When recently impeached US President* Donald Trump tapped an auto industry lobbyist to lead the US Department of Energy last fall, eyes rolled back into heads. Well, it looks like the wrong eyes rolled. Despite the Commander-in-Chief’s oft-repeated promise to save coal jobs, coal power plants are still closing and the latest energy storage news from the Department of Energy practically guarantees the death of coal for industrial use in the US.

Energy Storage & Advanced Manufacturing
The energy storage news was wrapped into a newly announced $187 million round of funding that aims to “strengthen U.S. manufacturing competitiveness.” Apparently that’s a different way of spelling n-o-m-o-r-e-c-o-a-l.

Fifty-five R&D projects in 25 states won awards under the initiative. As a group, they steer the US manufacturing sector toward high-efficiency processes that reduce the use of energy overall.

Heating and drying account for 70% of energy used in manufacturing processes, so that’s one key area of focus with $28.7 million in funding.

Projects relating to energy recycling, and onsite electricity and heat generation, get a $33.5 million chunk of the funding.

Projects related to energy storage get the lion’s share, with $124 million dedicated to 36 university and private-sector research efforts.

The Energy Department anticipates that these projects will “catalyze domestic battery manufacturing, phase-change storage materials for heating and cooling applications, and the development of innovative materials for harsh service conditions.”

As energy storage is the key that unlocks the full potential of wind and solar, the effect will be to admit more renewables into industrial processes.

The renewable energy trend is already beginning to take shape in the steel industry as well as aluminum production and other industrial sectors.

Not for nothing, but none of this is good new for natural gas, either.

The Q4 results from Tesla (TSLA) have received much attention. The startling success of auto developments had led to a much-warranted increase in the stock price.

The future of the company’s automotive business does indeed look very promising. Much of this is based on Tesla’s technological advantages over the competition. However, the less “sexy” business of energy storage and battery development are a key reason why the lofty stock valuation is justified.

As I detailed in an article in November, Tesla had re-iterated at their Q3 earnings that at a future date they expected the automotive division to represent only 50% of company revenues. That would pre-suppose a huge increase in energy storage revenues. Their senior management and major investors have repeated this since. The “Battery Investor Day” slated for April should give more substance to the story. It is likely to give a further boost to the stock price when it occurs.

The growth in the energy storage business in revenue terms is illustrated below:

In most companies, a revenue growth of 136% year-on-year would have sparked a lot of positive comments but things often work differently with Tesla.

A graph from the 8K illustrates the growth:

The new commercial Megapack is driving a lot of new interest. Its first deployment was made in Q4. It should drive even stronger growth. In the unaudited operational summary commentary the company stated:

“Since the introduction of this product, the level of interest and orders from various global project developers and utilities has surpassed our expectations”.

The Megapack is pre-assembled at the Nevada gigafactory. It comprises a 3MWh integrated system as one unit.

In 2019 Tesla’s energy storage division supplied 1.65GWh, more than all previous years combined. The residential “Powerwall” range has been supply constrained for a long period while Tesla gave priority to meeting Model 3 demand. This is due for revenue take-off as much as the commercial products.

In the United States, 29 states, three territories and Washington, D.C. have adopted Renewable Portfolio Standards and many experts agree that storage deployments are going to be critical to integrating the influx of renewables on to the grid. But going into 2020, the industry appears to be less bullish about the prospects of grid-scale battery storage over the next decade.

In Utility Dive’s 2020 State of the Electric Utility survey, 27% of participants said they expect their organization will significantly increase grid-scale battery storage in the next 10 years — a significant reduction from 37% in 2018, and 34% in 2019. This is despite analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which forecast a spike in utility-scale battery storage beginning in 2021.

“I think that from 2015 up until 2018, 2019, there was just a lot of rapid movement in this market and from chemistry to chemistry, in some cases, large promises were made. In some cases, they were met and in others, it was observed that they were not reliable, or there were issues involved, or the return on investment was not what was suggested,” Matthew Raiford, manager of the Consortium for Battery Innovation, a research organization focused on lead batteries, told Utility Dive.

There’s also the looming issue of safety — the last couple of years have witnessed some high-profile safety-related issues with battery storage, including an explosion at an Arizona Public Service facility last April and multiple storage-related fires in South Korea. But at the same time, there are promising markets for energy storage across the world, whether in areas where energy is expensive or where electricity is highly heterogenized and isolated.

“I would venture to guess that over the next few years, there will be a refocusing in the market, looking at things like safety, reliability and the kind of technical economics of utilizing these systems,” Raiford said.

Utility-scale battery storage capacity in the U.S. quadrupled between 2014 and March 2019 — from 214 MW to 899 MW, according to the EIA. Last July, the EIA forecasted that utility-scale battery capacity could exceed 2,500 MW by 2023, if current planned facilities go up and no capacity is retired. But data from last November indicates battery storage capacity will exceed 4,525 MW by the end of 2023, Glenn McGrath, the EIA’s leader of electricity statistics, uranium statistics and product innovation team, told Utility Dive.

Virginia lawmakers have passed a bill to support the US Commonwealth’s electric grid going 100% “clean” by 2050, which includes an energy storage deployment target of 3.1GW by 2035.

The new goalpost is slightly higher than New York’s much-celebrated 3,000MW goal, although New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has set his state’s sights on reaching that goal five years earlier than Virginia’s.

With those – perhaps irrelevant – comparisons to New York aside, the Virginia Clean Economy Act was passed on Tuesday 11 February, after what local news outlet The Virginia Mercury described as “dramatic” debate in the House of Representatives and “fiery” debate in the Senate.

While it has not yet become law, requiring another hearing in the bicameral state legislature, Governor of Virginia Ralph Northam is reportedly keen to sign it in whichever form lawmakers can agree, with Northam himself having set out an Executive Order to attain the 100% clean energy goal.

Democrat and Republican politicians have followed up what Mercury environment and energy correspondent Sarah Vogelsong pointed out had been weeks of negotiation over the 75-page plan. It was almost scuppered at the last by a number of House Democrats who felt emission reduction targets were not aggressive enough, Vogelsong wrote.

Under the Act, all of the six existing coal power plants in Virginia operated by utility Dominion will need to shut by 2030. While all utility-owned gas power plants in the Commonwealth are scheduled for closure by 2045 already, local environment group Chesapeake Climate Action Network said the bill could accelerate this process.

Manz AG, manufacturing equipment supplier, has signed off on a €20 million (US$21.83 million) deal with “high performance” battery maker AKASOL for planned ‘gigafactories’ in Germany and in the US.

Manz supplies industries including solar panel and lithium battery manufacturers and is likely well known to readers of our sister site PV Tech. AKASOL said it has ordered “fully automated production lines” from Manz, with delivery of the first production lines expected before the end of this year.

Meanwhile, Manz said that the deal worth €20 million in total is split across several tranches. The first tranche is worth €8 million and is for a module production line at AKASOL’s Gigafactory 1 in Darmstadt, Germany. That facility is currently under construction.

Then, the buyer retains an option to supply further production lines for what Manz said will be an “identical” module production line at Gigafactory 2. AKASOL said this facility will be in Hazel Park, Michigan, in the US. AKASOL added that tenders will be held for further production lines for both gigawatt-scale manufacturing facilities.

AKASOL said the devices will be used in buses and other commercial vehicles. The lithium-ion battery maker said it received an order for the supply of “ultra-high-energy battery systems in the high three-digit million Euro range”. While the size and cost of that order was not revealed, AKASOL CEO Sven Schulz did say that the Darmstadt Gigafactory 1 has a planned production capacity of “up to 5GWh”.

It’s the latest high profile announcement of battery production facilities at massive scale in Europe, although others have focused on stationary energy storage as well as e-mobility applications. Other obvious contenders include Tesla, which is establishing Giga-Berlin, while Emad Zand, business development head at Sweden-headquartered Northvolt told Energy-Storage.news in an interview to be published in the coming days that as much as 25% of output from its planned European facilities could service the energy storage system (ESS) space.

Order 841 directed the regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and independent system operators (ISOs) that run the country’s wholesale electricity markets to craft new rules to allow storage resources to bid their services into the markets. Energy storage has already been quickly growing, in large part due to declines in the costs of lithium-ion batteries that can store generated electricity and deploy it at other times, and the storage industry has expected a boost from Order 841 since it will provide new revenue streams for the services storage can provide.

In their brief, the attorneys general also claim that wholesale market barriers have been holding back the growth of storage, but that Order 841 and its companion Order 841-A “provide a requirement for market design that will bolster investor confidence and encourage development of storage resources.”

Storage has the unique ability to inject energy back into the grid when it is most valuable, and thus is “essential” to state goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by building more renewable energy that is not available at certain times, the brief said. It cited a Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources study that found that an “optimal” amount of energy storage deployed in that state by 2020 would lead to $3.4 billion in economic, health and environmental benefits over ten years due to reduced electricity prices, reduced demand, deferred transmission infrastructure investment and a reduced need to run peaking power plants.

But NARUC and other groups mounting the challenge see FERC’s order as an infringement on state authority because it goes beyond the realm of the transmission system, of which FERC is one of the primary regulators, into the distribution system, which is typically controlled by local utilities. “A substantial, real-world burden… would be placed on distribution utilities if they were required to allow storage resources connected to their local distribution facilities or behind the retail meter… to participate in wholesale markets administered” by RTOs and ISOs, according to a brief filed by the Transmission Access Policy Study Group (TAPS), a trade association representing municipal utilities, municipal joint action agencies, electric cooperatives and an investor-owned utility.

For example, distributed storage resources, like batteries deployed at customer homes or businesses, produce two-way flows of power since batteries both deploy stored power to the grid and consume electricity from the grid. Therefore, they can lead to large costs for utilities if their distribution systems are not designed to handle those bidirectional power flows, according to the brief from TAPS. On top of those costs, the utilities would also need to develop modeling and forecasting tools to accommodate the sales of electricity from those distributed resources to the wholesale markets.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra co-led a coalition of five attorneys general and the California Air Resources Board in filing an amicus brief urging a federal appeals court to uphold orders by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that will allow energy storage resources to fully participate and compete in the wholesale energy market, aiding states in their transitions to cleaner, more reliable, and more resilient power systems.

“Increasing the role that energy storage resources play in our markets will help lower electricity bills, reduce pollution, and support our thriving $14 billion clean energy economy in Massachusetts,” AG Healey said. “We urge the court to uphold FERC’s orders so states can build on these investments and accelerate the essential transition to an energy system without dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.”

“Here in California, we believe in tearing down barriers – not building new ones,” said AG Becerra. “Removing unnecessary barriers to entry into the wholesale electric market will increase competition, lower prices, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, and FERC’s orders will provide much-needed benefits to both consumers and the environment.”

The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, et al. v FERC, urges the court to uphold FERC’s orders, which require administrators of regional, wholesale electricity markets, including ISO-New England, to adopt rules that allow storage resources to fully participate in the competitive electricity market. The brief argues that the orders will enhance the substantial environmental, economic, and health-related benefits that energy storage technology, including battery storage, provides to Massachusetts and other states.

According to the brief, energy storage resources provide important benefits to states and their consumers by storing excess generated electricity for later use and injecting power back onto the system when needed, including when customer demand and electricity prices are high. This capability allows storage resources to help states lower electricity bills, create cleaner, more flexible and reliable power systems, and reduce the need for expensive and highly polluting energy generators that run on dirty fuels such as oil, diesel, and coal. In Massachusetts alone, energy storage could provide up to $3.4 billion in savings and revenues over the next ten years. By facilitating the transition to cleaner energy, storage resources help states address the climate crisis and improve air quality.

The brief also urges the court to uphold the orders based on an appropriate and well-established understanding of FERC’s limited statutory authority under the Federal Power Act.

The brief demonstrates AG Healey’s continued commitment to ensuring access to clean electricity at reasonable prices for all Massachusetts consumers and to working with other state attorneys general to advocate for renewable energy and fight dangerous climate change.

While energy storage system (ESS) batteries are often described as stationary storage to distinguish them from batteries used in automotive applications, a new partnership in Europe turns containerised ESS into mobile power sources.

GreenChoice, a renewable energy retailer headquartered in the Netherlands, is developing ESS battery ‘docks’ along with German engineering startup Greener Engineering. GreenChoice’s wind farms will be used to charge the latter company’s containerised battery energy storage units with electricity.

Those batteries can then be “wheeled” over to customers that need a mobile or emergency power source. Greener Power Solutions co-founder Dieter Castelein previously wrote a technical paper for PV Tech Power (reproduced here in full on the Energy-Storage.news site) about how mobile energy storage units can be used to “take-over” grid functions when grids need maintenance.

Greener also provides energy storage to outdoor events including popular dance music festivals in Europe, providing a cleaner alternative to diesel generators that have long been necessary for such occasions where there is no grid connection to get power directly from. The engineering company told Energy-Storage.news today that the partnership with GreenChoice now gives both provider and customer an option to do this with renewable wind power.

“If a festival or construction site needs an energy solution, we can provide a battery. And when the battery is empty, we can quickly replace it with a battery that is recharged with wind energy,” Dieter Castelein said.

For the latest project, 10 mobile systems of uniform size with a total capacity of 3,360kWh form the charging station. Batteries themselves come from Greener’s partnership with provider Alfen.

They can charge from GreenChoice’s Hellegatsplein wind farm in just 43 minutes and are used on a day-to-day basis to help regulate frequency of the grid by matching imbalances in supply and demand. It’s also GreenChoice’s second large-scale battery deployed at one of its wind farms, after a 10MWh battery was installed at Hartelkanaal wind power station near Rotterdam last year.

As readers of Energy-Storage.news are no doubt well aware, the United States energy storage market is achieving rapid growth.

As analysts project a thirteen-fold increase for the category over the next six years reaching 158 gigawatt-hours by 2024, there is now significant demand for battery manufacturing capacity in the U.S. This is true for the entire category, but especially so for industrial scale applications, as evidenced by utility-scale storage representing the largest market segment in 2018 at 394.8MWh, and experiencing double-digit growth of 11.3% year-over-year.

Many expect there to be continued growth and viability of industrial-scale batteries that are capable of powering energy storage systems. These solutions include those that sit predominantly in front of the meter, supporting utility-scale electricity generation, transmission and storage.

This technology can replace fossil fuel peaker plants, enhance wind and solar plus storage projects, optimise microgrids, improve the utility’s ability to meet fluctuating demand, manage power disruptions – and be deployed in commercial, industrial, mining and military projects.

It is a common misconception that “the technology isn’t there yet,” as most industry insiders will tell you that many of the hurdles to mass adoption of industrial energy storage relate to a lack of supply. Across the current landscape, many energy storage supply chains are bottle necked and wracked with costly inefficiencies that delay the process of production to delivery. While there are a number of international companies shipping product that has helped spur this sector’s growth, domestic manufacturing would help the U.S. meet battery demand with batteries made in the U.S.