Renewable energy developer Strata Solar sent an update on its landmark Ventura Energy Storage (VES) project — a 100-MW, 400-MWh battery energy storage system in unincorporated Ventura County, Calif. Strata awarded an Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contract to Tesla for its Megapack battery system.

Pre-construction development is now complete. Construction, using local union labor, is scheduled to commence in July 2020. As the largest project selected in the paradigm-shifting solicitation by SCE, the project is helping Southern California to move away from the Aliso Natural Gas Storage facility and coastal power plants without compromising reliability.

“This precedent setting project is a testament to Strata Solar’s 12 years of success in the energy industry and our commitment to battery storage development as a core business line,” said Strata’s founder and CEO Markus Wilhelm. “We focus on smart development, value for our customers and strong returns for our investors with a team that has the experience to deliver market-leading results.”

Following a breakneck development effort, the project recently completed entitlements and finalized all necessary commercial agreements. Equity interest in the Project is scheduled to close in the second quarter. The substantial investment in Ventura’s energy infrastructure would not be possible without the numerous local stakeholders and supporters committed to the Project’s success.

“I’m excited to see this project moving forward,” said Mike Powers, Ventura County CEO. “Given the disruptions taking place during this time, Planning Department staff has done a great job, approving the project during the County’s first virtual Planning Administrative Hearing. The Project will help to ensure local energy reliability, and in the event of a Public Safety Power Shutoff the facility will convey stored energy to the grid, providing power to our local homes and businesses.”

Lithium-ion battery storage is one of the most exciting new and innovative energy options changing the energy landscape, but it also poses some unique challenges for fire safety design. Dr Rui Sun, one of Hydrock’s leading fire safety experts, explores how to keep your building safe without compromising the benefits of this new smart energy solution.

Driven by the worldwide changing energy landscape, the development of smarter energy storage is accelerating. A smart energy strategy presents a brilliant opportunity to access cheaper, cleaner and more reliable energy for businesses and homes by allowing consumers (domestic and commercial) to store energy to access as needed, avoiding reliance on the grid. The commercial benefits of this are vast.

From a technology perspective, in the current market, the most popular accumulator is the lithium-ion battery. It is lightweight, rechargeable and stores a lot of energy in relation to its size for a reasonably long period without losing voltage. More importantly, thanks to the use of lithium-ion technology, the cost of energy storage has been reduced by 50%.

However, energy accumulation systems using lithium-ion batteries present unique challenges for fire safety design within buildings. They pose a new fire hazard that could be difficult to control and has no current UK regulation.

Fire risks associated with the use of lithium-ion batteries
Lithium-ion cells consist of two electrodes: negative and positive, with an ion-conducting, flammable electrolyte and separator in between, housed in cabinets or equivalent configurations that protect them.

Any damage to the battery structure, mainly the separator, could casuse an internal short-circuit that can lead to ‘thermal runaway’, an unstoppable chain reaction resulting in rapid temperature increase and sudden energy release within the battery system. This could eventually lead to a catastrophic rupturing of battery cells and result in the remaining material burning at a very high temperature (over 8000C).

Extinguishing fires caused by battery thermal runaway presents a challenge for firefighting. The combustion of lithium-ion cells produces oxygen which actually contributes to fire growth. The lithium-ion battery can also be seemingly reignited days or weeks after the initial extinguish.

Utility group PacifiCorp is about to open a gusher of opportunity for wind, solar and energy storage developers in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain regions.

Last year PacifiCorp finalized a landmark integrated resource plan (IRP) that for the first time envisions it relying on large amounts of wind farms and solar backed by energy storage to meet its long-range energy needs.

Now the utility, part of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, is preparing a solicitation for projects to meet that plan’s needs through 2024, taking a concrete step toward its vision.

PacifiCorp’s new all-source request for proposals “is a big deal,” said Spencer Gray, executive director of the Northwest & Intermountain Power Producers Coalition, a trade group with members including EDF Renewable Energy, Invenergy, Constellation Exelon, Shell Energy North America and others.

Through its two utility subsidiaries, Pacific Power and Rocky Mountain Power, PacifiCorp claims to be the largest grid operator in the Western U.S., serving 1.9 million customers in six states. PacifiCorp’s utilities have long relied on federally operated hydropower or utility-owned fossil-fueled generation for their electricity.

While many details still need to be worked out before the request for proposal’s anticipated opening in July, “from our perspective, this is a major shift in the region,” Gray said in a Friday interview.

For renewables developers, several things stand out about PacifiCorp’s upcoming solicitation. First and most obviously, “it’s just so large,” Gray said. PacifiCorp’s IRP preferred portfolio includes 1,823 megawatts of new solar resources co-located with 595 megawatts of new battery energy storage system capacity, and 1,920 megawatts of new wind resources — all by the end of 2023.

A 1MW battery storage system with as much as 150 hours of storage duration, using an as-yet unrevealed battery chemistry, is being deployed in a pilot by Minnesota electric utility Great River Energy.

Form Energy, a startup developing what it claims is an “ultra low-cost, long duration” proprietary energy storage system has remained tight-lipped on what’s inside its batteries since first coming to prominence in 2017 when it was the recipient of investment from MIT accelerator programme The Engine.

Form Energy was then known as Baseload Renewables and was in fact partly the brainchild of Yet Ming-Chiang, the MIT professor who also started up 24M, a maker of ‘semi-solid’ lithium-ion batteries made with thicker electrodes than other manufacturers’ devices that is claimed could reduce the cost of production by as much as 50%. Japanese technology manufacturer Kyocera selected 24M’s batteries for its residential energy storage systems and officially launched them at the beginning of this year.

Form Energy meanwhile has said since 2017 that it is working on two types of battery to meet the need for longer duration storage than lithium-ion is typically known for enabling: one is an aqueous-sulfur flow battery designed to provide several hours of storage at low cost, while little is known about the makeup of the other battery the company has developed, save for the fact that it is apparently an “aqueous-air” device that Form Energy said “leverages some of the safest, cheapest, most abundant materials on the planet. The company successfully closed a US$40 million Series B funding round in August last year and counts the likes of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Macquarie Capital and Italian oil firm Eni among its investors.

Just under a year before that Series B closing, Form Energy also netted close to US$4 million in funding from the US Department of Energy as the government sought out long duration storage technologies for up to 100 hours duration for demonstration through the DoE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Form Energy also has a partnership in place with Enel Green Power, and funding from the Enel Foundation, with the trio recently co-authoring a white paper on long duration storage and its viability for both integrating renewables and participating in energy markets.

Delmarva Power has selected distributed energy resource (DER) controls and aggregation firm Sunverge to spearhead a proposed behind-the-meter virtual power plant (VPP) and energy storage project in Maryland.

The VPP project will be focused on the Elk Neck peninsula in Cecil County, Maryland. Sunverge will provide DER control and aggregation services on residential meters to deliver energy storage capacity for grid reliability.

“We are honored and excited to be selected for this project and to have the opportunity to work with Delmarva Power to demonstrate the value of residential battery systems for the residents at Elk Neck and to the electric grid. We are confident that Sunverge’s advanced DER Control and aggregation solution will demonstrate the value of aggregating residential behind-the meter systems for the Maryland electricity grid and participating residential customers.” said Martin Milani, CEO of Sunverge. “The combination of real-time dynamic load flexibility and grid services is a powerful tool for managing the grid of the future and integrating the growth of distributed energy resources.”

The VPP will provide backup power during outages to homes located on a peninsula on the Chesapeake Bay. These homes are located in a heavily forested area and served by a four-mile long overhead and underground distribution feeder. Because of this isolation, these customers are vulnerable to grid outages and can benefit greatly from reliable backup generation.

The goal of the project is to increase overall grid reliability, DER integration and allow for potential participation in the PJM wholesale electricity market. The VPP will enable additional grid services, including peak shaving and reactive power support.

The project is planned to have 55 MW / 2.2 MWh capacity and is projected to create $2 million in value over a 15-year period. The proposal is currently under review by the Maryland Public Service Commission and subject to its approval.

DelMarva Power, which is owned by Exelon, delivers electricity to customers in Delaware and Maryland.

New battery technologies and innovations are paving the way.
The phrases “turning winds” and a “a new sun rising” are often used to describe change, and these metaphors could not be more appropriate in describing our energy system today, as the wind and sun themselves are driving the transformation. Even the casual energy observer has noticed that the Texas wind rush is on. Texas by far has the most wind capacity installed than any other state and solar is gearing up for a red hot run in the coming years.

Wind and solar are powerful forces in their own right, mainly given their ever lower costs and their rare ability to provide some long-term stability in a turbulent world. The U.S., including Texas, has deployed large numbers of wind turbines and solar panels and deployment will continue to grow. But once another emerging technology — cheap energy storage — shows up, they might very well explode onto the landscape. That is on the verge of happening.

You can’t make the sun shine at will or the wind blow when it doesn’t want to. Thus, in that regard, these technologies have earned some fair skepticism. The past and current strategy has generally been to use other dispatchable power plants and flexible demand to help respond to variability in wind and solar output when balancing supply and demand on the grid.

This strategy has largely worked because there have been plenty of dispatchable power plants available and the Texas electricity market — the best, most competitive and efficient in the world — makes sure they are compensated fairly for their services. Today, we are much better at predicting changes in wind and solar output and thus are in a much better position to manage them. Wind and solar deliver energy at some of the lowest costs of any source and new technologies keep making them cheaper and easier.

Cheap energy storage is often seen as the “holy grail” technology that forms, along with solar and wind, an “energy trinity” that ushers us into the promised land of clean, cheap, and abundant resources. None of these technologies are particularly new. The energy in wind has been harvested to grind grain or lift water for hundreds of years the first U.S. patent on a device to generate electricity from the sun was awarded in the late 1800s, and the first rechargeable battery was developed even before that.

A US utility is to trial a new battery storage technology that promises to deliver the holy grail of a grid based around wind and solar – ultra long storage of up to 150 hours that could revolutionise the way the storage technology is used and deployed.

Great River Energy – a major non-for-profit energy co-operative based in Minnesota – is teaming with Form Energy, a battery storage technology developer backed by Bill Gates, Australia’s Macquarie Capital, and others, to install a first-of-its-kind demonstration of Form’s unique “aqueous air flow” battery with ultra long storage.

The battery pilot will be a 1MW/150MWh, grid-connected storage system capable of delivering its rated power of one megawatt continuously for 150 hours, part of a broader plan to retire Great River’s main generator, a 1,151MW coal unit, and replace it with wind and ultimately battery storage and make 95 per cent of its power emissions free.

And while the battery component of this Great River Energy plan is relatively minor, if the pilot proves successful at delivering super-long duration and low cost storage, the implications for the electricity industry will be enormous.

Most big batteries currently in use in Australia and across the world are based on lithium-ion technologies, and often have very short storage time frames because they are used primarily to deliver super-fast, accurate and flexible grid services such as frequency control and inertia.

Even when used for storing wind and solar, the storage times are usually no more than four hours, beyond which it is presumed that pumped hydro has the cost advantage.

Form Energy was created three years ago by a group comprising a team from MIT, former Tesla battery leader Mateo Jaramillo, and Ted Wiley, a co-founder of Aquion. Its goal is build “ultra low cost” batteries with super long storage durations that would allow grid operators to store energy for seasonal storage, rather than just minutes and hours.

Last week, Tina Casey wrote about the agreement between Form Energy and Great River Energy that will see a 1 MW/150 MWh aqueous air battery installed and operational sometime in 2023. What is an aqueous air battery? No one knows much about the technology and the company is being very tight-lipped about it.

The question is whether it will supplant lithium-ion storage batteries from Tesla and others for grid-scale energy storage. Tesla has been very active in providing lithium-ion battery storage systems to utility companies. From Kauai to Samoa and South Australia, its battery installations have proven cost effective and reliable, often paying for themselves more quickly than anyone thought possible.

Tesla has also pioneered virtual power plants in Vermont and South Australia that network hundreds or even thousands of home storage batteries so they can provide backup electricity to home owners while simultaneously helping to stabilize the local grid. Recently, Tesla signaled its intent to expand its energy business by applying for a license to become a recognized generator of electricity in the UK.

But so far, most lithium-ion grid-scale storage facilities are not able to supply electricity to the grid for more than 2 to 4 hours. The Form Energy system promises energy storage that lasts days. It also appears to be significantly cheaper than conventional lithium-ion batteries.

What Is Form Energy?
Form Energy is a tech startup founded by Mateo Jaramillo, who used to work at Tesla Energy. He is joined by Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science at MIT; Ted Wiley, who co-founded the salt water battery company Aquion; Billy Woodford, formerly of 24M; and Marco Ferarra, who holds a Ph.D from MIT.

The company has raised over $50 million in funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the clean energy incubator backed by Bill Gates; Eni Next, the corporate venture capital arm of the Italian energy firm Eni Spa; and The Engine, MIT’s investment program. It has been operating in stealth mode until now.

What Is An Aqueous Air Battery?
We know CleanTechnica readers, being unusually well informed and technically sophisticated, will demand to know the technical details of the aqueous air battery. Unfortunately, almost nothing is known about it at this time. As PV Magazine observes, “The term, ‘aqueous air battery system’ leaves us little more informed about the startup’s technology than when it was stealthed.” Aqueous is defined as “of or containing water, typically as a solvent or medium,” which brings to mind the salt water battery technology once touted by Aquion.

The Energy Storage Digital Series, an online-only conference and webinar series, produced and hosted by the events division of our publisher Solar Media kicked off yesterday. Here are some highlights and key quotes from opening panel discussion: Predicting the energy storage tech of the future.

You can still sign up to join the rest of the sessions – free of charge – and you can also watch sessions from previous days on demand.

Predicting the energy storage tech of the future

A panel moderated by Clean Horizon head of market analysis Corentin Baschet featured Dr Billy Wu, energy technologies and systems expert and senior lecturer at Imperial College, a London University, alongside Matt Allen, CEO and co-founder of UK-based project developer Pivot Power and Jim Stover, who is chief marketing officer at VRB Energy, a vanadium flow battery manufacturer based in North America with a subsidiary company in China.

While a poll found that the event’s viewers believe that lithium-ion will continue to be the technology that dominates the industry still in three to five years’ time – a finding that came as no surprise to any of the panellists – there’s still a lot of scope for other technologies to complement lithium in today’s market and the future may see other options coming to the fore.

Imperial College’s Billy Wu said that hydrogen is finally starting to be seen as a potential mainstream contender, partly due to its versatility in being applicable for heat when added to the gas grid and for producing electricity through fuel cells. Wu said that every year felt like it got closer to the year that hydrogen can break through. There could also be a knock-on beneficial impact for flow batteries in terms of cost reduction if this became the case, Wu said, as electrolysers and flow batteries are likely to share many of the same components.

All of the above, but in intelligently designed proportions
While lithium-ion has obviously enjoyed the ongoing effect of scaled-up manufacturing through its use in consumer electronics and more recently electric vehicles, VRB Energy’s Jim Stover argued that the cost reduction curve of vanadium flow batteries has really only begun. VRB believes it can achieve cost reductions of around 10% to 15% with each doubling of manufacturing capacity, Stover said. Stover also played up the possible non-financial advantages of vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs): they are non-flammable and, partly due to the fact they use liquid electrolyte storing the power in tanks separate from the battery cell stack where power is generated, are not expected to suffer the same problem of cell degradation as is seen in lithium-ion energy storage.