Record low clearing prices in the UK’s recently-held T-1 Capacity Market auction have rendered the mechanism unfit for purpose, while meeting its minimum requirements could seem “fatally onerous” for battery storage developers, voices around the energy industry have said.

Last week the T-1 auction concluded, clearing at a record low price of just £0.77/kW. Those economics made it significantly challenging for new generators to compete, and just one new-build battery storage project – Centrica’s 49.99MW Roosecote project – was successful in obtaining a contract.

Quentin Scrimshire, head of energy storage at Kiwi Power, said the latest prices didn’t achieve the mechanism’s purpose, and instead only served to reward larger generators that would already be generating throughout the winter.

“The whole mind-set around the Capacity Market has changed from being a mechanism that would drive investment to just a handout from the government on top of your standard operational case,” Scrimshire said.

It’s not the first time that questions have been asked about the Capacity Market and its ability to meet its objectives. When the T-4 clearing price dropped to £6/kW last year, triggering large quantities of new capacity to exit the auction, industry professionals labelled the mechanism “outdated” and decried de-rating factors which had left it in a “state of flux”.

Low prices a disappointment for clean energy technologies
While the T-1 is indeed a top-up auction – Tom Edwards, senior modeller at Cornwall Insight, said it was ultimately “neither here nor there” for generating plant – the low prices have still been disappointing for clean technologies hoping to compete against dirtier counterparts.

Ameresco has completed the construction of a comprehensive energy resiliency and energy infrastructure project at the United States Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) Parris Island, South Carolina.

The US$91 million project, which required no upfront capital from the Marine Corps depot, features distributed energy systems designed to withstand potential storm and seismic conditions. The distributed generation, energy storage, and secure microgrid controls that Ameresco designed and installed at Parris Island have dramatically enhanced the site’s resilience, giving the installation the capacity to sustain its critical training operations when the local grid is out of commission.

This project, which features an 8 MWh battery energy storage system, will save US$6.9 million in annual utility and operational costs, cut utility energy demand by 75%, and lower water consumption by 25%.

MCRD Parris Island signed off on an energy savings performance contract (ESPC) for this installation, which leverages private capital through a Department of Energy contract vehicle back in 2015 with the competitive selection of Ameresco.

Ameresco then replaced an aging central plant with a 3.5MW combined heat and power (CHP) plant and three diesel generators for backup generation, along with installaing 20,000 solar modules at carport and ground-mount sites that provide 5.5MW of power generation.

Nicole Bulgarino, executive vice president at Ameresco, said: “Resiliency at MCRD Parris Island means providing uninterruptible power in support of critical training operations. Distributed generation systems like the comprehensive solution we have just built there deliver a layered defense against threats to the power supply.

“Ameresco is proud to partner with the USMC to lead by example and demonstrate how a military installation can both reduce energy and enhance resiliency with this unique contract vehicle.”

Researchers have created an ink made of graphene nanosheets, and demonstrated that the ink can be used to print 3-D structures. As the graphene-based ink can be mass-produced in an inexpensive and environmentally friendly manner, the new methods pave the way toward developing a wide variety of printable energy storage devices.

The researchers, led by Jingyu Sun and Zhongfan Liu at Soochow University and the Beijing Graphene Institute, and Ya-yun Li at Shenzhen University, have published a paper on their work in a recent issue of ACS Nano.

“Our work realizes the scalable and green synthesis of nitrogen-doped graphene nanosheets on a salt template by direct chemical vapor deposition,” Sun told Phys.org. “This allows us to further explore thus-derived inks in the field of printable energy storage.”

As the scientists explain, a key goal in graphene research is the mass production of graphene with high quality and at low cost. Energy-storage applications typically require graphene in powder form, but so far production methods have resulted in powders with a large number of structural defects and chemical impurities, as well as nonuniform layer thickness. This has made it difficult to prepare high-quality graphene inks.

In the new paper, the researchers have demonstrated a new method for preparing graphene inks that overcomes these challenges. The method involves growing nitrogen-doped graphene nanosheets over NaCl crystals using direct chemical vapor deposition, which causes molecular fragments of nitrogen and carbon to diffuse on the surface of the NaCl crystals. The researchers chose NaCl due to its natural abundance and low cost, as well as its water solubility. To remove the NaCl, the coated crystals are submerged in water, which causes the NaCl to dissolve and leave behind pure nitrogen-doped graphene cages. In the final step, treating the cages with ultrasound transforms the cages into 2-D nanosheets, each about 5-7 graphite layers thick.

The resulting nitrogen-doped graphene nanosheets have relatively few defects and an ideal size (about 5 micrometers in side length) for printing, as larger flakes can block the nozzle. To demonstrate the nanosheets’ effectiveness, the researchers printed a wide variety of 3-D structures using inks based on the graphene sheets. Among their demonstrations, the researchers used the ink as a conductive additive for an electrode material (vanadium nitride) and used the composite ink to print flexible electrodes for supercapacitors with high power density and good cyclic stability.

Failing to create an investment tax credit as part of the ongoing tax extenders legislation, a coalition of clean energy trade bodies in the US have urged.

As it stands, this year’s tax extenders will add a further year to wind power’s Production Tax Credit, but calls for the bipartisan Energy Storage Tax Incentive and Deployment Act (H.R. 2096) to be rolled in have been ignored.

Writing to Representative Richard Neal (D-MA), chairman of the Committee on Ways & Means, the group said the storage ITC offered a short-term jobs boost and a contribution to addressing the climate crisis.

“While members of the Democratic caucus debate how to address the climate crisis, the Ways & Means Committee has an opportunity to take a significant step forward by incorporating clean energy tax credits into forthcoming legislation,” the letter dated June 18 reads.

“H.R. 2096 will ensure a level playing field for energy storage as a standalone asset alongside all other energy resources made eligible for Section 48 & 25D investment tax credits (“ITC”). Resolving the uncertainty facing companies who seek to utilize the ITC for energy storage will not only spur greater investment and create jobs among a diversity of industries, but also it will accelerate the U.S. transition to zero-carbon electric supply.

“We encourage you to not miss this opportunity. Fixing ITC eligibility for standalone energy storage is among the nearest-term opportunities to advance clean energy in this Congress.”

The letter was sent on behalf of American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), Energy Storage Association (ESA), National Hydropower Association (NHA), Northeast Clean Energy Council (NECEC), RENEW Northeast and the Solar Energy Business Association of New England (SEBANE).

After fires were started at a reported 23 battery energy storage installations in South Korea during 2018, the government and a national standards committee have discovered the causes but have so far declined to engage with the international press on the matter.

Energy-Storage.news has been tracking progress since rumours and then more solid reports began flying around over the past few months that during 2018, lithium-ion battery energy storage systems, deployed rapidly over the past few years, have been catching fire.

South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, and the national Standards Committee were reported by local news outlets to have held a press briefing a week ago, revealing that in nearly every case the issue appears to have been poor management of batteries, rather than anything inherently unsafe in the batteries themselves. At one stage at the beginning of the year, a source passed on to Energy-Storage.news a note issued by manufacturer LG Chem to customers which requested customers to stop operating their systems until “a decision is made to restart the operation”, with other manufacturers similarly affected.

The ministry has issued a release in Korean, while Energy-Storage.news has requested further information from both the ministry and standards committee but is yet to receive a reply several days later. Similarly, when requested for comment back in May, the US office of battery maker LG Chem refused to handle the matter, deferring back to corporate HQ in Korea but claiming to be unable to contact or obtain comment from there. Direct requests to that HQ have yet to be acknowledged. Both Samsung SDI and LG Chem, among the country’s biggest players have taken a big financial hit based on one-off costs of dealing with the safety issue.

One of the most exciting innovations in energy over the past decade has been the development of energy storage technology. Batteries have become viable for almost every size project, from homes to the largest utilities.

In 2018, 311 megawatts (MW) and 777 megawatt-hours (MW-hr) of energy storage were installed in the U.S., according to Wood Mackenzie and the Energy Storage Association’s Energy Storage Monitor. The cumulative installations could power 75,000 homes for an entire year, and they’re just the start of the industry’s growth.

Energy storage plans are exploding
777 MW-hr of energy storage is a lot, but it’ll soon be dwarfed by a few projects. Earlier this month, the Gemini Solar Project in Nevada revealed plans to build a 531 MW/2,125 MW energy storage facility to accompany a 690 MW solar power plant. The project could then smooth out the electricity offered to the grid to include peak evening hours, when solar intensity falls but electricity demand jumps.

In Florida, NextEra Energy’s (NYSE:NEE) utility Florida Power & Light is planning a 409 MW/900 MW-hr facility that will be co-located with a solar power plant. In Hawaii, six projects were recently approved by regulators totaling 247 MW/998 MW-hr of energy storage. They will be paired with 247 MW of solar power plants, all of which will deliver electricity to the grid at $0.10 per kWh, or less, which is lower than the cost of fossil fuels on the island. Solar and energy storage have disrupted Hawaiian utility company Hawaiian Electric Industries (NYSE:HE) but Hawaiian Electric is (slowly) learning to use solar and energy storage assets to its advantage rather than fight renewable energy under its jurisdiction.

It’s no coincidence that energy storage is booming in scale right now. There’s a need in the market to curb the volatility of wind and solar energy production, and battery costs have now come down far enough that energy storage with batteries is economical.

The small-scale market that’s starting to sprout
It’s not just large energy storage projects that are gaining traction. Storage is being attached to residential and commercial solar projects in growing numbers. SunPower (NASDAQ:SPWR) says that over one-third of its commercial solar projects now have energy storage included.

On the residential side, Sunrun (NASDAQ:RUN), Vivint Solar (NYSE:VSLR), and SunPower are all offering energy storage for homeowners. The numbers are small, with only 15,000 home storage systems installed in 2018, but they’re growing in market share and could be included in standard solar systems in the next few years.

One of the major issues faced by the companies in the C&I sector is the downtime caused due to power outages. Even a small disruption in the supply of electricity in hospitals and nursing facilities can put lives at risk. Instances of power outages are resulting in significant losses for manufacturing companies as they are missing the timelines in delivering products to their customers. Power outages have led several manufacturing plants to shut down across the world. In December 2017, Delta Air Lines Inc. incurred a significant loss due to a power outage. Such financial catastrophes and business downtimes are creating a pressing requirement for investment in energy storage to overcome problems associated with power outages. This growing need for backup power is expected to drive the growth of the global decentralized energy storage market over the forecast period at a CAGR of over 18%. However, the market’s momentum will decelerate in the coming years because of the decrease in year-over-year growth.

Market Overview

Growing economic benefits of ESS

End-users are adopting ESS to store energy rather than depending on the power grid during peak power demand. This results in huge monetary savings as they reduce the peak demand charges they pay. Owing to such benefits, the demand for ESS is expected to increase over the forecast period and subsequently drive the growth of the global decentralized energy storage market size.

Stringent laws against lead pollution

Lead-acid batteries, that is one of the electrochemical energy storage technologies, contains sulfuric acid which is dumped in landfills contaminate groundwater reserves and drinking water supplies. Such improper disposal of the used lead-acid batteries is driving many countries to introduce stringent laws on the production and disposal of lead-acid batteries to reduce the risk of lead poisoning. For instance, China recently shut down many lead-acid battery plants and enforced strict regulations for the production of lead-acid batteries. This is expected to have a negative impact on the growth of the global decentralized energy storage market.

For the detailed list of factors that will drive and challenge the growth of the decentralized energy storage market size during 2019-2023, view our report.

Competitive Landscape

The market appears to be fairly fragmented with several players occupying the market share. Companies such as CALMAC and Fluence Energy LLC have intensified the competition. Factors such as the rising need for backup power and the growing economic benefits of ESS will provide significant growth opportunities for decentralized energy storage companies. CALMAC, Fluence Energy LLC, LG Chem Ltd., NEC Corp., NGK Insulators Ltd., and SENER Ingeniería y Sistemas SA are some of the major companies covered in this report.