those hoping for humanity to invent its way out of global warming.

The Supreme Court today agreed to tackle its second major case of this term surrounding state and federal turf lines in electricity markets. In a customary short order issued this morning, the court announced it would hear arguments in two linked cases involving a Maryland program providing incentives for new power generation. A lower court threw out the state program after judges found the incentives infringed on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's jurisdiction.

The biggest electricity users in California could buy power from a seller other than one of the three big utilities under legislation offered yesterday that was framed as a way to expand renewable energy. S.B. 286 from Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D) would lift a limit on the share of the Golden State's electricity market that can participate in a program called "direct access," where electricity customers contract with an energy service provider.

To realize its vision for a cleaner energy future, California needs to move beyond building more solar, wind and other renewable power sources, energy leaders say. The state needs to boost the market for systems able to store that green electricity. California's energy managers agree and last year set first-in-the-nation targets for adding more storage. That kick-started the industry, several experts said.

The proposed U.S. EPA rules to limit carbon emissions at existing power plants could require an overhaul of how grid operators line up electricity supply, causing significant confusion in power markets, according to federal energy regulators.

As an essential component to the rapid expansion of renewables, energy storage technology innovation is a focus for companies, states and the federal government. During today's OnPoint, Jeff Anderson, president of CalCharge, a public-private partnership focused on innovating and commercializing energy storage technologies, discusses the challenges facing his industry as it quickly tries to meet growing demand in the United States.

California, land of Google Inc., Apple Inc. and Hollywood, wants to add one more to the roster of industries it dominates. This time it's energy storage, an absolutely enormous emerging market where it has quietly been developing a substantial lead. The Golden State has more engineers and entrepreneurs figuring out how to store energy in phones, cars, buildings and power plants than anywhere else on Earth. It has access to venture capital and a set of state rules and regulations that encourages it to succeed.

Investors have been buzzing about the possibilities of Elon Musk's Tesla battery "gigafactory" and U.S. solar panel giant SolarCity enabling consumers to pair rooftop solar with affordable backup storage to free themselves from the grip of utilities and centralized power. To achieve that dream, however, they have to first go through the utilities they are challenging to test the batteries on the system. And it has been a long slog so far.

Last October, California became the first government to require its utilities to store a significant slice of the power they produce, instead of using it all right away. Now a growing roster of states and countries is taking up versions of the same idea, creating rules or incentives that will place storage in homes in Japan and Germany, at wind farms in Puerto Rico, along transmission lines in Ontario, and at individual buildings in Manhattan.

It is a Friday, and Byron Washom is obliged to give yet another tour of the microgrid at the University of California, San Diego. Last week it was utility executives, and next week it would be a honcho from the Navy. The requests keep coming in. "It's just nonstop," he said. Washom, the university's director of strategic energy initiatives, unplugged his white Nissan Leaf (parked at one of the university's 56 electric car plug points) and settled in for a three-hour tour. The campus is a big place, 1,200 acres on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and the nation's most ambitious microgrid is distributed all over the place.

If the train is running on battery power, that's electricity SEPTA doesn't have to buy from the utility. But the really innovative part of the system is where the Philadelphia-based utility Viridity Energy stepped in and proposed selling a portion of the battery power to the wholesale energy market.