An ambitious retrofit process

 This week has seen Carbon Brief publish analyses of the Department of Energy, Business and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) energy use. The subsequent news reports have been focused on the UK’s collapsing coal industry and the consequent impact on the environment. It has been reported that the use of coal fell by a record 50% in 2016, principally as a result of increased domestic carbon taxes. The result, a drop in carbon emissions to 19^th century lows. To provide some perspective, UK windfarms generated more power than coal in 2016 – a real feat for the renewable energy industry. However, even with the decline it has been suggested that carbon emissions were still 381 million tonnes.

As more gas and coal plants are decommissioned, the reliance on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power is increasing. Energy storage technology will play a crucial role in the management of the demand for energy supplies in the UK and will contribute vastly to the reduction of the UK’s carbon emissions.

Store it or lose it

 Fundamentally, countries worldwide are actively making steps towards creating more energy efficient and yet cleaner cities. The UK is placing energy storage at the heart of its new Modern Industrial Strategy, due to its potential to support smart energy systems and the automotive sector. As the energy industry moves away from carbon-heavy production, the twin-approach of renewable energy and storage will be critical for delivering on the demand while securing the future of UK energy.

Energy storage has a central role to play in creating a new, evolved UK energy system and will make a significant contribution to decarbonising our energy supply as a whole. Falling costs of battery technology and the new opportunities opening up in this market mean that there is an ever-growing business case for investment in this area.

Storage systems can fulfil multiple roles within the energy market. Energy can be stored when prices are low and used on site when they are high to save consumers and businesses money on their bills. Given the potential of energy storage to stabilise energy supply during periods of high and low demand, suppliers and consumers would be ill-advised to ignore its significance.

Storage enables more renewable energy sources to be integrated into the UK’s overall power supply. This is in addition to helping to balance energy supply and demand more effectively and increasing energy security for an evolving power network.

The National Grid has made a significant move towards a future that embraces energy storage. By committing to support battery storage on a large scale, the increased investment will mean a reliable source of real-time energy to balance the entire grid.

Click Here to Read Full Article

The energy market has evolved tenfold in recent years, from the way businesses facilitate and monitor usage to how electricity is sourced and supplied.

Technology has infiltrated the utilities market with smart monitoring systems and mobile battery packs, whilst climate change makes us more mindful of our energy choices with a move towards renewable sources. As consumers, this clearly illustrates that people are embracing the shifting energy landscape so why aren’t businesses along for the ride?

With power grids overrun with demand, businesses must play their role in alleviating some of that pressure, by taking the necessary steps to control their own power source particularly at times when demand might outweigh supply.

The falling cost of battery storage creates a timely opportunity to increase the use and grid parity of renewables, granting both commercial users and consumers better control over their energy usage and power bills. This in turn has the potential to strengthen and secure an ageing power grid in the UK.

Making an investment in commercial storage goes beyond a call to help save the environment – there are genuine business benefits which make battery storage systems a valid and feasible approach to storing and monitoring energy capacity on-site, which can provide a route to transformative change for both business and society as a whole.

Empowering businesses

On-site energy storage systems ultimately ensure the smooth running of a workplace. Their ability to enable commercial and industrial businesses to become more sustainable by controlling their power bills, supply risks via a backup power is the pinnacle of energy efficiency.

The most obvious benefit of battery storage though is its flexibility, making it an ideal complement to slower but higher-capacity stores of energy such as pumped hydro or natural gas reserves.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Earlier this year, Tesla Motors changed their name to Tesla Inc. — a move that signified the company’s intent to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy.

Instead of focusing on just one aspect of ensuring a sustainable future, Tesla wants to ensure that it is able to make broad solutions available to the public. It has determined that transitioning to renewable energy and technology is the best way to accomplish this.

A big part of this grand plan is anchored on the company’s acquisition of the solar energy company SolarCity. Tesla’s purchase will allow it to provide its customers with more comprehensive services, said Kurt Kelty, senior director of Battery Technology at Tesla, who spoke at the International Battery Seminar after the company won Innovator of the Year. He said that his vision was that Tesla customers would be able to have Tesla’s electronic vehicles (EVs) in their garage, Tesla’s solar panels on their roofs, and Tesla’s batteries powering their devices.

“You have solar, battery pack, the EV, and you’ve got all the controls on your cell phone,” Kelty said at the seminar. “This is the kind of future we see for [your] house.”

Kelty explained that Tesla’s energy storage solution makes the brand a “one-stop shop… it’s all a well-integrated system and it just makes it that much easier for the customer to use.”

ELON MUSK’S GRAND PLAN

Tesla Inc. CEO, Elon Musk has always been very vocal about his grand plan to usher in a sustainable future. And Tesla’s pioneering legacy in car manufacturing is now lending itself to the development of Tesla’s energy storage technology — the Powerwalls and Powerpacks. Kelty described the rise of additional applications of these micro-grids in Hawaii and California.

“There are a lot of applications for the Powerpack that we’re just starting to explore,” Kelty said at the seminar. “We’re just starting to penetrate the market now, and the market potential is absolutely huge.”

Click Here to Read Full Article

As we reported yesterday, Tesla’s energy division is about to ramp up quickly with the deployment of another 50 MW/200 MWh of Powerpack projects.

In a new and updated patent application, Tesla explains how these grid-tied projects are using its Powerpacks and inverters for what the company describes as a scalable “turnkey” solution.

Tesla first applied for this patent back in September 2015, a few months after it launched ‘Tesla Energy’, and it updated it and applied again a year later when it was working on the second generation of its Powerpack.

It was released publicly yesterday.

In the background of the application, Tesla explains why they focused on making the system “scalable and flexible”:

Various approaches for energy storage have been tried. Some batteries that are designed for large scale energy storage have smaller cells arranged in series and parallel. For example, some cells are arranged in parallel, and then that unit is arranged in parallel with another similar unit, and so on. This can require the system to have a disconnect and fuse, and to apply some management strategy that occurs at the high level. These systems can be configured so that they are paralleled at an electrical interface, which can make them complicated to parallel.

One problem with such approaches can be that when batteries are paralleled, one must match their voltage characteristics precisely because they in parallel electrically. This can significantly limit scalability of the system. For example, one may need to use very similar chemistry, or similar cells, or come up with particularized balancing strategies, to manage the different cells within their ranges of operating characteristics. Also, with regard to the individual cells, the system is in a sense limited by its weakest link. That is, if one cell malfunctions this typically renders the whole array of batteries out of service.

That’s why they came up with turning hundreds of cells into dozens of pods which in turn go into the actual ‘Powerpack”:

Click Here to Read Full Article

Energy storage is on. CIT Bank will lead debt financing for 50 megawatts of battery storage in a project that represents a new way to manage electrical grids and renewable energy generation.

The storage projects were acquired last summer by Macquarie Group, a large infrastructure manager, from Advanced Microgrid Solutions, a San Francisco startup that is pioneering the use of banks of batteries to manage loads and reduce costs.

Cost-effective energy storage is key to the broad deployment of intermittent solar and wind power, and gives grid operators, such as Southern California Edison, reserve capacity to manage demand peaks.

SoCal Edison has a 10-year contract to buy power from the projects, which will also generate revenues from Cal State Long Beach and Irvine Co., where the battery banks will be installed.

Macquarie expects billions of dollars of energy storage financing deals in the next few years.

Advanced Microgrid is one of the biggest buyers of Tesla’s Powerpack 2 lithium-ion batteries and the two companies share an early investor, Nancy Pfund’s DBL Partners.

“The era of energy storage has begun,” declared Advanced Microgrid’s Susan Kennedy.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Inspired by an American fern, researchers have developed a groundbreaking prototype that could be the answer to the storage challenge still holding solar back as a total energy solution.

The new type of electrode created by researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, could boost the capacity of existing integrable storage technologies by 3000 per cent.

But the graphene-based prototype also opens a new path to the development of flexible thin film all-in-one solar capture and storage, bringing us one step closer to self-powering smart phones, laptops, cars and buildings.

The new electrode is designed to work with supercapacitors, which can charge and discharge power much faster than conventional batteries. Supercapacitors have been combined with solar, but their wider use as a storage solution is restricted because of their limited capacity.

RMIT’s Professor Min Gu said the new design drew on nature’s own genius solution to the challenge of filling a space in the most efficient way possible — through intricate self-repeating patterns known as “fractals”.

“The leaves of the western swordfern are densely crammed with veins, making them extremely efficient for storing energy and transporting water around the plant,” said Gu, Leader of the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence Nanophotonics and Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research Innovation and Entrepreneurship at RMIT.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Pumped storage is a decades-old technology with a relatively simple concept: When electricity is cheap and plentiful, use it to pump water up into a reservoir above a turbine, and when electricity is scarce and expensive, send that pumped water down through a turbine to generate more power. Often, these pumped storage facilities are auxiliary to other electricity-generating systems, and they serve to smooth out fluctuations in the amount of power on the grid.

A German research institute has spent years trying to tailor pumped storage to ocean environments. Recently, the institute completed a successful four-week pilot test using a hollow concrete sphere that it placed on the bottom of Lake Constance, a body of water at the foot of the Alps. The sphere has a diameter of three meters and contains a pump and a turbine. Much like traditional pumped storage, when electricity is cheap, water can be pumped out of the sphere, and when it’s scarce, water can be let into the sphere to move the turbine and generate electricity.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy Systems Engineering envisions spheres with inner diameters of 30m, placed 700m (or about 2,300 ft) underwater. Assuming the spheres would be fitted with existing 5 MW turbines that could function at that depth, the researchers estimate that each sphere would offer 20 MWh of storage with four hours discharge time.

In an underwater “energy park,” dozens of these spheres could be connected near an offshore wind farm to create a system that would be able to add extra reliability to a renewable-heavy grid. The institute admits that the economics of this project only work on a large scale. It estimates that more than 80 spheres would be needed “to achieve a relevant overall performance/capacity for the energy market.”

In November, the Fraunhofer Institute placed the test sphere 200m off the coast of Lake Constance and 100m under the lake’s surface. The institute just retrieved its sphere last week. Researchers are still sifting through the data gleaned by the pilot program in order to create better computer models on how this scheme would work in the real world. The institute wrote that it wants to conduct a follow-up project using a larger sphere that would be underwater for a longer time.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Filipino renewable energy firm Solar Philippines has started construction on the first utility-scale solar project to be combined with battery energy storage in the Philippines.

It will feature a lithium-ion battery for shifting energy into the early evening and providing ancillary services to the national grid.

A Solar Philippines spokesman told Energy-Storage.News that further details of the storage technology would be announced in May, alongside other PV projects that would be using batteries.

The 150MW PV plant in at Concepcion, Tarlac, will also be the largest solar project in the country to date and the first to start construction after the government’s Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) programme came to an end, under the Duterte administration.

The spokesman said: “It aims to prove that solar is now viable in the Philippines without the FIT, and can in fact replace much of the 10GW of coal planned to be completed over the next five years.”

The project is also the first to feature ‘Made in the Philippines’ solar panels, from the newly-opened Solar Philippines 600MW solar module assembly facility in Batangas. The factory is managed and staffed by the former team of SunPower Philippines.

The spokesman added: “We envision [the] factory paving the way for the Philippines to become a leader in solar manufacturing. Its first modules will be used for our own projects, and then offered to module manufacturers as OEM capacity.

The project is set to power the equivalent of 300,000 households once completed by the end of 2017.

At the ground-breaking ceremony, energy secretary Alfonso Cusi said: “Currently, the country’s power demand is at 13,000MW and our supply is barely 14,000MW, hence we need more power as well as reserve power.

Click Here to Read Full Article