The ongoing heatwave in California has caused rolling blackouts that some have blamed on renewable energy, which is hard to regulate without an adequate battery backup. And, like manna from heaven, now the world’s largest battery backup facility is up and running in San Diego.

The facility stores up to 230 megawatts of power with plans to expand up to 250, both dwarfing and setting a new challenge for similar Tesla facilities in rural Australia and others around the world.

Why has the heatwave stretched the California grid to this extent? Anytime there’s a heatwave, people turn up their air conditioners, which are among the most energy-intensive appliances on the market. When the heat is enough to constitute a health hazard, it’s hard to argue that civilians should turn off the AC—especially when people can’t comfortably gather to share resources because of the COVID-19 pandemic and closures. Think of everyone who might normally spend the afternoon at a movie theater on the hottest days of the year.

Instead, people in individual homes are cranking up the AC to match the hazardous heat. That creates an over-demand on the grid, and to compensate, electrical suppliers often plan rolling blackouts to ensure the deprivation of services is, at least, uniform. This is where a battery backup comes in.

The “peak hours” for power usage in the summer coincide with the hottest, most dangerous part of days that have already been record high temperatures. A battery facility stores energy during off-peak times and releases it back into the grid during peak times.

Some solar customers already have their own small version of this, where their panels “sell” energy back into the grid at peak times in order to offset their energy bills. In California, so many people and facilities use solar power that the peak hours don’t start until the sun goes down, because that’s when demand shifts back to the state’s traditional power plants.

Major PV inverter manufacturer Sungrow has reported a significant recovery in revenue and profitability in the second quarter of 2020, after financial figures suffered in the first quarter, due to the impact of COVID-19 on both its PV project and EPC business and demand for PV inverters in China.

Major PV inverter manufacturer Sungrow has reported a significant recovery in revenue and profitability in the second quarter of 2020, after financial figures suffered in the first quarter, due to the impact of COVID-19 on both its PV project and EPC business and demand for PV inverters in China.

Sungrow’s total operating income (revenue) in the first quarter of 2020 fell to RMB 1,846 million (US$ 269.8 million), compared to record revenue of around US$850.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. Net profit had followed the same downward path, resulting in figures of US$23.3 million in the first quarter of 2020, compared to a net profit of US$49.4 million in the previous quarter.

However, the second quarter of 2020 marked a complete turnaround with revenue reaching RMB 5,095 million (US$744.67 million), Sungrow’s second highest quarterly figures. Net profit was RMB 286.62 million (US$41.88 million).

As a result, first half year revenue reached RMB 6,942 million (US$1,01 billion), a 55.57% increase over the prior year period, Net profit in the reporting period was RMB 446,13 million (US$65.2 million) 71.95% increase, year-on-year.

Key to the rebound was the growth in PV inverter sales within its PV Inverter & Power Conversion business segment, which reached around RMB 2,669 million (US$390.12 million) in the first half of 2020, compared to around US$243.3 million in the prior year period, a 60% increase, year-on-year.

Overall sales in the reporting quarter were also boosted by its energy storage segment, which was claimed to have increased sales to around US$35.6 million, up almost 50% from the prior year period, according to the company.

BOSTON, Sept. 3, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — The electricity grid is undergoing its first evolution since the invention of the power transmission system, and energy storage devices, particularly mechanical energy storage devices, will play a solid role in this evolution.

Decarbonization, renewable energies, and energy storage devices are all factors involved in the current evolution of the electricity grid. In the last decades the integration of renewable energies, pushed by the necessity to decarbonize the electricity sector, led energy storage devices to become increasingly important to stabilize the electricity grid.

The increased adoption of variable renewable energy led the electricity grid operator to adopt energy storage systems to smoothen the variability of renewable sources.

Li-ion batteries, currently dominating the storage sectors in all of its aspects. From portable electronics to MW scale storage systems, Li-ion batteries will struggle in the future to address the MW scale power and daily storage duration, when Mechanical Energy Storage systems will enter the market.

In the brand-new report “Potential Stationary Energy Storage Technologies to Monitor,” IDTechEx has investigated these emerging technologies. With a simple working mechanism, Mechanical Energy Storage systems are addressing the bigger spectrum of the energy storage devices: large power output, and long storage time.

This new class of storage systems include older and newer technologies. It includes elderly technologies like compressed air energy storage, already installed in the 1980s, and some of the younger gravitational energy storage, like in the case of Highview Energy, and Energy Vault recently backed with millions of dollars.

These interesting devices are now entering the electricity market with demonstration projects, to prove the technical concept. The constant integration of variable energy sources will require additional storage devices to stabilize the electricity grid, where the Mechanical Energy Storage device could play a fundamental role.

The US industry deployed 168MW / 288MWh of energy storage in the second quarter of this year, the second highest quarterly figures on record, according to Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables.

The market research and analysis firm has just issued its latest quarterly US Energy Storage Monitor, produced in cooperation with the national Energy Storage Association industry group. The figures are up on Q1 2020’s 98MW / 208MWh of installations and are second only to the record-breaking final quarter of 2019, when 186.4MW / 364MWh of deployments were made.

Wood Mackenzie noted that one single grid-scale project in California made up two-thirds of the total deployments for the quarter: the state is leader in all three segments of the US market, from front-of-meter (62.5MWh in Q2), residential (66.1MWh) to non-residential including commercial and industrial behind-the-meter (32.1MWh).

Other states to lead the market segments included Hawaii (26.2MWh residential and 15MWh non-residential), Massachusetts (23.7MWh non-residential and 14MWh front-of-meter), Oklahoma (20MWh front-of-meter) and Arizona (3.5MWh residential).

Firm revises annual deployment forecast downward slightly
While Wood Mackenzie had earlier in the year issued a forecast for the annual market to total 7.2GW in size and US$7.2 billion in monetary terms by 2025 in the US, the latest Monitor predicts that US deployments will reach “nearly 7GW” annually by 2025, worth about US$6.9 billion.

Nonetheless the growth forecast is still a significant jump from the 1.2GW of expected installations in 2020, which the analysis firm pointed out still meant the market crossed the US$1 billion threshold despite the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts.

Finnish technology group Wärtsilä has secured an engineering, procurement, and construction contract from Duke Energy for three battery storage facilities in the US.

In North Carolina, Duke Energy’s Asheville (8.8MW) and Hot Springs (4MW/4MWh) facilities will receive battery storage facilities under the contract. These are part of the company’s $2bn grid modernisation programme in western North Carolina.

The third energy storage facility is Duke Energy’s Crane project, located in Indiana. All three storage project sites are expected to be commissioned during 2020 and 2021.

A Wärtsilä spokesperson said the company would use its GEMS energy management platform in the projects. It will also use the software for planned battery sites and solar assets across six energy distribution areas.
The company said this will enable North Carolina facilities to dispatch energy, provide emergency backup power and balance the local grid.

Wärtsilä energy storage and optimisation vice-president Andrew Tang said: “Duke Energy is specifically utilising the GEMS Fleet Director and GEMS Power Plant Controller to monitor, assess and optimize deployments across multiple regions in real-time and integrating GEMS as a data source for their specialised algorithms and analytics.

“GEMS will be customised for Duke Energy’s deployments to increase grid resilience at sites that require energy storage backup and to ultimately facilitate the first-ever entry into the Midcontinent Independent System Operator market.”

As renewable energy generation grows, so does the need for new storage methods that can be used at times when the Sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. A Scottish company called Gravitricity has now broken ground on a demonstrator facility for a creative new system that stores energy in the form of “gravity” by lifting and dropping huge weights.

If you coil a spring, you’re loading it with potential energy, which is released when you let it go. Gravitricity works on the same basic principle, except in this case the springs are 500- to 5,000-tonne weights. When held aloft by powerful cables and winches, these weights store large amounts of potential energy. When that energy is needed, they can be lowered down a mineshaft to spin the winch and feed electricity into the grid.

Gravitricity says that these units could have peak power outputs of between 1 and 20 MW, and function for up to 50 years with no loss of performance. Able to go from zero to full power in under a second, the system can quickly release its power payload in as little as 15 minutes or slow it down to last up to eight hours.

To recharge this giant mechanical battery, electricity from renewable sources power the winches to lift the weights back to the top. In all, the system has an efficiency of between 80 and 90 percent.

Ultimately, this kind of system should be able to store energy at a lower cost than other grid-scale energy storage systems, such as Tesla’s huge lithium-ion battery in Australia. The concept sounds very similar to the one behind Energy Vault, which uses a crane to hoist concrete blocks into a tower.

That said, Gravitricity seems to be further ahead in development. The company is now in the early stages of constructing a demonstrator facility to test out the concept next year. The tower will stand 16 m (52.5 ft) tall, lifting and dropping two 25-tonne weights in order to generate 250 kW.

Agreements to deploy 1GWh of novel aqueous zinc battery energy storage in Texas and 500MWh in California have been struck by technology provider Eos Energy Storage, marking a massive scale-up in expected installations for the systems.

Eos Energy Storage said in a press release yesterday that its long duration zinc hybrid cathode batteries, which are best suited for 4-6 hour discharge but have the flexibility to go to higher power and longer run-times through de-rating power, have been ordered by ‘technology agnostic’ power producer International Electric Power for 1GWh of projects to be connected to the grid run by the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

A second customer, Carson Hybrid Energy Storage (CHES), has ordered Eos’ zinc batteries for the full capacity of a 500MWh energy storage facility in the Los Angeles Basin. CHES will use the zinc batteries to store surplus solar that otherwise would be curtailed and unused, while also easing congestion on transmission lines. The project will be preceded by a 1MW pilot to be constructed next year.

CHES president Peter Reardon said that the fire safety of Eos’ technology was a big factor in their selection, as was the ‘Made in the USA’ tag that accompanies the battery systems – Eos has partnered with US nuclear technology company Holtec to create a manufacturing joint venture (JV) called HI-POWER. Alongside the order announcements, Eos said Holtec has invested a further US$10 million into the JV on top of an initial US$12 million it put in last year.

Eos not only makes and supplies the batteries but also the integrated AC Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) that the customers require to connect them to the grid and to other energy resources such as solar and wind. The company claims its battery systems are non-flammable as well as made from widely-available, recyclable materials and as far back as 2017 was claiming solar-plus-storage with 4-hour discharge could be possible for as low as US$0.10 per kWh using the technology.

The rise of renewable energy sources and the decarbonization of the grid will need new energy storage installations in the coming years to provide flexible energy and capacity. Alongside rising shares of solar and wind power in the electricity mix, the U.S. is set to see increased energy storage installation as storage is critical to ensuring more solar and wind power generation.

America has the potential to see 100 gigawatts (GW) of new energy storage deployed by 2030, the U.S. Energy Storage Association (ESA) said in a new white paper this month.

That is an ambitious target, considering that in its previous estimate from 2017, ESA projected 35 GW of energy storage – including batteries, thermal, mechanical, and pumped storage hydro – installed by 2025.  

The ambitious 100-GW target of new energy storage is achievable if supportive policies and emerging policies removing barriers to market participation continue, the trade association says.

“Remarkable Growth Ahead”

“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,” said Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of ESA.

All estimates point to the exponential growth of energy storage installations over the next decade.

The most recent U.S. Energy Storage Monitor from Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and the ESA shows that a total of 523 MW of energy storage was deployed in the United States. This year, the storage deployment is set to double to nearly 1.2 GW, despite the coronavirus crisis that has changed and challenged energy markets and company plans. In 2025, energy storage deployment is set to reach 7 GW, representing six-fold growth compared to the new storage installations in 2020.