Highview Power has partnered with TSK, an engineering and construction firm to develop large-scale cryogenic energy storage facilities.

The partners say that the technology could enable an immediate shift to renewables, rapidly speeding up the transition to sustainable energies.

Cryogenic energy storage uses low-temperature liquids such as liquid oxygen or nitrogen to store surplus power by using electricity to freeze them. When its required, stored energy is released by rapid heating, and the resultant gas turns a turbine to generate power.

The partnership, under the auspices of their joint venture Highway TSK, will develop multiple projects between 2019 and 2022 in Spain, South Africa and the Middle East.

Long term energy storage is growing in popularity with grid operators as it helps balance the grid, increase reliability and improve generation economics as the technology offers weeks-long storage potential, rather than hours or days.

Joaquín García Rico, CEO of TSK, said: “The technology is not only cost effective, it is scalable, clean, has a long lifespan and can be deployed now.”

Highview Power has already built and connected two cryogenic energy storage plants to the UK grid.

Walking around Energy Storage Europe this year, hoping that as a British citizen I won’t be needing a VISA to come back to Germany next year somehow, it was obvious that the show, like the market, has grown from a small handful of “strong believers” as one source put it, to a forward-looking show focused on a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario.

“We’re not in the discovery phase anymore, we’re almost in a run-of-the-mill phase,” Olivier Chabilan, product marketing manager of Skeleton Technologies says.

“The technology is already well implemented with the main key players, but there’s still a lot of people turning up [at the trade show]”, Chabilan said.

We heard from German trade association BVES’ senior expert in communications and markets Valeska Gottke that there’s a growing recognition that the aims of the country’s Energiewende cannot be achieved without “better system integration of energy storage technologies”. And not only in Germany, but across Europe and the whole world, there’s a growing recognition that business-as-usual scenarios will require a holistic view of the entire energy system – from power to energy, from grid to off-grid and from transport to heat to electricity.

From lithium to ultracaps to hydrogen… and beyond
Energy storage is increasingly being seen as a key cornerstone and enabler of the transition to renewable energy worldwide. Yet for the most part, we have seen the advanced energy storage market dominated by lithium-ion batteries. Trade events such as Energy Storage Europe, which encompasses both downstream and upstream topics, gives providers of competing – or complimentary – technologies, a chance to enter the conversation.

Skeleton Technologies is a maker of ultracapacitors and ultracapacitor-based energy storage systems and solutions. Ultracaps cost more upfront but can deal with aggressive cycling while delivering intense bursts of power to the grid. Skeleton Tech’s systems have been deployed at a project on the Scottish Isle of Eigg, where ultracaps work alongside an existing flywheel system, improving the flywheel’s reactivity.

Everyone is familiar with the saying about an ounce of prevention. California Professional Firefighters urge the Contractors State License Board (CSLB) to take a common sense, important action to help prevent avoidable fire hazards.

When it meets March 21 (tomorrow), we urge the CSLB to clarify regulations to ensure that only qualified, licensed and adequately trained electrical contractors are authorized to install battery energy storage systems.

Firefighters are increasingly reporting on the dangers these systems can cause with faulty installation or poor maintenance.

Battery energy storage systems are rechargeable battery systems that capture and store energy — from solar systems or the electric grid.

These systems act effectively as a mini-power plant. Because battery energy storage systems capture and store energy for later use, these systems are a key technology to help California meet our clean energy and emissions reduction goals and expand the adoption of solar, wind, and other clean energy sources.

More and more, these systems are being installed in our homes, schools, hospitals and businesses. However, if not installed and maintained correctly by qualified and licensed electrical contractors and electricians, battery energy storage systems pose unique fire, electrical and public safety risks to installers, consumers, utility workers, emergency personnel and firefighters.

Fires involving battery energy storage systems are particularly dangerous for firefighters as they burn at extreme heat, can react violently with water and can reignite even after being extinguished. Firefighters are increasingly reporting on the dangers these systems can cause with faulty installation or poor maintenance.

Can an income tax credit boost the market for behind-the-meter energy storage systems? Yes, but in Maryland’s experience that measure alone is not enough to unlock the market’s full potential.

In 2017, Maryland became the first state to pass legislation establishing an income tax credit for energy storage systems.

Last month, the Maryland Energy Administration (MEA) announced it was accepting applications for the state’s energy storage income tax credit for the 2019 tax year. The deadline for residential and commercial customers to submit applications is January 15, 2020.

This year, up to $750,000 is available ($300,000 for residential customers, $450,000 for commercial customers) on a first-come, first-served basis.

Tax credits are capped at 30 percent of the total installed system cost, or up to $5,000 for residential systems and up to $75,000 for commercial systems. Maryland’s energy storage income tax credit is funded at $750,000 annually through the 2022 tax year.

First-year program results
Given the program’s constraints (more on that below), program officials said they have been pleased with the results so far.

“We are encouraged with the performance of the program in year one, knowing that building on current energy storage technology is key to the State’s renewable energy future,” Mary Beth Tung, MEA director, said in a statement.

In 2018, in the program’s first year, 61 residential customers and one commercial customer in Maryland claimed the energy storage income tax credit.

GTM asked MEA officials why just one commercial customer took advantage of the tax credit last year.

On Monday, the Danish minister of education and research, Tommy Ahlers, attended the official inauguration of a giant pilot facility that will use 600 degree hot stones to store energy. Speaking to dr.dk, he said: “This could be the missing link in our renewable energy transformation.” (It’s arguable whether there really is a missing link, but that’s another story.) High-temperature thermal energy storage (HT-TES) is the technical term. The basic concept of the project is that cheap, non-degradable, and environmentally friendly storage materials combined with known charging and discharging technology can reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of energy storage.

Imagine a big box of small black stones, the size of an IKEA warehouse, insulated on all sides, very big, but very easy to build. The idea is that when excess energy is produced by intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar, this energy is used to pump very hot air into the stone storage, where the energy in the form of heat can be stored for many days with very little loss on average. The process is reversed by forcing the hot air out of the storage, which in turn creates steam from water to drive electricity-generating turbines and produce hot water for district heating.

For future theoretical storage in Denmark, the technical university DTU has identified storage needs of 10% of 1.4 GW baseload in 2035: 830 hours per year at full capacity (>300 MWh stored and released on average per day). Storage requirements are equivalent to 1 storage solution of 1.227 million cubic meters (e.g. 600 by 200 by 10 meters). The storage solution can be virtually invisible in the surroundings.

Energy company SEAS-NVE and the technical university DTU have built a small-scale test facility of this grand idea in collaboration with partners at Risø Campus, including Aarhus University, Danish Energy, Energinet.dk, EUDP (who has supported the project with research funding), and Rockwool. Niras has contributed to the work of constructing the plant. To Ritzau, Tommy Ahlers said:

Three bipartisan energy storage bills were introduced in Congress last week, but none would provide investment tax credits, which industry has sought to increase the competitiveness of the technology.

“I think the question, in our minds, is going to be do these folks see [storage ITC] as something that’s a near term concern or do they see this as something they want to put into a larger, longer conversation,” Jason Burwen, policy vice president at the Energy Storage Association, told Utility Dive.

The three storage bills, which focus on opportunities for loans and research in energy storage, come amid rising interest in the technology, with an increasing number of state targets, a new bipartisan storage caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives and increased funding in the President’s latest budget request.

Meanwhile, industry priorities like the ITC are competing with a host of other energy issues in Congress, including nuclear power, curbing emissions and the Green New Deal.

Hill rehashes support for storage

Last Wednesday, Reps. Mark Takano, D-Calif., and Chris Collins, R-N.Y., announced a new Advanced Energy Storage Caucus along with a package of battery storage bills previously introduced at the end of 2018 in the last Congress. The action is “one more signpost” on the path of continuing bipartisan interest in energy storage, according to Burwen.

WASHINGTON — Assistant Energy Secretary Bruce Walker said Thursday that the Department of Energy is planning a megawatt-scale “Storage Launchpad” that he predicted will cut the cost of energy storage dramatically.

Walker told attendees of the NERC Reliability Summit that funding for the initiative, which will be assigned to one of DOE’s 17 National Laboratories, is included in President Trump’s proposed fiscal 2020 budget, which was released March 11.

“We are going to build a facility … where we can leverage our focus on chemistry. So we’re looking at aqueous, non-aqueous redox equation-type batteries, zinc manganese oxide,” Walker said. “We’ve made some significant breakthroughs already in that space. We believe we’re going to be able to drive the cost down to basically 20% of what it is today over the next five years.”

The budget proposes $5 million for the Storage Launchpad and $15 million “to accelerate the conversion of the National Wind Testing Facility site into an experimental microgrid capable of testing grid integration at the megawatt scale.” The budget would cut funding for DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy by 70% and eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. Congress rejected similar proposals last year.

Daniel Gabaldon, director and co-founder of Enovation Partners, a Chicago-based consulting firm that does the data analysis for Lazard’s levelized cost of storage report, expressed some skepticism that a $5 million investment could produce such a dramatic return in battery technology but said DOE’s investment would be “a really healthy development.”

Although Enovation doesn’t track the technologies cited by Walker for Lazard, Gabaldon said the prediction of an 80% reduction is in line with claims of early-stage companies pursuing alternatives to lithium-ion technology.

“We’ve seen very dramatic claims, and it would be certainly helpful for the suppliers, as well as potential buyers, to substantiate those claims,” he said in an interview. “Whether it comes to pass, who knows?”

pv magazine Australia: We saw an extremely rapid expansion of the Australian PV market in 2018 – across all market segments. How confident are you that Australian market can sustain these rate of growth, or even an annual installation rate of around 3.5 GW into the future?

Shawn Qu: I would prefer the market to continue, with around 2-3 GW each year. But also, if we can bring energy storage online fast enough, then we would be able to provide a real 24/7 service, and we will be able to maintain the market at this level. I don’t like boom and bust cycles.

Looking at all of the [large scale] project development, there is something like 40-50 GW of projects being developed at present. I think 40-50 GW, Australia can take it, but certainly not in one year. That volume of installations should be carried out over 15-20 years. The pace of installation should be kept in line with the pace of decommissioning of the coal power plants. But for that, it will take 20-30 years.

Talking about energy storage, what is Canadian Solar’s engagement with storage?

We have a few engagements. A couple of years ago we won a contract in Canada in Ottowa to build a 5 MW energy storage facility – pure energy storage, no solar. This is for Ottowa Hydro. That project was awarded four or five years ago, but we are just commissioning it now. That shows how much of a learning curve both Canadian Solar, the utility and the equipment provider and integrator went through over this period. This project was slow, we learned, we will lose money for sure – but that’s ok, it’s a part of the R&D process and the experience gathering [process].

Last year we signed another PPA in California, this time for 185 MWh, or somewhere around that. It will be the largest solar-plus-energy storage project in California, and probably the second largest in the United States. We will deliver this before the end of 2020. That will give us very good experience in how to integrate a solar-plus-energy storage in an important market marketplace, and for a major utility.

As the number of medium- and large-scale energy storage deployments has grown, so too has the recognition that the soon-to-be gigawatts of battery assets coming online will have to be properly managed and will require robust operations and maintenance programs. But unlike the solar PV sector where there’s often an attitude of “let’s sell the project first and worry about O&M later,” storage projects must have services built in to the thinking and financial process from the beginning. Utilities and other savvy asset owners want to know what type of O&M will be provided, how the teams will be qualified, and how the services will be provided to ensure the productivity of their new system. In other words, with storage, a strong O&M plan and team become part and parcel of making and closing a strong productive deal.

Out of pocket, and out of luck?
There are some areas of overlap between the best practices of PV and storage O&M: in both cases, designing for serviceability promotes system health. Good installation using quality products is one of the best ways to hedge against subpar performance. Predictive maintenance backed by advanced data analytics is more cost effective than rolling trucks whenever there might be an issue. A warranty is only as good as the financial strength of the company behind it.

But to say that “services provided to storage systems do not radically vary from those provided to solar systems” would be misleading. In many ways, the stakes are higher with storage O&M and the financial risks that must be managed are more difficult than in solar. Storage O&M is significantly more complicated than its solar sibling—involving a broader range of components and subsystems as well as power distribution and load management issues—and requires a higher level of technical training and expertise among the workforce as well.

Why are the stakes higher? Because we are no longer just working with and servicing a component of a power plant such as a tracker, inverter or solar panel; with storage, we are now servicing many additional critical layers of the power plant. As storage O&M providers, it’s not just about the battery: We must have expertise in every piece of the system so that we can help manage the owner’s financial risk by ensuring the storage asset performs at its optimal level.

The German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt or DLR) is investigating whether Germany’s coal plants could be reused as energy storage assets.

The research body, which has a track record in concentrated solar power (CSP) development, is planning a pilot that will involve ripping out the boiler from an old coal plant and replacing it with a molten salt thermal storage tank that will be heated using excess renewable energy.

If the concept works, then advocates say it could help safeguard coal generation jobs while giving Germany tens of gigawatts of storage capacity for renewable energy load-shifting on the German grid.

Furthermore, a single pilot could be enough to prove the commercial viability of the concept, since the technology, described as a Carnot battery, is based on commercially available industrial components and standard engineering practices.

Dr. Michael Geyer, senior adviser at DLR’s Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics in Almeria, Spain, said the center is preparing a commercial-scale pilot in association with an unnamed German utility. A feasibility study for the pilot had already been awarded, he confirmed.

Geyer explained that engineering proposals would take 12 to 18 months and construction could take another year and a half, meaning the pilot plant could be up and running within three years. The pilot is being financed as a public-private initiative, he said.

“A commonsense application”
According to its website, DLR has been researching Carnot batteries since 2014. Experience with molten salt storage in CSP plants, meanwhile, stretches back almost a decade.