NYSERDA’s filing is “an enormously positive step” in the state’s deployment goals, Bill Acker, executive director of New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST), told Utility Dive. It will advance New York’s goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030 and shift to 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040, he said.

The plans follow Gov. Cuomo’s announcement earlier this month of new emissions regulations aimed at phasing out less efficient power plants and encouraging plant owners to replace the lost capacity with battery storage or other clean energy options. Along with the storage target, the state also wants to add 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035 and 6,000 MW of distributed solar by 2025.

Under NYSERDA’s plan, “incentives are offered at a fixed amount per AC kWh of usable storage capacity.”

Retail incentives can be applied to standalone or paired storage projects of 5 MW or less, considered on a first-come, first-serve basis, starting at $350/kWh and winding down as each funding block is filled.

Bulk incentive programs are offered in all state investor-owned utility service areas besides that of Consolidated Edison, which is running its own bulk incentive program. Projects under 20 MW will receive a projected $110/kWh, ramping down $10 each year until 2025, subject to market changes. Projects over 20 MW that will begin operation within the next two years will receive either $85/kWh or $75/kWh, depending on the class year.

According to Acker, the bulk market storage incentives were not included in the original January plan and were added in response to stakeholder input.

An energy storage system has been installed at the largest single-site solar park in the world.

The battery storage facility has been built at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park in Dubai and marks the first storage system to be twinned with a PV plant at a grid-scale level in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

NGK Insulators supplied the batteries and electrical engineering company Ingeteam was responsible for the supply of a 1.2 MW power conversion system with its medium voltage components, plus the power plant controller.

UAE utility Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA) want to evaluate the effectiveness of the storage system in stabilising grid fluctuations caused by the intermittency of renewables.

The storage system will be also used for energy time shifting, frequency control and voltage control by using the large capacity of the batteries.

The solar park is being built in phases, has a planned capacity of 1000 MW by 2020 and 5000 MW by 2030 and will use both photovoltaic and concentrated solar technologies.

The 13 MW first phase became operational in 2013 using PV panels, with a 200 MW second phase launched in March 2017. A further 800 MW of PV will be online by 2020.

The fourth phase of the solar park will be a concentrated solar park and will feature the tallest solar tower in the world at 260 metres.

This story originally appeared on our sister website, Electric Light & Power.

Insurer Munich Re has launched what it claims is the world’s first long-term insurance plan for battery performance, signing up ‘all-iron’ flow battery maker ESS Inc as its first customer.

One of the insurer’s management board, Peter Röder, described the ability to insure battery performance as a missing “key piece of the puzzle in decarbonising our energy sector”.

“For the first time, battery manufacturers can insure against the risk of their products not delivering as promised,” Röder said.

Aimed at major projects such as stationary storage systems deployed for grid stability or peak demand reduction applications, manufacturers will be able to give customers performance guarantees by backing their warranties for 10 years.

Munich Re claimed manufacturers can “unburden their balance sheets” because insurance will cover the cost of repair or replacement of defective battery modules that exceeds the agreed cover amount. The insurer said this should also make it easier to obtain project financing for stationary storage projects, by capping the maximum costs of warranties. Cover can be extended to individual projects, meaning customers are covered even in the event of manufacturer insolvencies.

Energy-Storage.news reached out for expert opinion and commentary on the launch and Munich Re’s claims – from both an independent advisory firm and an energy storage market research company – but did not receive replies in time for the publication of this story.

In order to stay reliable, the national grid needs large energy storage systems that use ‘consistent’ sources of energy.

Both wind turbines and solar power are great for consumers, and the environment. But because of their intermittent nature, they need to be backed up by battery storage.

And although we think of batteries as those little cylinders we buy in the supermarket, there are other ways to store the massive amounts of energy needed by the electricity grid as we use more renewable sources.

Let’s take a look at four ways we can store renewable energy to draw on later, after the sun has gone down and the wind dies.

Types of energy storage systems

Water storage with pumped hydro
Pumped hydro storage uses renewable electricity to pump dam water to a high reservoir. When needed, energy flows back down through turbines to turn the trapped energy into electricity again.

Two large hydro storage projects are under development in Australia – Snowy 2.0 and Hydro Tasmania.

The first will connect the Talbingo and Tantangara reservoirs with a 27-kilometre tunnel, costing between $1.9 and $2.25 million per megawatt.

Hydro Tasmania, on the other hand, will turn the state into the “battery of the nation”. It will pump hydro across 14 possible sites around the state at a lower build cost than Snowy 2.0.

The main difference is the storage capacity. Snowy 2.0 aims to store 175 hours’ worth of energy, while Hydro Tasmania could only hold between 8 and 36 hours.

Molten salt energy storage systems
In South Australia, a project called Aurora will use molten salt to generate and store energy. The project requires a 240-metre-tall tower in the centre of 12,000 heliostats, or mirrors, across 700 hectares.

The sparkling green hydrogen economy of the future is a long way off, but meanwhile scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel are hot on the trail of a hydrogen-based energy storage system that could resolve at least two significant obstacles: safety and cost.

Before we dive in the usual caveat applies: hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles are lagging far behind their battery-powered cousins in terms of mass market appeal, but hydrogen has innumerable other uses as a fuel and industrial chemical. The global race is on to produce, store, and transport renewable H2 at scale.

Mother Nature’s Energy Storage System

The next time you walk past your house plant, give it a thumbs-up for its ability to effortlessly store energy in the form of hydrogen without setting itself on fire or blowing itself up.

Here’s an explainer from our friends over at Science Daily:

…In biological cells, finely adjusted chemical compounds bind and release hydrogen to build up the chemical compounds needed by the cells. All these biological processes are catalyzed by enzymes.

The tricky part comes in where scientists try to replicate 700 million years of evolution within a few years of lab work, and translate that into an artificial system that can be scaled up to massive proportions.

Here Comes The Hydrogen Economy…
One interesting breakthrough occurred back in 2013 a research team at Virginia Tech developed an enzyme-based formula for extracting H2 from biomass, using the common plant sugar xylose as a springboard.

Our friends over at Wikipedia note that xylose comes in several forms. Here’s one that explains why researchers have been eyeballing plants for H2 production and energy storage: HOCH2(CH(OH))3CHO.

It’s undeniable that humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels needs to change if we are going to mitigate the disastrous impact of climate change. One of the best alternative energy sources is solar power because it is so plentiful–to meet the Earth’s current energy needs, we would only need .025% of the energy the sun emits every year. It’s also cheap: If you can put the infrastructure in place to collect and store it, the solar energy itself is free.

But incentivizing people to build that infrastructure remains a challenge. Ikea’s innovation lab Space10 is envisioning a new prototype for how solar energy could be installed in local communities and then shared on a small microgrid. The microgrid would enable people to sell their excess energy to others on a blockchain-powered platform. Called SolarVille, the idea came about because Space10 decided to do research into how solar energy might change people’s lives in the future. But it’s hard not to see the lab’s research in the context of Ikea’s larger sustainability goals and initiatives. For instance, one segment of Ikea’s business, a franchise called Ingka that runs Ikea stores in 30 countries, has pledged to bring affordable solar technology to homes in all of these markets by 2025. Ikea has also been selling solar panels in the U.K. since 2013 and launched a battery and solar panel kit in 2017, also in the U.K.

Right now, SolarVille is a 1:50 scale model village, where the homes are decked out with mini solar panels that harvest energy from the sun. All the buildings are hardwired together, creating a microgrid that enables everyone to share their energy. In the concept, some people will generate excess energy either by using less energy themselves or by installing more solar panels. A blockchain technology platform will enable them to sell that extra energy to their neighbors without any intermediary–instead, the transactions between neighbors are logged in a secure and transparent ledger. Space10 says that the design is meant to be easy to use and install, and all the software that runs the blockchain is free.

Part of the project is meant to lower the cost of energy, since the blockchain platform wouldn’t require a company in the middle. “Centralized energy systems are often too slow and economically inadequate to reach the billion people who remain locked in energy poverty,” Bas Van De Poel, creative director at Space10, tells Fast Company in an email, referring to the higher costs of traditional electricity and the infrastructure that would be required to bring it to under-powered areas. “SolarVille showcases that, when working in tandem, technologies such as solar panels, microgrids, and blockchain open new opportunities: off-grid systems allowing people to leapfrog traditional grid electricity.”

KACO new energy is now launching its first hybrid inverter onto the market and is offering it together with the battery and mains disconnector as a system from a single source.

KACO new energy presents its hybrid inverter for the first time at the Energy Storage Europe show in Düsseldorf. With the acquisition of the storage provider Energy Depot last autumn, the German PV pioneer secured the market-ready technology. The inverter is now available as blueplanet hybrid 10.0 TL3. It is aimed at operators of residential and small commercial solar PV systems that want to combine the advantages of solar energy with power storage.

The blueplanet hybrid 10.0 TL3 is the control center of the solar-powered energy storage system: It provides connections for battery, PV system and public power grid. Several batteries can be connected to the hybrid inverter — even as a retrofit. In this way, it can always be adapted to the energy demand. The new hybrid inverter provides three-phase grid feeding and compensates for fluctuations in consumption within 100 milliseconds. When it feeds electricity into the grid, it achieves an efficiency of 98%, and a high 97% when charging and discharging the batteries. In addition, the inverter has excellent partial load characteristics.

KACO new energy offers the blueplanet hybrid 10.0 TL3 together with battery and mains disconnector as a complete package under the name blueplanet hy-store. It is the only storage system on the market that can also set up a three-phase stand-alone grid with a full 10 kilowatts of power. The next development stage envisages automatic island switching to enable reliable emergency power operation. This functionality is to be implemented by a software update.

In many electric utility markets, policymakers are exploring the next generation of renewable energy policies that will deliver the most value given the new reality of low-cost solar PV, wind and energy storage. Policies that encourage energy storage to be paired with solar or wind generation can have an outsized impact because these grid assets can together deliver firm capacity into peak periods when customer costs are the highest. If implemented effectively, the results are lower costs for ratepayers, increased resiliency and reduced emissions.

A Clean Peak Standard (CPS) is a relatively new policy tool that can increase the share of renewable energy resources used to meet peak demand. Now is the ideal time to implement Clean Peak Standards in the U.S. because there is a significant amount of peaking capacity that is over 40 years old, as shown in Figure 1. Over the next 20 years, about 152 GW of peaking capacity is expected to retire. For example, in North and South Carolina, 1.61 GW of winter peaking capacity is scheduled to retire by 2028 according to Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress.

Arizona and California have proposed a CPS, and in 2018 Massachusetts became the first state to establish a CPS requiring the delivery of a minimum percentage of kilowatt-hour sales from clean peak resources during system peak demand periods. Building upon these efforts, Energy Intelligence Partners (EIP) has developed a new CPS concept that improves the traditional CPS. It leverages the improving economics of energy storage (ES) to address the limitations of renewables and will help create a truly reliable clean grid.

ES has the capability to address the main drawback of renewable energy — its intermittency — and turn renewable energy resources into truly dispatchable assets. EIP developed an ES-centric CPS for North Carolina’s regulated monopoly electricity market, but it can be a model for other states with similar energy markets.

The energy storage-centric CPS (CPS-ES) requires that renewable energy generation is paired with ES. A portion of power delivered during designated peak periods must be generated by renewable energy and delivered by some combination of the renewable energy generator and paired ES. This means that unlike other CPS programs, generators are not just incentivized to deliver during peak periods, they are required.