The first ‘smart neighbourhood’ in the US state of Georgia is being created by utility Georgia Power and homebuilder PulteGroup, with each home equipped with solar PV, battery energy storage and other smart, clean and distributed energy resources.

PulteGroup said the planned new development builds on learnings from a prototype Zero Net Home, a residential building which offsets total energy consumption, either through efficiency measures or by producing more clean energy than the amount drawn from conventional grid sources. That prototype was built in northern California for local investor-owned utility Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E) Zero Net Energy Production Builder Demonstration scheme, in a state which has already mandated new residential dwellings to be net zero energy by 2020.

Georgia Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, will use Georgia Power Smart Neighbourhood as a real-world R&D and test facility for the future of such homes, much in the same way as Panasonic’s Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town project in Japan has been doing since opening in 2014.

An initial 46 homes are planned at the Georgia development, each with 3 or 4 bedrooms, equipped with modern insulation, advanced heating and cooling, LED lighting and home automation including smart thermostats and voice-activated controls.

Through this partnership with Georgia Power, we continue to be at the forefront of energy efficiency that can shrink our homes’ carbon footprint, but also make our homes less expensive to own, translating into lasting savings for homeowners,” Ryan Marshall, president and CEO of PulteGroup said.

The development is planned for a grand opening later this year.

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NV Energy has issued a request for proposals that could add up to 330-MW of new renewable energy projects to be built in Nevada. This additional commitment to renewables, which includes the potential integration of battery energy storage systems, will provide enough carbon-free electricity to power about 200,000 Nevada homes.

“As important as this opportunity is to further the state’s desire for clean energy, equally important is that we expect to deliver these renewable projects to customers without increasing rates,” said NV Energy’s President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Caudill.

The request for proposals seeks wind, solar, geothermal biomass and biogas technology projects that are compliant with Nevada’s existing renewable portfolio standards. NV Energy will also, for the first time, consider adding supplemental battery energy storage systems that are integrated with the proposed renewable energy resource.

“Since 2009, NV Energy has more than tripled its in-state renewable energy production and our electricity prices today are 15% lower than they were at that time,” explained Caudill. “We expect these new projects to provide some of the lowest-cost renewable energy available in the market, which will directly benefit our customers. In fact, adding these new renewable projects serves to diversify the portfolio we use to provide power across the state and protects against the risk of increases in the price of natural gas used to generate electricity,”

The new projects will be competitively evaluated on a number of factors, including best value to customers of NV Energy and creation of economic benefits to the State of Nevada.

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Autarsys GmbH is planning to develop an energy storage system and PV project in Mam Rashan, a refugee camp in the Dohuk district of northern Iraq near the Syrian and Turkish borders.

Autarsys’ energy storage system will be integrated with a 300kW PV project that will secure a more stable supply of power. The system’s energy management software will give camp administrators the ability to prioritise and schedule the delivery of power based on residents’ most critical needs.

While refugee camps are traditionally powered by diesel generators, diesel is more expensive than renewable energy and is dangerous to transport in a volatile region. The first phase of the project will have the capacity to power one portion of the camp at a time during the day.

Autarsys expects that the renewable energy system will be operable by spring 2018. Additional funding in the future may enable expansion of the system. The German company has developed and delivered a number of off-grid microgrid or ‘edge of grid’ projects pairing solar, energy storage and other resources including two in the Philippines, one at a resort, the other for a remote village, one for a remote village in Cameroon and another in Australia with Conergy Australia combining 13MWp of PV with 1.4MW / 5.3MWh of energy storage which is currently underway in Lakeland, Queensland.

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On December 12, 2017, Senior Energy Storage Analyst Dan Finn-Foley moderated a panel at Greentech Media’s Energy Storage Summit, Crowdsourced Market Insights: Role of Energy Storage in Creating the Grid of the Future. This panel employed a unique structure where our experts on stage were asked to interpret and weigh in as 500 senior-level energy professional attendees answered live polling questions on the top themes in the market.

The results were insightful and, in some cases, surprising, with optimism mixed with skepticism in equal doses as the industry took stock of a market that was roiled with activity in 2017.

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New York’s plan to invest $200 million in energy storage could help boost demand for what new energy storage company Fluence, a creation of Siemens and AES Energy, sees as a growing market.

New York’s goal to build 1.5 gigawatts of energy storage by 2025, announced on Jan. 2, is part of its plan to generate half of its electricity with renewables by 2030, including enough power from offshore wind farms to power more than 1.2 million homes.

The state’s energy-storage target and regulatory support could be a blueprint for other states as they consider projects, said Ray Hohenstein, market applications director for Fluence, which was formed Jan. 2 and is based in Arlington, Va.

“The size of the target is an important recognition of the value of storage in the eastern U.S.,” Hohenstein told Bloomberg Environment. “Our hope is that it inspires and charts a path for other states, particularly in the eastern U.S., to be similarly ambitious in size and speed of storage adoption.”

If the state meets its energy-storage goal, New York is expected to represent about 15 percent of the total U.S. energy-storage market in 2025, Logan Goldie-Scot, head of energy storage analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told Bloomberg Environment.

Fluence was created as a way for AES Energy, which has experience developing projects in the U.S. and Latin America, and Siemens, which has European experience, to capture the global energy-storage market, Fluence Chief Operating Officer John Zahurancik said.

The company sees a quickly growing market in the U.S., as utilities to turn to batteries to help them replace aging power plants, used only during peak electricity demand. The batteries would be built alongside new wind and solar projects, he said.

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Autarsys GmbH is planning to develop an energy storage system and PV project in Mam Rashan, a refugee camp in the Dohuk district of northern Iraq near the Syrian and Turkish borders.

Autarsys’ energy storage system will be integrated with a 300kW PV project that will secure a more stable supply of power. The system’s energy management software will give camp administrators the ability to prioritise and schedule the delivery of power based on residents’ most critical needs.

While refugee camps are traditionally powered by diesel generators, diesel is more expensive than renewable energy and is dangerous to transport in a volatile region. The first phase of the project will have the capacity to power one portion of the camp at a time during the day.

Autarsys expects that the renewable energy system will be operable by spring 2018. Additional funding in the future may enable expansion of the system. The German company has developed and delivered a number of off-grid microgrid or ‘edge of grid’ projects pairing solar, energy storage and other resources including two in the Philippines, one at a resort, the other for a remote village, one for a remote village in Cameroon and another in Australia with Conergy Australia combining 13MWp of PV with 1.4MW / 5.3MWh of energy storage which is currently underway in Lakeland, Queensland.

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One of the best new markets for energy storage might not be in a state with a deregulated market and policies that favor renewable energy, but in Florida, a bastion of traditional, regulated utilities.

States like California, Texas, New York, Hawaii and Massachusetts have either competitive wholesale power markets or policies that support and encourage energy storage, or both, and are among the leaders in energy storage projects. Florida, in contrast, has virtually no energy storage projects. But that could change quickly.

Florida could see $230 million of investment in utility-owned battery systems by 2021, according to a report by researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

Projects approved or proposed for Florida Power & Light and Duke Energy Florida could make the state a prominent location for energy storage. But electricity rates that track the national average — providing less incentive for storage as a means to reduce demand charges — and a lack of regulatory mandates pose challenges for storage developers, the report said.

Dramatic market change

Florida’s market for energy storage has already changed dramatically, Rick Ferrera, one of the authors of the report, told Utility Dive. “The market is a lot different today than it was a year ago when we started the report.”

That shift is being driven by the falling costs of battery storage and a heightened awareness of the need to bolster grid resilience in the aftermath of last year’s hurricane season that brought the devastation of Irma and Maria, Ferrera said.

The report, Battery Energy Storage in Florida, was released by The School of Global Policy and Strategy at the UCSD.

It finds an existing positive investment case for behind-the-meter storage in Florida. The main driver, the authors say, is the ability of battery storage to offset demand charges for utility customers. The scenarios modeled in the report found several battery systems are already “in the money” under a variety of scenarios at the low end of current cost estimates. And, as lithium-ion battery prices fall, even more potential projects could become viable, according to the report.

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Leaders in the fledgling commercial and industrial (C&I) sector in the US have made energy storage ‘as-a-service’ the core of their proposition, a market analyst has said.

Julian Jansen, senior market analyst in energy storage at IHS Markit told Energy-Storage.News that his team’s latest work, looking at opportunities and business models in the behind-the-meter C&I space, which he said that to date has been “under-analysed”, for the most part.

In the US, C&I users of electricity, from retailers to factories are charged premiums for the portion of their power drawn from the grid during peak times on a monthly basis. These so-called demand charges can make up 50% of a C&I customer’s electricity bills in some cases. Storing energy in batteries and discharging them to mitigate those peaks is one way that energy storage companies can earn money. The customer pays a fee to the energy storage provider, who in turn commits to delivering bigger energy savings to the customer via demand charge reduction or management.

While C&I energy storage can also offer other benefits, such as backup power and resiliency, could increase or enable self-consumption of onsite solar generation or can be used by utilities as a capacity or grid services resource, the primary focus of IHS Markit’s analysis was on “techno-economic modelling” of the business case for demand charge management, as the current biggest business opportunity available.

Payback times for C&I installations in the US can be as short as one year, in some cases, although the analyst and his team were keen to point out that project economics vary greatly and can be customer-specific.

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Renewable generation deployments (primarily solar photovoltaic and wind farms) have grown substantially over the last decade and are forecast to continue growing well into the future. That’s thanks to lower costs and technological improvements leading to increased power output.

Indeed, the International Energy Association expects that average annual global renewable installations will be 80 percent higher than coal, oil and natural gas combined between 2017 and 2040. Separately, Navigant Research anticipates that wind and solar PV installations — both in front of and behind the meter — will surpass 1,500 gigawatts cumulatively between 2017 and 2026.

This is good news in terms of sustainability and greenhouse gas reduction activities. However, this massive influx of variable generation capacity can present issues for outdated electrical grids around the globe. Energy storage that supports renewables integration can help solve these issues by maintaining smooth, consistent power flow to the grid. As a result, renewable installations combined with energy storage are expected to make significant waves in the energy market well into the future.

Deployments of this nature can be divided into two large segments. The first category includes utility-scale solar PV and wind power plants (typically larger than 1 megawatt in capacity) combined with energy storage and capable of servicing entire communities. The second category includes behind-the-meter solar PV installations combined with energy storage that generally service individual commercial or residential buildings and are usually less than 1 MW in size.

Renewable, utility-scale power plants tied with energy storage will be a major force in the global energy market — but it is the behind-the-meter installations combining renewables with storage that will lead the way around the world over the next decade.

Consider these forecasts. Annual revenue for energy storage tied to utility-scale wind and solar is expected to reach $9.6 billion by 2026. Revenue for behind-the-meter installations, however, is expected to surpass $13 billion in the same timeframe.

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