Equinor and Hanon Systems have joined the Volta Energy Technologies global energy storage investor consortium, it was recently announced. Equinor is an international energy company and Hanon is a global automotive supplier. Volta CEO Jeff Chamberlain answered some questions for CleanTechnica about the new additions.

What benefits result from organizing and managing this type of consortium?

By acting as a syndicate, Volta and our investors have the opportunity to jointly shape the interconnected energy system of the future. By working together to gain early insight into potentially breakthrough technologies, our investors, who will be the users of the products created by our portfolio companies or suppliers to those companies, will be able to stay ahead of their competition and ensure that the technologies Volta pursues will have a home in the marketplace.

What do the new members bring to the consortium?

Volta’s strategic investors have unique interests and needs; however, developments in batteries and energy storage technology have the potential to disrupt all investors’ businesses by fundamentally shifting the way we produce, store and use electricity. Participating in Volta puts investors in a place to drive — instead of follow — massive, industry-wide changes. With the addition of Equinor and Hanon Systems, Volta’s investors represent a fuller spectrum of the energy storage value chain, from energy production and supply, to the use of storage in vehicles and on the electric grid.

Why is cross-sector collaboration beneficial?

Cross-sector collaboration with corporations – particularly those with strategic interest in energy storage and batteries – is a hallmark of Volta’s model. Batteries and energy storage, interconnected and in multiple applications, are central to the energy system of the future, so Volta’s scope includes any hardware, software, materials, or manufacturing process that enable the ubiquitous adoption of batteries for electric vehicles and storage for renewable power generation. Each Volta strategic investor participates in a working group that meets regularly to discuss the opportunities in Volta’s pipeline. Volta prioritizes its efforts based on the feedback from this group to ensure we are squarely focused on investors’ strategic and financial needs.

Top energy companies — including GE Energy Storage, Panasonic, LG Chem Power and Duke Energy — joined the Energy Storage Association today to make safety a priority when manufacturing and operating energy storage systems.

ESA formally launched the Energy Storage Industry Corporate Responsibility Initiative and pledge at its Annual Energy Storage Conference & Expo in Phoenix. To date, 30 companies have signed the pledge, emphasizing their commitment to the well-being and safety of consumers. At the conference, ESA and the signatory companies launched a task force to develop best practices for potential operational hazard prevention, end-of-life recycling and responsible supply-chain practices.

“The U.S. energy storage market nearly doubled in 2018 and is expected to double again in 2019, so this marks an ideal time for the industry to demonstrate their commitment to corporate responsibility,” said ESA CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman. “Representing the national trade association and the voice of the energy storage industry, I can say unequivocally that the industry stands ready to tackle the topics outlined in the Corporate Responsibility Initiative in a proactive and direct manner.”

Vistra and environmentalists disagree on whether the utility’s coal plants are needed for reliability.

Last spring, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Sierra Club released a report that found retiring eight of the utilities coal plants in the Midcontinent ISO (MISO) Zone 4 could save ratepayers $14 billion without impacting reliability. But the utility maintains the coal plants are necessary.

“There are many challenges to operating power plants in Illinois, from longstanding and unresolved capacity market design flaws to delays in regulatory updates and other economic pressures,” Curt Morgan, president and CEO of Vistra and its Illinois subsidiaries, said in a statement.

The legislation establishes a “reasonable and achievable path” to transition existing coal plants to renewable resources, he said.

Through its subsidiaries, Vistra has nearly 5,500 MW of capacity that accounts for 40% of MISO Zone 4’s summer capacity. The company says 75% of its capacity in the region is at risk of closing by the end of this year “due to a number of factors.”

But environmental groups oppose the legislation for a variety of reasons, according to J.C. Kibbey, a clean energy advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“The way it’s being marketed is pretty misleading,” he told Utility Dive. “It’s lipstick on a pig. Vistra uses the word ‘transition’ over and over again, I think hoping people wont notice this is a coal bailout.”

The report last year, issued with the Sierra Club, concluded energy supply in southern and central Illinois would be secure, “even with the closure of these plants,” he said.

An online map developed by the Consortium for Battery Innovation (CBI) has identified the location of more than 120 lead-battery storage projects worldwide.

The CBI published the map as part of the lead-up to the Energy Storage Association’s annual conference, which is being held this week in Phoenix, Arizona. The map features operational storage systems on every continent except South America. It even pinpoints the location of a 400 kWh system – powered by batteries supplied by Berlin-based Younicos, now part of the Aggreko group – at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.

“We are seeing growing interest in lead-battery energy storage for utility and renewables systems all over the world,” said CBI director Alistair Davidson. “The aim of this initiative is to highlight some of these installations and encourage companies to share other examples. Our analysis suggests demand for battery energy storage will increase significantly in the next five years. This new tool will allow us to demonstrate that the latest lead-battery technology is supporting a wide range of installations with reliable, safe, sustainable and cost-effective energy storage.”

Village mini grids included

By drawing on case studies, the map gives detailed information on how lead-battery storage systems are supporting renewables projects globally. The map includes a number of systems serving as back-up for small local grids.

The online tool also lists a handful of off-grid installations powering isolated communities, including an 18 kWh microgrid in Nigeria. That installation – powered by batteries supplied by California-based Trojan Battery – was built with Green Village Electricity Projects, a Nigerian PV mini grid developer. The project is providing electricity to 260 homes and 60 businesses in the small village of Bisanti.

CBI’s interactive map also lists battery storage installations in Australia, a hotbed for global deployment. A report by Bloomberg NEF in January predicted more than 70,000 energy storage systems will be installed in the country’s residential segment alone this year. With Australian storage demand set to triple, the nation is expected to account for 30% of global demand by the end of the year.

Subsidiaries of state-run energy conglomerate China Energy Engineering Corp have started constructing two major solar plants and one of the largest energy storage systems in China, according to filings on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (HKEX).

China Energy Engineering Group Shanxi Electric Power Engineering has started building a 500MW solar PV project, split between two separate 250MW plants, located in Licheng County and Pingshun County in Shanxi Province. No further details were provided in the filing.

Meanwhile, China Energy Engineering Group Jiangsu Electric Power Design Institute has started building a huge energy storage system in Jiangbei New District, Nanjing, in Jiangsu Province.

The 130.88MW / 268.6 MWh grid-side electrochemical energy storage system is claimed by the company to have the largest capacity and the highest power in China, but no further details were released on the specific storage technology – presumably lithium-ion batteries – being used for the two-hour duration system.

China is underway in building massive flow battery projects as well as lithium-ion energy storage, with policy initiatives including a nationwide strategy on energy storage and market dynamics including regional high penetrations of renewable energy and coal power station retirements or efficiency upgrades among the drivers for adoption. In February, Energy-Storage.news reported that lithium battery company CATL had deployed a 100MWh battery storage system at a mixed renewables plant, Luneng Haixi Multi-mixed Energy Demonstration Project, while

China, alongside the US, will account for more than half of the global energy storage market by 2024, according to a recent report from Wood Mackenzie.

Researchers from Drexel University and Trinity College in Ireland, have created ink for an inkjet printer from a highly conductive type of two-dimensional material called MXene. Recent findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that the ink can be used to print flexible energy storage components, such as supercapacitors, in any size or shape.

Conductive inks have been around for nearly a decade and they represent a multi-hundred million-dollar market that is expected to grow rapidly into the next decade. It’s already being used to make the radiofrequency identification tags used in highway toll transponders, circuit boards in portable electronics and it lines car windows as embedded radio antennas and to aid defrosting. But for the technology to see broader use, conductive inks need to become more conductive and more easily applied to a range of surfaces.

Yury Gogotsi, Ph.D., Distinguished University and Bach professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who studies the applications of new materials in technology, suggests that the ink created in Drexel’s Nanomaterials Institute is a significant advancement on both of these fronts.

“So far only limited success has been achieved with conductive inks in both fine-resolution printing and high charge storage devices,” Gogotsi said. “But our findings show that all-MXene printed micro-supercapacitors, made with an advanced inkjet printer, are an order of magnitude greater than existing energy storage devices made from other conductive inks.”

While researchers are steadily figuring out ways to make inks from new, more conductive materials, like nanoparticle silver, graphene and gallium, the challenge remains incorporating them seamlessly into manufacturing processes. Most of these inks can’t be used in a one-step process, according to Babak Anasori, Ph.D., a research assistant professor in Drexel’s department of Materials Science and Engineering and co-author of the MXene ink research.

Renewable energy has come a long way in the last decade and that’s good for all of us. But a successful clean energy market and smart power grid can only go as far as advances in energy storage can take us.

With that in mind, U.S. Sens. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., introduced legislation Thursday that would expand the investment tax credit (ITC) to include standalone energy storage investments. As it is now, only a small subset of energy storage projects co-located with solar are eligible.

Why does this matter?

First, by making investment in energy storage more attractive it helps to increase the efficiency and decrease the costs of how energy companies generate and deliver electricity for all technologies.

Any energy company — whether powered by solar, wind or gas — can use energy storage to provide electricity more reliably and efficiently for their customers. By storing the electricity that’s generated and saved until it’s needed, energy storage can optimize grid operations. But because only some energy storage projects — those paired with solar — qualify for the tax credit there are limits to innovation in this space.

Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle support an “all of the above” strategy to energy, and the Gardner-Heinrich legislation helps accomplish just that.

Second, the tax credit would spur new investment in energy storage as a rapidly growing clean energy industry that already supports tens of thousands of jobs.

Businesses need policy clarity and certainty before making long-term investment decisions. The demand is already there. Consumers increasingly care about where their electricity comes from. They want clean and affordable energy options. And the power grid needs to be reliable as our economy becomes more electrified and digitalized, with more devices connected and using electricity.

Energy companies can meet this challenging demand with energy storage, but the current tax code is holding them back.

Take, for example, a business planning to spend $100,000 per year over the next 10 years on energy storage development. If that business could access the ITC, it could potentially save $148,000 on its $1 million investment over the life of the project.

Electrical and heat storage using specially nanocoated salt (NCS) could be economically competitive with pumped hydro, SaltX has said, with a large-scale demonstration facility inaugurated in Berlin, Germany.

Headquartered in Sweden, SaltX has been “working with salts for 15 years”, the company’s marketing director Eric Jacobson told Energy-Storage.news today. This specific application for the salt-based energy storage technology has been in development since customers began expressing an interest in seeing it scaled up a couple of years ago, Jacobson said.

Last Thursday, SaltX and its project partner Vattenfall inaugurated the first 10MWh system based on the technology, in Spandau, Berlin. The pilot plant has an output of 0.5MW, Jacobson said, with energy utility Vattenfall installing the system at one of its combined heat and power (CHP) plants, Reuter-C.

“It’s been known for a while that you can store energy in salt, and there’s been two problems with doing that,” Jacobson said.

“First, the salt is highly corrosive so the application itself has been really expensive because you need special material as the salt starts to corrode the metal and eventually it will be destroyed. Secondly, when you are discharging this thermal battery the salt content has agglomerated, started to lump together. So after 60 cycles you lose the properties of the salt and it starts to not be so efficient.”

Claiming to have solved this problem by applying a proprietary material – patented as far back as 2013 – as a nanocoating to salt crystals, which prevents this corrosion and the agglomeration, Jacobson said that it will require tanks of inexpensive metal to store the material, without the need for pressurisation inside. SaltX claims this will make the technology easier to scale up to larger and larger capacities of storage.

“We use a technology where, it’s similar to an engine and a fuel tank, so the salt is the fuel and it’s really easy to scale this tank up and then we have a reactor or engine where we can take out the energy or the power.

“Whether we want 10MWh or 100MWh of storage, that’s not a big deal for us. That’s one of our advantages.”