A new study has predicted the energy storage industry will grow to employ millions by 2050, fuelling a renewables jobs boom as fossil fuel industries shed millions of workers.

Renewables will grow to host 80% of all direct energy sector jobs by 2050 – from 28% in 2015 – as the fossil fuel and nuclear industries decline worldwide from a 70% to a 3% share over the period, according to scientists from Finland’s Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT).

In a new report, the researchers predicted energy storage alone could create up to 4.5 million new jobs by 2050, helped along by the world’s shift to a fully renewable electricity system in line with climate change goals. For its part, solar would add a workforce of new 22.2 million employees.

The Finland-based team styled their research as the first ever to offer long-term employment forecasts for energy storage worldwide. Using what they termed the “LUT Energy System Transition modelling tool”, they produced estimates around the jobs energy storage will create across all key regions, including Europe (277,000), North America (330,000) and Subsaharan Africa (862,000).

“The results indicate that job losses in fossil fuels and nuclear power sectors are more than outweighed by the job creation in renewable power generation and storage sectors,” the scientists said, predicting the segment to create around 17% of all new energy jobs already by 2030.

VC funding of battery storage companies increased 103% from $850 million in 2018 to $1.7 billion in 2019, according to Mercom’s report. The sector received $2.8 billion in total corporate funding last year, including debt and public market financing, up from $1.3 billion in 2018.

In an email to Utility Dive, Mercom CEO Raj Prabhu noted that VC funding has been rising for three years. The 2019 increase follows a 96% increase from 2016 to 2017 and a 20% increase from 2017 to 2018, he said.

VCs contributed nearly 61% of total corporate funding for energy storage, compared to about 12% of the total corporate funding for solar, according to Mercom.

The report also looked at corporate funding for the energy efficiency and smart grid sectors, such as technologies that allow utilities to automatically deal with distribution grid problems. For smart grid companies, VC funding was down from $530 million in 2018 to $300 million in 2019, and total corporate funding for the sector was down from $1.8 billion in 2018 to $372 million in 2019.

Funding for energy efficiency dipped more dramatically. VC funding for energy efficiency was $1.5 billion in 2018, thanks to a $1.1 billion deal from Silicon Valley-based company View, which designs “smart” windows to allow more daylight into buildings like office spaces. In 2019, VC funding fell to $298 million, while total corporate funding for the sector falling from $1.7 billion in 2018 to over $670 million in 2019.

“Funding for the smart grid sector has been inconsistent but the funding decline in 2019 has been the steepest in the past five years,” Prabhu said. “Financing for energy efficiency companies has been on a downward trend over the past five years except for 2018, when one large billion-dollar deal skewed the numbers.”

Lithium-ion batteries, the most popular form of battery storage by far, accounted for $1.4 billion of the $1.7 billion in VC funding for storage, but Mercom noted that many other forms of storage received funding, including flow batteries, compressed air energy storage, fuel cells, liquid metal batteries, thermal energy storage, solid-state batteries, sodium batteries and zinc-air batteries.

The storage companies bringing in the most VC investment in 2019, according to the report, were Northvolt, a Swedish designer and manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries and battery systems, with a $1 billion deal, followed by the U.S. firm Sila Nanotechnologies with $170 million and $45 million in two separate deals. Energy Vault had the fourth-biggest deal with a $110 million investment from SoftBank’s Vision. Based in Switzerland, Energy Vault’s technology uses the force of gravity generated by lowering concrete blocks from a tower as a form of energy storage.

California regulators have finalized plans to direct more than half a billion dollars in behind-the-meter battery incentives over the next four years to customers most at risk of being impacted by the state’s increasingly deadly wildfires and the grid outages meant to prevent them.

The decision from the California Public Utilities Commission finalizes a proposal pushed ahead last month as a response to the state’s wildfire and blackout crisis. Its vehicle is the Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP), the state’s premier incentive for energy storage and on-site generation technologies, which will now direct 63 percent of its $830 million in new funding through 2024 to a newly created “equity resilience budget.”

This, along with $100 million in previous funds, adds up to about $613 million through 2024 that will be set aside for low-income, medically vulnerable and other select groups of disadvantaged residents who live in Tier 2 and 3 “High Fire Threat Districts” spread across the state. It’s also open to customers who aren’t in those zones if they’ve experienced two discrete “public safety power shutoff” (PSPS) events, like the multiday blackouts that left millions of customers of bankrupt utility Pacific Gas & Electric without power this fall.

Critical facilities, ranging from fire stations and nursing homes to cell towers and supermarkets serving remote communities, can also qualify for this budget. But the CPUC’s decision reserves the most generous subsidies available from the SGIP program — $1 per watt-hour, or enough to almost completely cover the upfront costs of a typical residential solar-storage system — for residents who could face serious deprivation or even death due to multiday PSPS events.

Under last week’s decision, these customers will be allowed to exceed SGIP’s limits on sizing of residential storage systems to allow them to choose the next step up in modular battery-solar offerings on the market if that’s needed to support their longer-duration backup needs. They’ll also be allowed to include electrical and circuit load panel and wiring upgrades in the costs.

California’s investor-owned utilities, which administer the system for vendors to apply for and receive SGIP grants, have been asked to speed up the typical process from more than 90 days to less than 60 days, in order to assure that systems can be in place for the 2020 fire season.

SGIP’s budget for its remaining existing categories will be cut to pay for this new focus. That’s a potential challenge for companies that have relied on the incentive to boost the business case for behind-the-meter battery projects.

In the last 15 years, the increase in renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic and wind energy has accelerated significantly. At the same time, manufacturing and installation costs, especially for PV systems, have fallen significantly, making this energy source one of the cheapest and cleanest forms of energy, depending on the location. With the increase of fluctuating renewable energies in an electrical grid, the need for compensation possibilities at times when renewable energies are not available increases [1]. One possibility is the use of electrochemical energy storage such as lithium-ion, lead-acid, sodium-sulphur or redox-flow batteries. Additionally, combinations of hydrogen electrolysis and fuel cells can be used [2]. Batteries can be adapted in a flexible and decentralised manner depending on the respective requirements and are scaleable from a few kW/kWh for e.g. domestic storage up to systems of several MW/MWh for grid storage. The different types of electrochemical energy storage systems have different physical/chemical properties, which affect the cost of the system. It is important to note that the cost of the storage system over its lifetime (levelised cost of storage – LCOS) is a critical factor used in selecting the most suitable system for a particular application [3]. For example, the investment costs for lead-acid batteries are significantly lower than for all other technologies, but the service life is very short.

Technologies with similar investment costs at higher lifetimes result in a lower levelised cost of storage, but to be precise additional factors such as recycling, energy efficiency and maintenance costs have to be considered. A battery with a high efficiency, low recycling effort, low investment and maintenance costs and great freedom of scalability to meet the requirements of the application would be an ideal system. In electrical networks there are different storage time requirements: short-term storage, medium-term storage and long-term storage. The shorter the storage time, the more suitable are physical storage devices such as capacitors. Batteries are suitable for applications ranging from a few minutes to several hours. In addition, mass storage systems such as electrochemical hydrogen generation (power-to-gas) are particularly suitable for long-term storage of several weeks.

Redox flow principles
All electrochemical energy storage systems convert electrical energy into chemical energy when charging, and the process is reversed when discharging. With conventional batteries, the conversion and storage take place in closed cells. With redox flow batteries, however, the conversion and storage of energy are separated [4]. Redox flow batteries differ from conventional batteries in that the energy storage material is conveyed by an energy converter. This requires the energy storage material to be in a flowable form. This structure is similar to that of fuel cells, whereby in redox flow batteries, charging and discharging processes can take place in the same cell. Redox flow batteries thus have the distinguishing feature that energy and power can be scaled separately. The power determines the cell size or the number of cells and the energy is determined by the amount of the energy storage medium. This allows redox flow batteries to be better adapted to certain requirements than other technologies. In theory, there is no limit to the amount of energy and often the specific investment costs decrease with an increase in the energy/power ratio, as the energy storage medium usually has comparatively low costs. Figure 1 shows the general operating principle of redox flow batteries. The energy conversion takes place in an electrochemical cell which is divided into two half cells. The half cells are separated from each other by an ion-permeable membrane or separator, so that the liquids of the half cells mix as little as possible. The separator ensures a charge balance between positive and negative half cells, ideally without the negative and positive active materials coming into direct contact with each other. In fact, however, separators are not perfect so some cross-over of the active materials always occurs and this leads to the self-discharge effect.

What a difference a decade can make. Ten years ago, Li-ion batteries were mostly confined to phones and personal computers; fast-forward to the present and they now power our cars, houses, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), marine vehicles, and even factories.

The coming energy storage explosion will, however, make all this look like a mere stage rehearsal.

A host of energy experts including the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), UBS, BloombergNEF, S&P Market Intelligence, Wood Mackenzie and others are extremely bullish about the prospects of the battery storage industry– both over the near-and long-term–as the clean energy drive gains huge momentum.

Investors who capture the massive economic opportunity could enjoy long growth runways for decades to come.

Utility-scale storage critical in a green world

With the severity of our climate crisis becoming more apparent with each passing day, the need to rapidly transition to a renewable-fueled world becomes even more urgent. Despite our best efforts, greenhouse gas emissions have kept climbing, putting paid our goal to keep the planet from warming to no more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This calls for deeper cuts on dangerous emissions and a much faster transition to lower or zero-carbon energy sources.

At the center of our green energy drive are solar and wind power, both of which are expected to contribute nearly half of the global power mix by 2050 as per Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The intermittent nature of these renewable sources, however, means that large-scale storage is absolutely critical if the world is to successfully shift away from high dependence on fossil-fuels.

The surge in lithium-ion battery production since 2010 can be chalked up to huge improvements in the technology from a cost and performance standpoint.

Over the past decade, an 85% decline in prices fueled a revolution in lithium-ion battery technology, making electric vehicles and large-scale commercial battery deployments a reality for the first time in history.

The next decade will be defined by a massive increase in utility-scale storage.

United States utilities are trying to cut down on emissions by implementing utility-scale battery storage units (one megawatt (MW) or greater power capacity).

In March 2019, NextEra Energy (NYSE:NEE) announced plans to build a 409-MW energy storage project in Florida that will be powered by utility-scale solar.

To ensure we deliver a compelling, relevant, and actionable conference experience this February, the Intersolar North America team has been watching how the solar, energy storage, and e-mobility industries evolved over the past year. Dive into the top trends shaping each of these markets below.

Solar Trends to Look Forward To
Analysts predicted that the global solar market would surpass 100 gigawatts (GW) in 2019. 2.7 gigawatts of solar were installed in the first quarter, which made it the quarter with the most solar ever installed in US history. Recent growth has been driven in part by the federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC), which was decreased at the end of 2019 and motivated companies to close deals prior to the deadline.

Corporate procurement and renewable energy commitments from companies like Google and Apple continued to surprise market analysts as a major market growth driver in 2019. Corporate procurements made up nearly 25% of 2018’s projects and are expected to have made up 17% of projects in 2019.

In the past decade, US solar has grown from 25 GW to an estimated 663 GW by the end of 2019. According to BloombergNEF, that’s enough to power nearly 100 million homes in the US.

Looking Ahead

With carbon-based electric generation contributing approximately 30% to the US’s total greenhouse gas emissions, there’s a major opportunity to decarbonize the energy sector with renewables. In the 2020s, state, municipal, and corporate procurement will continue to drive market expansion as more cities announce renewable energy goals and the cost of solar continues to drop.

Energy Storage Trends that are Driving Innovation
The decline in battery technology costs is driving market growth for the energy storage industry in 2019, with lithium prices expected to fall 45% by 2021.

In Q1 of 2019, the market achieved a record-breaking 232% growth. Part of that growth can be attributed to a surge in residential storage in 2018, with deployments quadrupling year-after-year due to the increase in state-level incentive programs for solar-plus-storage projects. Despite recent residential market growth, utility-supply storage continues to stand as the largest market segment. According to SEPA, investor-owned utilities deployed the most storage of any utility type, contributing approximately 64% of megawatt-hours interconnected to the grid last year.

Portugal is already speeding up work to follow its record-breaking solar auction of 2019 with a fresh tender this year, with a tentative launch date now set towards the end of Q1 2020.

Recently contacted by Energy-Storage.news’ sister site PV Tech, the country’s Environment and Climate Action Ministry said it expects this year’s PV tender to get underway “by the end of March 2020”.

Asked about a potential separate storage tender – a move the government had discussed last year – a Ministry spokesperson said these technologies will be incorporated to the PV auction.

“A new bidding option shall be provided [under the solar tender] to promoters who wish to deploy a storage technology,” the spokesperson explained.

To read the full version of this story, visit PV Tech.

The auction’s tentative date of late March 2020 places it right alongside Solar Media’s Large Scale Solar Europe 2020 (Lisbon, 31 March-1 April 2020), which will delve into Portugal’s plans to drive a solar boom.

Companies selling batteries of any sort to businesses grapple with the fact that the devices are expensive, take up valuable space and tend to require a painful and lengthy sales cycle.

Those downsides can get in the way of the appeal, which is to save companies loads of money on their electricity bills by dodging peaks and demand charges. As such, several commercial battery vendors have shifted their business models, but none have done so quite like Axiom Exergy.

The Bay Area startup launched in 2014 with the thesis that lithium-ion batteries made little sense for businesses with high thermal loads, like grocery stores, and that thermal storage could optimize cooling and slash bills for considerably less upfront investment.

The company got a few initial “refrigeration batteries” into stores, including Whole Foods and Walmart. Along the way, it built a software platform that tapped into existing refrigeration systems’ data collection in order to predict upcoming peaks and front-load cooling sessions accordingly.

Then something unexpected happened, said co-founder and CEO Amrit Robbins in an interview Monday. “We were really blown away by the results,” he said. “Customers asked to deploy the software without the hardware.”

Instead of convincing building energy managers and their bosses to hand over square footage to a tank of salt water, the software makes a much simpler pitch. Refrigeration controllers already collect hundreds of data streams, but they typically only get used if something goes wrong and triggers a manual inspection, Robbins said. The logs get wiped every couple of weeks to make room for more under-utilized data.

Axiom simply inserts a small computer box into the existing refrigeration controller, then feeds the data stream into an AI algorithm alongside relevant information, such as weather and utility rates, and uses its analysis to ramp cooling up or down to minimize the customer’s bill. It calls this Axiom Cloud, and the company has contracted more than $1 million in bookings over the last few months, Robbins said; he hopes to have 100 sites in operation by the end of this year.

The shift from hardware-centric to software-centric sales dramatically lowered Axiom’s cost of goods sold, sped up the sales cycle and generated recurring subscription revenues. Those are all things that venture investors like to see, which should please Axiom backers including Shell Ventures, GXP Investments (now Evergy Ventures) and former Tesla CTO JB Straubel.