CleanTechnica met up with Generac’s Chief Marketing Officer and president of its new clean energy business, Russ Minick at SPI 2019, to talk about the company’s big pivot into energy storage products to learn more about where that strategy came from.

At SPI2019, Generac and its team of Patagonia vest clad associates rolled out a new home energy storage system based largely on the units designed by Pika Energy, which Generac acquired earlier this year. The company injected the brain of the solution, the PWRcell inverter, with intelligence from another acquisition, Neurio Technologies, adding home energy usage monitoring and much more through its new PWRview tool.

The addition of Neurio’s intelligent energy management and monitoring tech also enabled integration with another renewables star: residential solar systems. The ability to not only harness energy in the battery for later use, but to enable homeowners to run off of that power for hours or days in the event of a grid outage resonated with Generac’s core customer base.

Customers looking to add a generator to keep their home and refrigerator running through a power outage caused by a storm were thrilled at the prospect of a system that taps into the unlimited resource of the sun without the need for any additional fuel. Sharing the PWRcell inverter slashes the cost of having to purchase a second inverter for the home solar system and makes the combined solar-plus-storage that much more affordable.

Exploring the potential of rooftop solar integration led Generac to not only allow for a direct connection of a rooftop solar system to its PWRcell inverter, but to develop a suite of products that intelligently integrate an on-site solar installation with the overall home energy system.

After the solar modules themselves, the first point of connection for a single inverter solar system is typically to a dedicated DC optimizer for each panel. Generac took the idea one step further with its PV Link Substring Optimizer (diagram above) that can control up to nine PV modules per unit. That cuts the number of connections required for installers and minimizes the potential points of failure in a rooftop solar system.

Working our way down the rooftop solar trunk cable that connects all the modules together, current NEC code requires a rapid shutdown device to be installed within a few feet of each solar array. These are typically dedicated devices that require their own enclosure. That equates to more cost and more space in the home that must be dedicated to the solar system. For example, in our Tesla Solar Roof installation, we have ~10 of these rapid shutdown devices, each enclosed in a dedicated ~12″ x 12″ x 4″ enclosure in our attic space.

These are great ways to play solar energy.

Over the next seven years, Bank of America estimates energy storage costs will decrease by 50%, ushering in the next phase of the global transition to renewable energy. The firm estimates the energy storage market could grow 16% annually from 2020 to 2031 and continue to expand to $58 billion by 2040. Those projections may seem aggressive, but solar energy costs alone are on track to drop 70% from 2010 to 2020. Here are seven renewables, batteries and electrification stocks to buy to play the coming energy storage boom, according to Bank of America.

Sunrun (ticker: RUN)

Sunrun finances, installs and services U.S. residential solar installations. The majority of its installations are leased by customers. Analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith says Sunrun has limited downside given its fundamental valuation, even based on conservative estimates for costs and deployments. Dumoulin-Smith says refinancing opportunities and preventative electrical outages in California during wildfire season could drive further market penetration. Sunrun recently reaffirmed its full-year 2019 guidance for between 16% and 18% deployment growth and net present value of $1.15 per watt. Bank of America has a “buy” rating and $25.50 price target for RUN stock.

Vivint Solar (VSLR)

Vivint is another U.S. leader in residential solar installations, leasing the majority of its panels to customers. Vivint shares recently traded below $6.60 even though Dumoulin-Smith says Vivint’s PowerCo assets alone are worth about $7.30. He says Vivint shares are not pricing in long-term, attractive-margin growth prospects and a favorable low interest rate environment. Dumoulin-Smith says Vivint is well-positioned to capitalize on the next solar upgrade cycle triggered by a spike in electricity demand, potentially driven by electric vehicles. Bank of America has a “buy” rating and $14 price target for VSLR stock.

Worldwide demand for battery energy storage will jump to 400,000Mwh in 2025, compared with 100,000 in 2015.

That’s according to independent market assessments commissioned by the Consortium for Battery Innovation (CBI), which suggests while electric vehicles will increase lithium batteries’ share of the market, demand for all battery technologies will continue to rise as the world increasingly adopts renewables and electrifies its infrastructure.

It notes electricity grids and renewables drive demand for longer-lasting, safe, and reliable high-performance batteries – the CBI aims to achieve this more economically than previously possible, as well as increase the cycle life of advanced lead batteries by up to five times.

It suggests improved battery cycle life would help to significantly reduce operating costs, which it claims are “a key parameter for utility and renewable energy installations”.

As a result, CBI says a greater number of clean energy storage projects would be able to be installed, providing reliable and affordable electricity.

Dr Alistair Davidson, Director of the CBI, said: “We’re in the midst of a revolution in battery technologies as governments look to accelerate their move to low carbon energy sources. We need a range of high-performance batteries for different products and applications to meet this growing trend.

“Our technology innovation plan looms at a short-term boost in battery performance. But we’re also focusing on the next big leap in advanced batteries over the next decade as new forms of lead battery technology come to market.”

I’ll be honest. When a company known for installing more than 2 million backup generators for homes reached out to me for a meeting at Solar Power International 2019 last week, I was not excited. Was the company making the move to green its image, to woo new investors, or to gauge customer interest? We have seen too many legacy companies over the years dabble in clean tech with most of those roads leading to dead ends, but I figured what the heck. Let’s give it a shot. Boy was I wrong.

Walking up to the booth, the show floor around the Generac booth was abuzz over the new home energy storage product it was working on. Earlier this year, Generac acquired the residential energy storage company Pika Energy, who we first talked to at SPI last year at the Panasonic booth. Stacking onto the excitement, Generac aqui-hired the team of energy storage intelligence experts at Neurio Technology Inc. The news was exciting, but with the residential energy storage market moving as quickly as it is today, it was anyone’s guess whether Generac would be able to integrate the two new companies into the fold and translate their disparate technologies into a single set of customer-facing products quickly enough for it to matter.

We connected with Generac’s Chief Marketing Officer and president of its new clean energy business, Russ Minick, at SPI 2019, to talk about its big pivot into energy storage products to learn more about where that strategy came from. Right off the bat, Russ said that Generac had been eyeing the residential energy storage market for quite some time, but until recently, felt that, “it wasn’t worth the diversion of focus.”

“We’ve had our eye on solar and storage for some time,” but the company was really trying to hit the sweet spot in the market. “If you go in too soon, the market isn’t mature enough…if you go in too late, the leaders will already be entrenched.” In early 2019, it started dabbling with the technology, assembling a team of engineers well-versed in residential backup power solutions. After 2 or 3 months, it became clear that they were working outside their core competency and the company instead pivoted towards the prospect of an acquisition. “The ability to get a really competent product to market…would have taken too long,” Russ said.

The early efforts quickly bore fruit as Generac honed its search, performed its due diligence, and decided to acquire the energy storage intelligence experts at Neurio, and just a few weeks later, the energy storage builders at Pika Energy. “We put the teams together,” Russ said. “They’re 3,100 miles apart. One’s in Vancouver, one is in Portland, Maine. We closed, put them in a room and I got out of the way because I’m from Iowa and just let the magic happen.”

GE Renewable Energy recently announced it is has been selected by Convergent Energy + Power for the supply of battery energy storage systems for three projects in California for a total capacity of 100 MWh. GE’s scope of work includes a long-term service agreement and augmentation guarantees.

With this project, GE will reach a total of 495 MWh in operations or construction in the battery energy storage space. It is GE’s largest energy storage project in the United States to date, showing the clear demand for energy storage solutions in the United States and around the world.

The energy storage systems support two primary goals. First, they provide targeted local capacity to enhance grid reliability during peak periods. Second, as fast-acting stabilization devices, the battery energy storage systems can charge and discharge rapidly to regulate frequency and contribute to grid stability, helping to balance and facilitate the ever-growing penetration of variable renewable energy. Assets such as these will assist with making California’s state targets of 33% renewable energy penetration by 2020 and 100% by 2050 a reality.

Frank Genova, COO and CFO of Convergent, said, “Convergent has a track-record of developing trailblazing energy storage assets that advance the energy storage sector; we’re proud to partner with GE to provide for local area reliability and support the growth of renewable energy in California.”

Prakash Chandra, renewable hybrids CEO, GE, said, “Energy Storage is going to be a major component in the energy transition to more renewable generation and our collaboration with Convergent in California is a stepping stone in demonstrating the industry’s commitment to deliver more reliable and dispatchable renewable energy.”

Iowa is betting on big batteries to help it unlock more wind energy potential as a lack of grid capacity begins to constrain development in parts of the state.

The Iowa Economic Development Authority for the past couple of years has been funding and encouraging research into various forms of battery storage. In July, it gave Steve Martin, a materials science and engineering professor at Iowa State University, a $480,000 grant to continue work aimed at making a battery based on solid sodium.

Should Martin succeed in devising a feasible way to store large amounts of power in a solid-state sodium battery, it could be “a game-changer,” said Brian Selinger, who directs the Economic Development Authority’s energy office. Sodium, one of the two ingredients in table salt, is the seventh most common mineral and would be easy and cheap to acquire compared to the relatively rare lithium used in most batteries.

The award was the largest of 10 energy grants issued this summer and the only one for work on storage technology. The authority sees great economic development potential in energy storage and has raised its profile in keeping with the recommendations of the 2016 Iowa Energy Plan.

Batteries today typically use liquid lithium or sulfuric acid to shuttle ions back and forth between the battery’s positive and negative poles. A few use a liquid form of sodium. Although lithium-ion is the prevalent technology in cell phones and electric vehicles, it has important limitations, according to Martin.

In its liquid form, lithium is volatile and vulnerable to exploding when heated. Also, it is a fairly expensive soft metal whose cost Martin predicts will “skyrocket” as the demand for battery storage escalates. That would make it a pricey technology to pair with the grid in general and wind energy in particular.

He and a few others around the world are working to solve technical issues so that sodium batteries can come to market and provide storage on a massive scale.

“This is a very large problem,” Martin said. “If you’re going to build gigawatts of batteries for storing wind energy, it takes tons and tons and tons of sodium.”

Work is underway to devise ways to stash large amounts of energy in vanadium redox flow batteries, molten salt, and compressed or liquid air, according to Jason Burwen, vice president for policy at the Energy Storage Association.

TORONTO, Oct. 03, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — CellCube Energy Storage Systems Inc. (“CellCube”) (CSE:CUBE) (OTCQB CECBF) (Frankfurt 01X, WKN A2JMGP), and for and on behalf of its wholly-owned subsidiary Enerox GmbH (“Enerox”) and Pedro Resources Ltd. (PED-H.V) (“Pedro”)(collectively, CellCube and Pedro are referred to as the “Parties”), are pleased to announce that they have entered into a non-binding term sheet (the “Term Sheet”) pursuant to which, among other things, Pedro intends to purchase all of the assets of EnerCube Switchgear Systems Inc. (“EnerCube”) and PowerHaz Energy Mobile Solutions Inc. (“PowerHaz”), subsidiaries of CellCube (the “Proposed Transaction”).

Details of the Proposed Transaction

Pursuant to the Term Sheet, Pedro has agreed to purchase, through a subsidiary, the assets (the “Assets”) of EnerCube and PowerHaz which are comprised of intellectual property, patents, trademarks, equipment and commercialization rights used in connection with the production of large and small vanadium redox flow batteries. This is an Arm’s Length Transaction. Consideration for the Assets consists of payment of $1,750,000.00 of cash and securities yet to be determined to acquire the Assets (the “Purchase Price).

The completion of the Proposed Transaction is subject to a number of conditions, including all necessary corporate and regulatory approval, including approval of the Canadian Securities Exchange (the “CSE”) and the TSXV.

About CellCube Energy Storage Systems Inc.

CellCube is a Canadian public company listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange (symbol CUBE), the OTCBB (symbol CECBF), and the Frankfurt Exchange (Symbol 01X, WKN A2JMGP) focused on the fast-growing energy storage industry which is driven by the large increase in demand for renewable energy.

CellCube supplies vertically integrated energy storage systems to the power industry under the subsidiary company, Enerox GmbH, the developer and manufacturer of CellCube energy storage systems. CellCube’s other related subsidiary is EnerCube Switchgear Systems Inc., which designs, manufactures, assembles, and tests and complete range of dependable power control systems. The Company has also invested in an online renewable energy financing platform, Braggawatt Energy Inc.

CellCube develops, manufactures, and markets energy storage systems on the basis of vanadium redox flow technology and has over 136 project installations and a 10 year operational track record. Its highly integrated energy storage System solutions features 99% residual energy capacity after 11,000 cycles (cycling daily for 28 years) and larger scale containerized modules. Basic building blocks consist of a CellCube unit family with 4, 6 and 8 hours variation in energy capacity.

While in the past, the use of DER solutions such as energy storage and demand response have been thought of in terms of how they defer the use of traditional items in the grid developer’s toolkit, better consideration is forming around the “upfront role” DER can play, a US-based analyst has said.

Energy-Storage.news spoke with Samir Succar, a director and DER analyst at consultancy group ICF, shortly after he spoke on a panel at Solar Power International / Energy Storage International with National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) analyst Kristen Ardani and Interstate Renewable Energy Council (irec) VP of regulatory affairs Sara Baldwin in Salt Lake City, Utah last week.

The panel, ‘Distribution system planning data for project development’, looked closely at the ways and means different stakeholders in the electricity system have for assessing their requirements and planning according.

We briefly reported last week that Irec’s Sara Baldwin had said the deployment of DER needs to scale with the demand for the services they provide, without becoming a neat technology without a niche, as can often happen.

ICF’s Samir Succar highlighted some of the challenges that exist in terms of gathering and using data, especially as more and more DERs are aggregated on the grid. The system, he said, is becoming “more complex, more dynamic, both in the way you operate the system and also in terms of how you then plan and build the system as well.”

“That has implications for DER developers that are looking to not only interconnect on the system but maybe get access to value streams, distribution services, participate in wholesale markets and build that into how they think about their project and their project fundamentals,” Succar said.

Curtailment risk and the need for transparency
Managing constraints on the distribution system and figuring out how to “proactively build the system” to enable DERs to participate more broadly across different services and applications, mean that the top-down planning process becomes vitally important in “both understanding and building those capabilities that then enable functionality and additional revenue opportunities for DER,” the analyst said.

A legislative package for energy storage research and development (R&D) has been welcomed by the US Energy Storage Association, after receiving approval from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

An amended version of the Better Energy Storage Technology (BEST) Act was last week approved by the committee after having been introduced in May alongside the Promoting Grid Storage Act of 2019 .

The BEST Act now forms a package of energy storage bills, including language from the Promoting Grid Storage Act of 2019, the Expanding Access to Sustainable Energy Act of 2019, the Reducing the Cost of Energy Storage Act of 2019 and the Joint Long-Term Storage Act of 2019.

Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of the US Energy Storage Association, lauded the approval as “another milestone on the path to a better and brighter energy future”.

“Legislation approved today by the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee will for the first time elevate energy storage to one of the top priorities of US technology research, development, and demonstration.”

The BEST Act is set to amend the United States Energy Storage Competitiveness Act of 2007 to establish a research, development, and demonstration programme for grid-scale energy storage systems, and for other purposes.

The programme would have an aim of reducing the cost and extending the duration of energy storage systems.

Specifically, research would focus on highly flexible power systems with a minimum of six-hour storage durations, long duration storage systems with 10 to 100 hours of storage durations, seasonal energy storage that could reach durations of weeks or months and the integration of vehicle batteries with the grid, as well as other innovations.

The Department of Energy (DOE) would also be required to carry out up to five grid-scale energy storage demonstration projects by the end of fiscal year 2023, as well as to develop a ten-year strategic plan for energy storage RD&D.

With threats to electric reliability increasing, it is easy to understand why power outages worry retailers. So what are the solutions?

The most obvious is a backup generator. While this may seem like an expedient solution, procuring backup generators is costly and complex. Their purchase requires sizing analysis, engineering, building permits, construction, and routine maintenance that includes inspection, loaded testing, and fuel conditioning if they use diesel.

Failure to adequately maintain backup generators will create operational problems that a retailer may not discover until it is too late. Backup generators sit idle for most of the year, only running during emergency operations. Because of this infrequent operation, maintenance is sometimes skipped, making backup generators less likely to work when needed and far less reliable than a microgrid. In contrast, microgrids frequently interact with the grid, so they undergo constant testing and conditioning, increasing the likelihood they will work during an emergency.

The heart of a microgrid
It is important to understand what a microgrid is and how it functions, and how is can contribute to electrical reliability. As the name suggests, a microgrid is a smaller version of the electric power grid installed on-site at the user’s facility.

A microgrid can serve a single building, a business campus, a college campus, a military base or even a community. A microgrid’s defining characteristic is its ability to operate in isolation from the surrounding grid.

When designed for resiliency, a microgrid’s defining characteristic—what makes a microgrid a microgrid—is its ability to operate in isolation from the surrounding grid. A grid-connected microgrid ‘islands’ from the central grid when it senses a disruption, such as a power outage. The microgrid then activates its system to supplant the lost grid electricity.

Islanding occurs via a microgrid controller, the technology at the heart of the microgrid, which allows the microgrid to interact with the central grid. When it senses a problem on the grid, the controller sets up the activities to ensure power flows to its host from the on-site system. Retailers are able to maintain continuous operations, despite severe weather or other grid threats.

A microgrid also can provide advantages to a retailer by interacting with the grid during non-emergencies. For example, the microgrid may sell services to the grid or leverage changes in pricing, which can produce a revenue stream or offset microgrid costs.