The Mitsubishi Electric battery energy storage system (BESS) is a scalable, purpose-built battery solution that includes all of the balance of system (BOS) equipment that can be modified to meet the customers’ requirements. In addition to some of the world’s largest energy storage systems currently operating in Japan, Mitsubishi Electric now has completed battery energy storage projects in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. With extensive experience in project completion, Mitsubishi Electric continues to be an industry leader by providing turnkey solutions. Technologies such as BESS, static var compensators (SVC), and static synchronous compensators (STATCOM) are offered with optimized equipment design, systems planning, controls and protection design, project management, and construction services. Today, Mitsubishi Electric supports an installed base of nearly 200 power electronics projects globally.

The Mitsubishi Electric Power Products Inc. (MEPPI) Renewables Energy Solution Team leverages core competencies of project execution and engineering to partner with utility and developer customers on clean-energy projects. Utility-scale storage projects typically carry plenty of risk, but MEPPI offers a robust technology, the bankability of a financially-strong parent organization, a full warranty for all equipment, as well as long-term performance guarantees and service contracts. These Renewable Energy Solutions can be supplied as equipment only up to full turnkey options with project requirements and safety in mind.

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In a victory for the energy storage industry, a federal appeals court has upheld the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order 841, clearing the way for transmission grid operators across the country to open their markets to energy storage, including aggregated batteries connected at the distribution grid or behind customers’ meters.

Friday’s court opinion (PDF) declared that FERC has jurisdiction over how energy storage interacts with the interstate transmission markets it regulates, even if those systems are interconnected to the grid under regulations set by the states.

The court also rejected arguments by utility groups and state utility regulators seeking to opt out of allowing energy storage resources (ESRs) to participate under Order 841, which allows for units as small as 100 kilowatts to access wholesale markets.

Instead, the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with FERC’s contention that “[k]eeping the gates open to all types of ESRs — regardless of their interconnection points in the electric energy systems — ensures that technological advances in energy storage are fully realized in the marketplace, and efficient energy storage leads to greater competition, thereby reducing wholesale rates.”

Beyond helping to make wholesale markets more efficient, Order 841 has started to open new energy storage opportunities in grid markets in New England and New York. The rest of the country’s transmission grid operators, which manage wholesale markets serving roughly two-thirds of the country’s electricity customers, are creating their own Order 841 implementation plans.

Wood Mackenzie predicts that Order 841 will open up new opportunities for energy storage developers and aggregators that have primarily relied on state-by-state energy storage mandates and market opportunities to date. While energy storage industry groups have fought against some grid operators’ interpretation of Order 841, they’ve also hailed its broader potential benefits.

“This is an enormous step for energy storage, with the affirmation that energy storage connected at the distribution level must have the option to access wholesale markets, allowing homes and businesses to contribute to the resiliency, efficiency, sustainability, and affordability of the grid,” Kelly Speakes-Backman, chief executive of the Energy Storage Association, said in an email.

The threat of chronic blackouts is sparking a rush to install battery backup systems as California homeowners try to avoid disruptive power cuts related to wildfires.

Blackouts are increasingly a part of life as Pacific Gas and Electric Co. strives to avoid igniting deadly blazes with aging equipment. At fault for some of the state’s worst wildfires, the utility shut off power nine times between June and October last year in Northern California. Some blackouts lasted for days, and at least one affected more than a million people.

The utility plans to use shut-offs for years as it upgrades its system (Climatewire, July 1). It’s pledged to reduce their scope and restore power more quickly.

But many residents aren’t reassured.

Nitsa Lallas and husband Ignacio Arribas, who live in the San Francisco suburb of Mill Valley, are getting two Tesla Powerwalls installed this week to store power from the solar panels on their 2,600-square-foot house.

“The primary trigger for us was when it became clear that these power shut-offs were part of the plan for the foreseeable future,” Lallas said. “PG&E was telling customers to expect them. … It appeared to us that every fire season, we would have multiple shut-offs, and that that would happen for multiple years.”

They’re not alone. Permit applications for energy storage projects are surging, according to local officials. In Sonoma County, about 80 miles north of San Francisco, 174 permits were issued in the first half of this year. That eclipsed the 161 permits that were approved in all of 2019.

Interest has boomed with advancing storage technology and since it became clear that blackouts will persist. The county issued 76 permits in 2018, and 47 in 2017, said Domenica Giovannini, policy manager for Sonoma County.

Distributed energy storage facilities in the US are set to join wholesale markets and compete to provide grid services after what’s described as the “single most important act” for the energy transition so far.

The United States Court of Appeal in the District of Columbia ruled last week against petitioning from the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and others which sought to prevent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Order 841 from passing.

In doing so and allowing Order 841 to pass, distributed energy storage units can now compete with other assets, including fossil fuel resources, to provide grid services in wholesale markets.

FERC chairman Neil Chatterjee lauded the decision when it was handed down late last week, adding his consideration that it would be regarded as the “single most important act we could take to ensure a smooth transition to a new clean energy future.”

“…I’m extremely pleased that the DC Circuit denied the petitions challenging Order 841 on jurisdictional grounds and upheld our orders on the merits. The court found our actions to be well within our statutory authority,” Chatterjee said, adding that Order 841 and removing barriers for energy storage technologies had long been one of his top priorities as FERC chairman.

Low cost, large-scale energy storage is the key to accelerating the renewable energy revolution, and now shrimp have been enlisted in the cause. The aim is to push down the cost of flow batteries by using bio-based materials such as shrimp shells. That would help ramp up the transition out of fossil fuels and into clean power, thus saving the planet in time to avert a climate catastrophe. Thank you, shrimp. Wait, what is a flow battery?

Shrimp (May) Be The Key to Energy Storage That Flows
We’ll get to that flow battery thing in a minute. First let’s clarify the news about shrimp shells and energy storage, which has been zooming all over the Intertubes in recent days.

The news involves research published in April at ACS Sustainable Chemical Engineering under the title, “Exploration of Biomass-Derived Activated Carbons for Use in Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries.”

The research team did not exactly determine that shrimp shells are the best bio-based material for flow batteries. What they did was compare shrimp shells to pine wood, in order to develop a method for determining the performance of a wide variety of bio-based materials and develop a general set of design principles.

Got all that? Good! Shrimp could still come out on top, but shrimp shells are just one of many bio-based sources that could be used to produce the activated carbon used in flow batteries.

The bio-based approach is relatively new, so before anybody skips to the front of the line, there needs to be “a systematic approach to advancing biomass-based functional materials for use in energy applications,” as the research team explains.

If you know your atoms, you know what the team means when they conclude that “electrochemically accessible surface area, rather than the heteroatom composition” is a more effective representative of the material’s performance.

Spoiler alert: surface area is a big deal in energy storage performance.