The European Union (EU) has just published its Strategy for Energy System Integration, including pledges to support renewables and energy storage as the continent targets carbon neutrality by 2050.

Published through the European Commission, the strategy provides the “framework for the green energy transition,” with a particular emphasis on bringing together the disparate energy supply and demand scenarios in transportation, industry, gas and buildings – also known as ’sector coupling’.

This includes a recognition that behind-the-meter resources such as household energy storage batteries and electric vehicles (EVs) could help manage distribution grids better. EVs for example could provide 20% of Europe’s required electricity system flexibility by 2050, the Commission said, according to a new study.

Meanwhile larger-scale energy storage resources including pumped hydropower, grid battery storage as well as hydrogen (H2) electrolysers could also provide a great deal of flexibility, to help manage the system. Thermal storage at industrial facilities, closely integrating heat with power, could also be a big provider of flexibility, allowing for demand response that takes advantage of electricity price changes in real-time.

In addition to adding increased flexibility, energy system integration – planning the whole energy sector holistically – will have multiple benefits from reducing greenhouse gas emissions in difficult-to-decarbonise sectors, to increasing energy efficiency and reducing demand, to supporting European economic competitiveness, the Commission argued. It will also mean “greater consumer empowerment, improved resilience and security of supply”.

A subcommittee of the US House Committee on Appropriations has approved more than a billion dollars in support for developing energy storage deployment, research and manufacturing in a funding bill for the 2021 Fiscal Year.

The Congressional Committee, which makes funding decisions on the federal government’s key activities, approves 12 bills a year on topics including legislation, labour and education, defense and energy and water.

Yesterday, the FY 2021 Energy and Water Development Funding Bill was approved by the Committee, set to invest a total of US$49.6 billion in programmes to address climate change, improve infrastructure, strengthen national security and make measures to support the revitalisation of the economic in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Committee noted that this was an increase of US$1.26 billion – or 3% – above the 2020 equivalent Bill. Also included was US$43.5 billion of emergency spending for the repair of water infrastructure and the modernisation of energy infrastructure. The bill now heads to the full committee for markup.

In the section on electricity, the Bill proposed a total of US$3.35 billion of “necessary expenses related to grid modernisation programmes”. Alongside a US$2 billion commitment to grants and demonstration for the enhancement of grid resilience, reliability and energy security of national electricity infrastructure including allowing for the greater adoption of renewable energy, there were specific pledges on energy storage. These were:

The U.S. may have fallen behind Asia and Europe in battery manufacturing, but a number of well-funded companies are looking to get the country back in the game with a technology that could supersede today’s lithium-ion chemistries.

Companies including Ionic Materials, QuantumScape, Sila Nanotechnologies, Sion Power and Solid Power are developing all-solid-state batteries (ASSBs) that are expected to be safer and more energy-dense than the lithium-ion products used in today’s electric vehicles and battery systems.

“Lithium-ion today, with a metal-oxide cathode and carbon-based anode, is starting to approach its theoretical limits,” said Solid Power CEO Doug Campbell in an interview.

Current lithium-ion technologies might achieve power densities of up to 300 watt-hours per kilogram, Campbell said, but not much more. “Solid-state is a platform that allows things like metallic lithium as an anode,” he said. “That’s perhaps the most direct pathway to significantly increasing the energy.”

ASSBs will not have liquid electrolytes that are susceptible to thermal runaway, so the batteries should be inherently safer. And because today’s lithium-ion products require costly thermal control systems, “a safer battery pack is a lower-cost battery pack,” Campbell said.

That combination of potential upsides is attracting big bucks. Massachusetts-based Ionic Materials has drawn investment from a fund backed by Nissan, Mitsubishi and Renault, in addition to Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. Daimler has backed Sila Nanotechnologies, based in California’s Bay Area. Samsung and Hyundai have invested in Colorado-based Solid Power.

According to Wood Mackenzie, U.S. investments in ASSB and advanced lithium-ion players amounted to $300 million in 2018, $250 million in 2019 and $200 million so far this year, with the 2020 figure made up by a single cash injection from Volkswagen into QuantumScape.

Gresham House Energy Storage Fund is aiming to raise an initial £15m to buy more grid scale battery storage.

The fund has an operational storage portfolio of 215MW with a further 140MW expected to come on line later this year (details here).

It aims to use the initial series of ‘Grid Power Bonds’, which pay an annual fixed rate of 5 per cent over a five-year term, to acquire an operating asset “which is at an advanced stage of due diligence”, per the market announcement.

The fund aims to launch a series of such bonds, which will be redeemable by the issuer after two years with no penalty. It may also use proceeds to fund other buys and to refinance existing projects.

Paying 5 per cent a year and with low fees is a good rate compared to revolving credit or project finance, the fund argues.

Gresham House doesn’t plan to use the bonds to borrow more than £40m in aggregate.

At the time of writing this article, the COVID-19 pandemic still had a firm grip on the world with no reliable and widespread cure within reach. And while there will be a day when this crisis is resolved, its impact on global economies and industries will likely still be felt for a long time after the virus is under control and life has returned to (the next) normal.

The energy storage industry is no exception. But what is the actual impact of COVID-19 on the market, in particular, in the longer-term? And how should energy storage players adapt to weather the pandemic’s effects or become even more successful?

In this two-part article, based on work carried out by my company, Apricum, an international cleantech advisory and consultancy group, I will provide the bigger picture of “energy storage vs the virus” by examining its impact on the fundamental market drivers and outlining the key mindset and behavioural shifts that we expect to see in a post-pandemic world.

A quick recap: Where we are currently
Like all industries, the energy storage business is significantly impacted by the pandemic due to site access problems and difficulties to get permissions in times of lock downs as well as a general economic downturn. This will certainly affect activity in 2020.

However, we are not aware of any larger scale project under construction that has been cancelled or delayed for a longer period. Quite the opposite, grid battery contracts of impressive size have been announced over the last few months, like Southern California Edison’s (SCE) 770MW storage procurement in May, one of the largest ever seen. Temporary slowdowns in the execution will typically not lead to an abandonment of a large grid battery project given the often multi-year development cycles. Moreover, if utility-scale energy storage qualifies as “critical infrastructure” site access is granted even in times of a lockdown, as seen, for example, in California and Italy.

Behind-the-meter storage companies in general are likely to feel a stronger impact, though: Many commercial and industrial (C&I) customers will have to cut back on investments outside their core business, so the purchasing of an energy storage system might be considered non-essential for the time being. In the same spirit, homeowners might want to defer major household spending to 2021 and beyond.

Eos Energy Storage, the leading manufacturer of safe, low-cost and long-duration zinc battery storage systems, today announced that it has partnered with EPC firm Nayo Tropical Technology Ltd to deploy the company’s Aurora EnergyBlock™ battery energy storage system (BESS). Eos’ EnergyBlock is part of a project to bring power to underserved areas and will integrate into rural microgrid developments beginning in the African country of Nigeria. Results from the deployment of this microgrid BESS solution will give utilities and energy providers options for the best storage technologies for rural locations and environments.

“Eos’ energy storage solutions are unique as they do not require HVAC or any expensive thermal management systems to cool the storage system,” commented Balki G. Iyer, Chief Commercial Officer of Eos. “The solution is a perfect fit for harsh environments and rural developments like the Nigerian microgrids as it features simple-to-deploy technology and components, delivering an affordable solution that only needs minimal operation and maintenance. This can be a big game-changer for many parts of the world with similar needs and we are quite excited about solving the larger energy problems for many rural communities.”

“We are proud to be leading the way in deploying one of the most advanced energy storage technologies in the world,” said Okenwa Anayo Nas, CEO of Nayo Tropical Technology Ltd. “Our projects will provide lighting to homes and better the livelihoods of the people in remote villages across Africa, beginning with our first of many projects together in Nigeria. From a mini-grid developer’s perspective, Eos offers the most reliable solution with high round-trip efficiency at the lowest cost per kilowatt hour.”

Eos’ clients, including utilities, EPC companies, and storage integrators, benefit from features including:

Battery system integrators must navigate a broad array of technologies and varying market drivers when putting systems together. Andy Colthorpe speaks to Powin Energy and Sungrow about the engineering challenges involved in building lithium-ion battery storage.

This article first appeared in Volume 23 of Solar Media’s quarterly journal, PV Tech Power, in ‘Storage & Smart Power’, the section of the journal contributed by Energy-Storage.news.

In the previous edition of PV Tech Power, we spoke to four leading developers of solar-plus-storage and standalone energy storage projects based in North America about what it takes to get projects over the line, their experiences in the field – and what sort of technologies are making their efforts possible.

This time around, we’ve spoken in depth with two of the system integrator/ manufacturers that supply that segment of the energy storage market as well as projects in other key markets including the UK, mainland Europe and Australia.

Danny Lu, vice president at Oregon, USA-headquartered Powin Energy and Dr Zhuang Cai, R&D director at Hefei, China-headquartered Sungrow, share their insights on what it means to build lithium-ion battery storage systems at scale.

A 21st Century industry
Powin Energy is a pure-play battery energy storage system (BESS) manufacturer and system integrator, having pivoted away from its role as a developer in 2017, while Sungrow will be better known to readers as one of the world’s biggest solar inverter makers.

“Sungrow has focused on power electronics for more than 20 years. Our president (Can Renxian) was a university professor and saw a large potential for renewable energy,” Cai says.

Sungrow has to date supplied more than 100GW of PV inverters. Since first announcing a joint venture (JV) with South Korean battery maker Samsung SDI to create and supply energy storage systems in China with an investment of around US$20 million, the storage JV has accelerated its activities rapidly. By 2016, when it went global, investment in the JV stood at a reported US$170 million. According to Sungrow the JV has already installed more than 900 battery systems, at various scales and for varying applications. The company’s background in solar was instrumental in allowing for the move into energy storage, Cai says.

The Australian energy industry has gathered online for the Energy storage: leading the transition virtual conference, which was held on Thursday 2 July.

More than 700 delegates registered to attend the virtual conference, which was hosted by Energy Editor Laura Harvey. During the three-hour conference, speakers explored the transitioning energy market in Australia and the role that energy storage will need to play as we strive to increase the level of renewable energy in our national grid.

The conference commenced with a presentation from Hydro Tasmania’s Battery of the Nation (BotN) Project Director, Christopher Gwynne, who provided a very well received update on the BotN project.

Delegates were particularly interested in the concept of deep storage which Mr Gwynne introduced – storage with the ability to operate over many hours as an optimal, least-cost choice, a category which BotN falls into.

“Up until recently storage was just storage, but recently we’ve started to point to big differences between what you might call shallow and deep storage,” Mr Gwynne said.

Shallow storage essentially is storage that is four to six hours worth of storage in terms of its duration. Deep storage has a longer duration, in the range of ten to twelve hours.

As the market transitions to having more input from renewable sources, forms of short, or shallow storage, are the ones we need in place first. But according to Mr Gwynne, most of the analysis that’s going on around the world is showing that as markets move further into their transformations, longer, deeper storage options will be required in order to maintain a stable and reliable power system.

“What this means is that by the mid to late ‘20s, we’re going to need some of these longer duration, deep storage assets to start to come into the market,” Mr Gwynne said.

“The value of this type of storage is in the fact that it’s better placed to manage longer term variations in supply, like what we might see during a wind drought, or a successive number of days of low solar output in the system.

“When dealing with these conditions, you’re going to need deep storage to help manage the reliability of the system.”

Next up, Matt Rennie, Energy Transition Lead Partner at EY, discussed storage opportunities in the evolving energy market.

The need for inexpensive, fast, reliable chemistries and technologies for storing renewable energy is breaking the lithium-ion mould. Get used to the terms “beyond-LIBs”, “strain engineering” and “hydrogen-bonding metal hydrides”, and enter the labs of Professor Guoxiu Wang at the University of Technology Sydney and Professor Kondo-Francois Aguey-Zinsou at the University of New South Wales.

Professor Aguey-Zinsou’s new technology could provide energy at 2 cents per kilowatt hour and is expected to be patented within weeks.

At UNSW’s Materials Energy Research Laboratory in nanoscale (MERlin), Aguey-Zinsou has been working on storing hydrogen by bonding it with solid materials, such as magnesium nanoparticles.

It’s a safer approach than storing hydrogen in gas or liquid form; and many hydrides act like a sponge for hydrogen, absorbing it to the high volumetric capacity required for efficient storage of energy.

Aguey-Zinsou, who has spent 20 years investigating hydrogen-bonding metal hydrides, has applied his breakthrough technology — a hydrogen-absorbing metal alloy that includes titanium — to an energy-storage system designed for residential and commercial use, which could be commercialised in early 2021.

“It’s a game changer in how we use electricity,” the Professor told the Sydney Morning Herald, likening the development to “the internet revolution”, and emphasising the safety of the chemistry involved — “It’s not flammable,” he said.

The resulting residential battery system, engineered at UNSW’s Hydrogen Energy Research Centre, which has received $10 million in funding from Providence Asset Group, is expected to have a 60 kWh capacity and occupy the space of a mini-fridge with a height of about 130 cm.

A co-founder of Providence, Alan Yu, has said the batteries will be manufactured in Australia and will be branded LAVO.

He also hopes to scale the system by containerising numerous battery units to be used at scale on projects such as the community 4.5 MW Manilla Solar Farm near Tamworth, developed by Providence Asset Group with the help of $3.5 million in funding from the NSW Government Regional Community Energy Fund.

A National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study concludes that by 2050, hydrogen storage lasting for two weeks “is expected to be cost-effective.”

The global consulting firm DNV GL reached a similar conclusion in April, saying that hydrogen is the “first viable option” for seasonal storage, to help balance renewable generation.

Hydrogen storage with just one week’s duration could become cost-effective by achieving capital costs for the power equipment below $1,507 per kW, and capital costs for underground hydrogen storage below $1.80 per kWh, said the study’s lead author Omar Guerra, an NREL research engineer.

The power equipment begins with an electrolyzer to produce hydrogen from water—a process that can be powered with solar or wind power. Later, to convert the hydrogen to electricity, the power equipment would be either a fuel cell or a gas turbine. Researchers are also developing a reversible fuel cell that also operates as an electrolyzer.

NREL’s study also found that pumped hydro and compressed air energy storage with one day of discharge duration would be cost-competitive in the near future.

Here are the study’s cost estimates, provided by NREL—with the cost for storing the hydrogen, compressed air, or pumped water shown as the energy capacity cost (in $/kWh capacity, not $/kWh generated):