The first grid-scale battery energy storage project in the Canadian province of Alberta is on-track to go into operation this month, while TransAlta, the company behind the project, has expedited plans to retire a coal plant citing “future market conditions”.

TransAlta Corporation, which generates and is engaged in wholesale marketing of electricity, is building the WindCharger 10MW / 20MWh lithium-ion battery storage project in the municipal district of Pincher Creek, through its subsidiary Western Sustainable Power Corporation.

As the name implies, the project is being built at the site of a wind farm, also operated by TransAlta. The company said it had been investigating the viability of battery storage at its various wind farm locations before selecting the Summerview Wind Farm in Alberta.

Approval was granted for WindCharger to be built at the wind farm’s substation in November 2019 by the Alberta Utilities Commission and construction began at the end of March this year. While it had originally been expected to be completed in June or July, TransAlta announced in its second quarter 2020 results reporting on 31 July that the project is to be completed during August.

TransAlta targeting ‘100% clean electricity by 2025’

TransAlta chief operating officer John Kousinioris told local newspaper the Calgary Herald that the project, which uses Tesla’s battery storage technology, is “an opportunity for us to match storage and our renewable wind power generation”. Kousinioris told the Herald that the batteries will charge up from the wind farm “when the wind is blowing or prices are really low”.

As heat waves sweep across North America, C&I customers are using their batteries to reduce strain on the grid.

According to data supplied by Enel X, energy storage resources are being used five times as much this year as they were last year to help reduce peak electricity demand across New York, California, Massachusetts and Ontario this summer.

Enel X helps C&I customers reduce energy and make money via utility demand response programs by installing energy storage batteries and distributed energy resource (DER) optimization software that lets them participate in utility demand response calls. The company manages and operates, and in many cases, owns the battery storage systems.

When energy demand is high on the grid, a C&I customer with a behind-the-meter battery storage system optimized by Enel X’s software can use energy stored in that system instead of using power from the grid. In instances of a demand response event, the local utility or ISO will issue an alert that triggers the dispatch for the battery storage system operator. The battery is dispatched during these events shifting site load off the grid, similar to how a traditional demand response participant is dispatched to curtail load.

According to Enel, the software uses machine learning to learn the facility’s behavior and anticipate its electricity consumption, which gets saved into the software’s algorithm. The algorithm continuously evaluates this information, as well as factors such as market prices, utility rates, demand response, demand charges, and battery storage, to determine how it will interact with the energy storage assets. It shifts into storage power when it sees that storage will be the most efficient financially.

Scientists seeking ways to improve a battery’s ability to hold a charge longer, using advanced materials that are safe, stable and efficient, have determined that the materials themselves are only part of the solution.

In fact, studies at the interface of battery materials, along with increased knowledge of the processes at work, are unleashing a surge of knowledge needed to more quickly address the demand for longer-lasting portable electronics, electric vehicles and stationary energy storage for the electric grid.

“If we need better energy storage, we need to better understand what happens at the interface between the electrolyte and the battery or supercapacitor material,” said Yury Gogotsi of Drexel University, the corresponding author for a forward-looking review paper published in Nature Reviews Materials.

Drexel is a partner university of the Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures and Transport, or FIRST, center, an Energy Frontier Research Center located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and funded by the Department of Energy.

For the past 11 years, a group of scientists with the FIRST center focused on electrochemical research has been studying the interfaces of materials for energy storage. “This is the key—this is where action happens in energy storage,” Gogotsi said. “Basically, this is the frontier of energy storage.”

The electronics market is dominated by lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors. They are used in multiple consumer and industrial applications that require electrochemical energy-storage, or EES, devices, because they are known to operate safely and efficiently in various environments, especially at high or low temperatures.

A federal appeals court has cleared the way for large-scale energy storage projects to have similar access to the power grid as electric generators do. State regulators had brought the case to limit FERC’s regulation of interstate electricity markets. The court (again) ruled in favor of FERC’s authority. The July decision is a big win for independent, merchant battery companies and renewable energy proponents, and a blow to entrenched legacy generators that have worked to stall independent battery stations by complaining that these are not generation facilities and cannot perform the same way as a legacy generation station on the grid. In particular, they were concerned that their own electricity would be used against them—bought low and sold high the next day while depressing prices. The legacy plants would lose both ways! But that’s nonsense.

Advanced battery technologies and decreasing battery costs have encouraged the development of utility-scale (really big) electricity storage stations on the grid. Tesla TSLA and AES Energy Storage have led the way with two such batteries. These address the greatest handicap wind and solar energy have in their push to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation market: intermittency. Batteries will also solve a second limitation of wind and solar energy, that peak renewable energy production is not always coincident with peak demand. Electricity demand varies over a day and over a season. It is this peak-and-trough wave that energy planners want to address with electricity storage facilities.

Today, most markets require electricity generation fleets sized to meet demand on the hottest day in August or coldest day in winter. Using the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT, market as an example, peak demand is forecast to reach 75,000 megawatt hours (mWh) in August 2020. ERCOT is charged with making sure that there are sufficient supplies. However, the average electricity demand in ERCOT throughout the year is approximately 45,000 mWh. Battery storage would help reduce the need for a portion of the generation fleet and hasten the retirement of older high-cost generators.

The transition to clean energy is exactly that: a transition. While we must bear in mind that electricity is only one (large) portion of energy demand, the transformation to a renewables-based future is happening extremely quickly, but there are still steps that need to be taken for the grid to fully take onboard their value and replace fossil fuels.

One major step in the US is the ongoing implementation of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order 841, allowing energy storage resources to participate in wholesale markets operated in the main regional transmission operator (RTO) and independent system operator (ISO) grid services areas.

At a technical conference hosted online by FERC, chairman Neil Chatterjee reiterated that “breaking down barriers to energy storage resources” has been a huge focus of his team’s work, calling FERC Order 841 a “landmark effort for energy storage technology to participate and compete”.

“Order 841 will be seen as the most important step this commission could take to ensure a clean energy future,” Chatterjee said, with all six RTOs engaged in the process to make Order 841 “reality”.

However, the focus of the technical conference, held on 23 July, was to look at another major step forward, enabling the pairing of energy storage with generation facilities – described as ‘hybrid resources’.

“The time is right to discuss the next wave of opportunities for storage resources,” Chatterjee said.

FERC Commissioner Glick added that “we need to take a look at market rules – are they acting as barriers? And what can we do?”

2019 was another blockbuster year for energy storage deployment. One question seems to stay at the forefront: When will we see a real competitor to lithium-ion? While there is no clear front-runner today to knock lithium-ion off its podium, there are many technologies that have the potential to be the next breakthrough.

Energy storage is referred to as the “holy grail” of renewable energy, as it gives solar and wind energy the ability to generate electricity 24/7. The need to shift energy from daytime to nighttime is critical for solar energy to compete with fossil fuels. Once these costs of shifting electricity reach grid parity, it is likely that solar and storage will replace many of today’s fossil fuel generators.

While lithium-ion had a dominant 60% market share of deployed projects in 2018, more and more utilities and independent power producers (IPPs) are experimenting with alternative technology pilot projects. There are several reasons why alternative technologies have become a key topic in the storage industry. Although we see lithium-ion costs continue to decline, the rate is currently slowing and would need much greater acceleration to reach grid parity coupled with solar. In addition, many lithium-ion technologies use cobalt (a conflict mineral), leading to a push for a more environmentally friendly and ethical reason.

Another key argument against lithium-ion is the inherent fire hazard the systems pose. Several lithium-ion battery fires throughout South Korea and other locations over the past few years brought this topic of safety to the forefront. On the technology side, lithium-ion sees annual degradation, both cycling and time-based. This degradation can have major impacts on the system as it progresses through its life.

LG Chem pointed out in its comments that the author of APS’s final report did not conduct site visits or forensic analysis of site artifacts, but summarized findings of APS’s retained consultants. “The independent experts retained by LG Chem believe that the evidence rules out DNV-GL’s theory regarding the cause of the initial thermal runaway event,” Kyunghyun Nahm, deputy general counsel for LG Chem, said in a letter to the commission.

APS declined to comment on methods or findings in LG Chem’s report. Davion M. Hill of DNV-GL, author of the APS report submitted July 27, would not comment for the company.

APS and LG Chem agree that the explosion occurred when firefighters opened a door, igniting flammable gases accumulated inside the battery energy storage system (BESS) container. Four firefighters were injured and two have not yet returned to work, said Rick Swan, director of health and safety operational services for the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF).

There is no method yet for stopping a thermal runaway event in a BESS installation, according to Swan. “Industry can sometimes get ahead of themselves,” he said.

Both APS and LG Chem agreed the Novec 1230 clean agent fire-suppression system installed in the McMicken facility was inadequate to halt the thermal runaway event.

Firefighters’ concerns about energy storage systems include being informed by system owners about materials inside containers, ongoing monitoring and having detailed emergency response plans, Swan said.

“Additional research on effective fire service tactics, remote gas monitoring, robust communication systems, and explosion prevention systems are needed,” Steve Kerber, vice president of research at UL Firefighter Safety Research Institute (FSRI), said in an email.

Germany company Voltstorage, claiming to be the only developer and maker of home solar energy storage systems using vanadium flow batteries, raised €6 million (US$7.1 million) in July.

Voltstorage claims that its recyclable and non-flammable battery systems, which also enable long cycle life of charging and discharging without degradation of components or electrolyte, can become a “highly demanded ecological alternative to the lithium technology”. Its battery system, called Voltstorage SMART, was launched in 2018 and comes with 1.5kW output and 6.2kWh capacity. At the time of its launch, company founder Jakob Bitner claimed that Voltstorage had been “the first to automate the production process of redox-flow battery cells,” enabling the production of “high-quality battery cells at favourable cost”. The company also claims that around 37% less CO2 is emitted in the production of its systems versus comparable lithium-ion storage.

There has been great interest and discussion around redox flow batteries using vanadium electrolyte around the world at grid and larger commercial scale, although actual deployment figures have not yet begun to eat into the dominant existing market share held by lithium-ion. For domestic use, meanwhile, only Australia’s Redflow, which uses a zinc bromine electrolyte chemistry rather than vanadium, is widely reported to be targeting the home storage market – along with commercial and industrial applications as well. However, Redflow discontinued a 10kWh product specifically targeted at the residential space in May 2017 and the majority of its focus is on those other segments, although it makes its modular ZBM-branded systems available to larger residential users. Industry analyst Julian Jansen at IHS Markit had told Energy-Storage.news at the time of that discontinuation that it seemed “highly unlikely that flow batteries will succeed as a viable competing option to Lithium-ion based systems in the residential market outside of very specific niche applications”.

Existing investors in Munich-headquartered startup Voltstorage put in money once again, including family-owned investment company Korys, Bayer Capital – a subsidiary of Bavaria’s development bank – and EIT InnoEnergy, a European accelerator investor in sustainable energy and related innovation.

The way has been cleared for energy storage projects by a federal appeals court. The July decision is a big win for independent, merchant battery companies and renewable energy proponents.

Advanced battery technologies and decreasing battery costs have encouraged the development of utility-scale (really big) electricity storage stations on the grid. Tesla -3.8%TSLA and AES Energy Storage have led the way with two such batteries. These address the greatest handicap wind and solar energy have in their push to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation market: intermittency. Batteries will also solve a second limitation of wind and solar energy, that peak renewable energy production is not always coincident with peak demand. Electricity demand varies over a day and over a season. It is this peak-and-trough wave that energy planners want to address with electricity storage facilities.

Today, most markets require electricity generation fleets sized to meet demand on the hottest day in August or coldest day in winter. Using the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT, market as an example, peak demand is forecast to reach 75,000 megawatt hours (mWh) in August 2020. ERCOT is charged with making sure that there are sufficient supplies. However, the average electricity demand in ERCOT throughout the year is approximately 45,000 mWh. Battery storage would help reduce the need for a portion of the generation fleet and hasten the retirement of older high-cost generators.