Construction has begun on the Chisholm Grid battery energy storage system, the largest standalone battery energy storage project currently under construction in the US outside of California. Located in Fort Worth, Texas, Chisholm Grid will have an initial rated capacity of 100 megawatts (MWac) and is scheduled to begin commercial operations in mid-2021.

The Chisholm Grid battery energy storage system was developed by Able Grid Infrastructure Holdings, LLC, a joint venture between Able Grid and MAP. Able Grid will provide construction management and operational asset management services for the site. Chisholm Grid is owned by Astral Electricity, LLC, a privately-held energy storage power producer.

In early August, Astral issued full notice to proceed to Mortenson and work has already begun onsite for the balance of plant and high voltage transmission components, making Chisholm Grid the largest standalone battery energy storage project currently under construction in the US outside of California.

At peak construction, approximately 50 people will be employed on-site at Chisholm Grid, and Mortenson has secured subcontracts from local Dallas – Fort Worth-based trade partners to ensure local participation on the project.

For all the excitement over the next big thing in lithium-ion batteries, the simple fact is that plain old water is the only large scale, long duration energy storage medium available today in the US and in many other parts of the world. The challenge is that water batteries — aka pumped hydropower — require expensive new infrastructure, which limits their application. That could be about to change, and it looks like the US Department of Energy is determined to be the change maker.

But First, A Word About Seams

To get a snapshot of how pumped hydro fits into the national energy profile, let’s go back to last week when The Atlantic published an account of the Energy Department’s ill-fated Interconnections Seam Study under the title and subtitle, “How a Plan to Save the Power System Disappeared: A federal lab found a way to modernize the grid, reduce reliance on coal, and save consumers billions. Then Trump appointees blocked it.”

The Seam study was a wide-ranging, collaborative effort aimed at enabling more electricity to hop back and forth across the US, rather than getting stuck at a “seam” that splits the nation into two grids (Texas, unsurprisingly, has a third electricity grid all to itself). The study is part of the Energy Department’s ongoing grid modernization effort, which comes down heavy on the side of renewable energy and energy storage.

The Atlantic presented the story of the Seam study as a successful attempt to block clean power. Be that as it may, seam or no seam, more renewable energy has been making it onto the grid, partly with support from other Energy Department R&D programs. There is plenty more where that came from, and energy storage will play a larger role in the future as more wind and solar come aboard.

Long Duration Energy Storage On The Cheap

That brings us to the Energy Department’s push for more and better energy storage in the form of pumped hydropower.

For those of you new to the topic, pumped hydro can take advantage of renewable energy to pump water from a lower reservoir to an upper reservoir. When the local grid needs more electricity, gravity does the rest. Water from the upper reservoir scoots downhill to run turbines, and ends up in the lower reservoir.

The US Energy Storage Association (ESA) has adopted a target of 100GW of energy storage capacity in the country by 2030, a capacity it said would help facilitate greater penetration of renewables.

The figure, which serves as an upgrade on a previous target of 35GW by 2025, was unveiled during the trade body’s annual conference and described by chief executive Kelly Speakes-Backman as “entirely reasonable and attainable”.

But, Speakes-Backman added, reaching such a goal would require the “right policies and regulatory frameworks” to be in place. That policy environment has been described in detail within a ‘vision paper’ – dubbed ‘100 x 30: Enabling the clean power transformation’ – also released yesterday.

Also speaking on the opening day of the event was US Department of Energy deputy secretary Mark Menezes, who said in a keynote address that his department recognised the importance of energy storage and reiterated its commitment to a technology that would support deeper penetration of renewable energy on US grids.

While storage deployment has slightly lagged behind the original 35GW by 2025 vision crafted by ESA with help from Navigant Research (now known as Guidehouse Insights), with BloombergNEF predicting around 32GW by then and Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables about 28GW, analysis all points to an accelerating rate of deployment.

Indeed the three analysis and research firms between them predict around 85GW to 95GW by 2030. ESA argues that with policies to further stimulate higher shares of renewables on the grid, the 100GW figure is achievable. 100GW would support an aim of 50% renewables by 2030 across the country – an aim shared by ESA together with other prominent renewable and clean energy trade associations including groups representing the wind, solar and hydropower industries. The latter, incidentally, includes 16GW of new pumped storage in its 2030 vision, which ESA also backs.

The U.S. Energy Storage Association  (ESA) today issued an expanded vision for energy storage: 100×30: Enabling the Clean Power Transformation. Informed by developments in the energy storage and clean energy markets and extrapolating upon ESA’s 2017 vision document (35×25: A Vision for Energy Storage), this white paper charts a path for the industry to deploy 100 GW of new storage across the United States in the next decade.

“The U.S. power sector is in the midst of transformation to a cleaner, more modern infrastructure,” said Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of ESA. “With the right policies and regulatory frameworks in place, we believe that achieving 100 GW of new storage installations by 2030 is entirely reasonable and attainable. Current market projections indicate remarkable growth for energy storage over the next decade, and its role is expanding to maintain and enhance the reliability, resilience, stability and affordability of electricity over the coming decade.”

The 100×30 paper depicts a path to 100 GW of new energy storage in the next decade, based on an extrapolation of the original 35×25 report, experts’ projections, and the impact of the accelerating clean energy transformation of the U.S. electricity grid. Technologies in the 100 GW of new energy storage include batteries, thermal, mechanical and pumped storage hydro. ESA estimates that 100 GW of storage deployment by 2030 would produce 200,000 jobs, roughly a threefold increase from current levels.

To reach the goal of 100 GW of new energy storage by 2030, the report outlines a combination of strengthened policy support, such as the investment tax credit (ITC) for stand-alone storage facilities, as well as the continuation of emerging policies that remove barriers to market participation. The combination of a supportive policy framework and a vibrant clean energy economy will drive energy storage growth and set a trajectory for 100 GW of new storage, keeping the power system reliable, resilient and affordable.

Swiss asset manager Capital Dynamics quickly compiled one of the most ambitious energy storage pipelines in the U.S.

The firm is teaming up with Tenaska to develop and operate nine battery projects totaling nearly 2 gigawatts and up to 7.8 gigawatt-hours of grid storage in California. They will target the coastal hubs of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego to provide the dispatchable capacity that is sorely missing right now as the state struggles with days of critical electricity scarcity.

The portfolio joins Capital Dynamics’ earlier acquisition of the Eland solar-storage project, which 8Minute Solar Energy contracted to the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power. CapDyn also acquired Strata Solar’s 100-megawatt/400-megawatt-hour battery near Oxnard in June, Greentech Media has learned. That system is under construction, expected online in the first quarter of 2021.

“It’s obvious to us that the energy transition will require a combination of hybrid plants — solar-plus-storage, wind-plus-storage — as well as standalone storage,” said Benoit Allehaut, managing director for clean energy infrastructure at Capital Dynamics. But, he added, “there’s still plenty to be built before it starts to make a dent.”

California has shut down nuclear- and gas-fired capacity without building enough new firm capacity to meet demand after the sun goes down. Capital Dynamics’ investment thesis appears tailor-made to tackle the root causes of the grid drama unfolding this week.

The partners identified the densely populated coastal areas as places where emissions-free capacity would be most valuable. Those areas consume the most power but are losing local capacity as gas plants shut down. Permitting new gas plants has already become a challenge, and the state’s 2045 deadline to eliminate fossil fuels from power production limits the payback period for new gas projects.

Tenaska chose the greenfield locations based on substation capacity and value for resource adequacy at both the system level and the local level, Allehaut said.

Lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) will become increasingly popular for stationary energy storage applications, overtaking lithium-manganese-cobalt-oxide (NMC) within a decade, Wood Mackenzie forecast in a new report.

As demand from electric vehicles and the stationary storage market both skyrocket in this decade, evolving performance priorities will create a divergence between the types of batteries used for storage and those used for EV applications.

It started with a supply crunch

Historically, the energy storage market has mostly deployed NMC batteries. In late 2018 and early 2019, demand for NMC batteries to be used for energy storage applications grew swiftly, outstripping the available supply.

The rapid rise in demand for EVs since 2010 had driven down the cost of lithium-ion batteries by more than 85 percent. As lead times for NMC availability grew and prices remained flat, LFP vendors began tapping into NMC-constrained markets at competitive prices, thus making LFP an attractive option for both power and energy applications.

Now, it looks like LFP has attained sufficient momentum to overtake NMC as the leading stationary storage chemistry by 2030.

LFP will grow its market share from 10 percent of the stationary storage market in 2015 to more than 30 percent by the end of the decade.

Two markets, two sets of priorities
Even as the stationary energy storage market takes off, EVs will continue to account for the lion’s share of global lithium-ion battery demand over the next 10 years.

The global energy storage systems market size surpassed $340 billion in 2018 and is set to achieve over 6% CAGR up to 2025, according to a report released by Global Market Insights.

Increasing demand for continuous electricity supply along with growing focus toward renewable energy power generation will drive the global energy storage systems industry growth.

The rapid growth pace of energy storage systems market is rather evident from recent agreement between Taiwan Power Company and Delta Electronics.

This pact entails the development of the former’s largest energy storage system which would act as a part of a smart grid project on Kinmen Island.

For realisation of the same, Delta is expected to deliver a 1MWh lithium-ion battery energy storage system, an energy management platform, a 2MW capacity power conditioning system, and environment management systems for deployment at Kinmen’s Xia Xing Power station.

Apparently, the solution would support Taiwan Power Company to stabilise the grid by supplying backup power within a radius of 200 ms in no time post an unplanned generator outage takes place. This move, indeed, is indicative of the fact that the demand for energy storage systems is gradually soaring over time.

Robust properties like high reliability and boosting system resilience at every level has enabled the energy storage systems to erase minor instabilities in the energy output for small as well as large electricity sources.

Energy storage systems serve as a vital cog in the operation of power systems while ensuring the continuity of the energy supply and improving the reliability of the system. On these grounds, the energy storage finds high-end applications across myriad segments spanning transport, manufacturing, and other industrial sectors.

The largest single-site energy storage project in the country was today unveiled in San Diego County, California. Project developer LS Power claims that the 250-MW Gateway Energy Storage project is also the largest battery system in the world.

The project enhances reliability on the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) grid and reduces customer energy costs. In doing so, Gateway provides a valuable resource for energy consumers, utilities and other load servers across California.

“For more than three decades, LS Power has been at the leading edge of our nation’s transition to cleaner, more innovative energy solutions, and we are powering up Gateway Energy Storage as one more component of this vision,” said LS Power CEO Paul Segal. “Through our investments in multiple sectors of the renewables and energy infrastructure space, LS Power is reducing carbon emissions and improving reliability in the markets we serve.”

Gateway Energy Storage, currently at 230 MW and on track to reach 250 MW by the end of the month, follows another LS Power battery project, Vista Energy Storage in Vista, California, which has been operating since 2018 and was previously the largest battery storage project in the United States at 40 MW. LS Power has additional projects in development or construction in both California and New York, including Diablo Energy Storage (200 MW) in Pittsburg, California; LeConte Energy Storage (125 MW) in Calexico, California; and Ravenswood Energy Storage (316 MW) in Queens, New York.

“Gateway and LS Power’s other California-based energy projects will support the state in its clean energy and storage goals,” said LS Power Head of Renewables John King. “LS Power is a first mover in commercializing new technologies and developing new markets. By charging during solar production or off-peak hours and delivering energy to the grid during times of peak demand for power, our battery storage projects improve electric reliability, reduce costs and help our state meet its climate objectives.”