Energy Storage News

When Danielle Fong was taking her PhD in plasma physics at Princeton University at the age of 17, she wasn’t driven to be the best — she was driven by an urgency to solve the world’s energy problem. Though she missed her mother’s cooking back home in Dartmouth — “My mom makes the best omelettes” — Fong focused on her mission to make green energy a practical reality for everyone. “Solving the energy problem is the problem of my generation,” she said Tuesday. And the 26-year-old believes she has come up with a way to do that — she just has to prove it to the industrial sector.

Annette Verschuren says she is working on bringing bright ideas back home to Nova Scotia. The Cape Breton native, now the CEO of NRStor Inc., a developer of energy storage projects, said the Toronto company is eyeing opportunities in the province. “Money is not an issue,” she said. “If we can get a contract with Nova Scotia Power Inc., it’s not an issue. I can get the financing. The money will come if the right economics are there.” The former president of Home Depot Canada was in Halifax on Tuesday for the ninth annual Renewable Energy Conference. Her company, which started in July, is partnering with businesses that manufacture and integrate flywheel, compressed air and battery storage systems. The goal is to take energy being produced during non-peak hours, hold it and release it back to the grid when needed, she said.

Eigg (island) has a total energy storage capacity of 212kWh, using several banks of 24 Rolls four-volt batteries to power their homes and facilities.  Up to 50% of the stored energy is discharged from each bank, while a combination of wind, solar and hydroelectric sources, with a diesel backup, recharges the battery bank for the next day.

The 6MW wind project has been approved by as part of the feed-in tariff program. The development, will have three or four turbines, and is scheduled to be completed in 2014.  Storage will likely include a 500kW 1MW generating unit and four to six storage tanks, each storing 1MW of energy.