The falling price of renewable energy has been dominating the headlines, but more dramatic change is happening behind the scenes, where battery storage is disrupting the way utilities provide power.

The change is driven not just by cheap renewables and cheap batteries, but by the electronics that link them together, said Mark Ahlstrom, the president of the non-profit Energy Systems Integration Group.

“Unlike all the old spinning generators that were electromechanically coupled to the grid, these are using power electronics, computers, state-of-the-art technologies that scale really well, as we’ve seen with other industries,” said Ahlstrom, who also serves as vice president for renewable energy policy at NextEra Energy. “And it really is the digital revolution finally hitting the power industry.

“We saw it coming a little bit with wind and solar and what we’re really doing with storage is going to push it over the edge in a big way.”

In the past, utilities had to “take what they could get” from slow, inflexible fossil-fuel plants, Ahlstrom said. Their primary concern was having enough energy to meet peak demand.

Now, utilities will have abundant cheap power from renewables. Paired with batteries, that power can be deployed by computer in microseconds to ensure reliability or fulfill other ancillary services.

“What really surprised me—this is all I work on now—is hybrid projects,” Ahlstrom said at a workshop hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. “What happens when you tightly couple storage with solar PV, what you end up with of course is a solid-state computer-controlled power plant. When you really step back and think about this means, we’re really talking about virtual power plants becoming real. It’s very dramatic.”

The rise of electromobility and demand for stationary storage will drive lithium-ion battery costs down by a further 50% by 2040, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s latest Energy Storage Outlook report.

With costs for the technology having already tumbled 85% from 2010 to 2018, the business intelligence firm predicts 1,095 GW/2,850 GWh of energy storage will be installed in 21 years’ time, up from 9 GW/17 GWh last year.

By that point, China and the U.S. will dominate, according to the Energy Storage Outlook 2019 study, with significant markets in India and Germany and only slightly lower volumes in Latin America, Southeast Asia and France.

Australia, the U.K. and Japan will also have significant markets, as will current world leader for energy storage South Korea.

The role played by solar in the energy storage revolution was highlighted by BloombergNEF’s head of energy storage Logan Goldie-Scot in a press release issued by the firm to promote the report, published yesterday.

Solar-plus-storage

“In the near term, renewables-plus-storage – especially solar-plus-storage – has become a major driver for battery build,” said Goldie-Scot. By 2040, however, BloombergNEF predicts energy storage will have become a practical alternative to newly built generation assets of any kind.

In a significant indicator of the rapid rate at which stationary storage is altering the energy market, the 2019 report now predicts utility scale batteries will make up the majority of storage deployment by 2040. Until now the analysts have expected behind-the-meter batteries – whether in homes or businesses – to take the lead.

BloombergNEF also revised up the amount of investment energy storage will attract over the next 21 years, adding $40 billion for a predicted $662 billion.

The analyst has predicted solar and wind energy will supply almost 40% of the world’s energy by 2040, up from 7% today and driving demand for the energy shifting/peaking services available to grid operators through battery storage. The study also predicts electric vehicles will make up a third of the global passenger transport fleet in 21 years’ time, up from less than half a percent today.

Noting the explosion in demand for energy storage will be good news for lithium, cobalt and nickel miners, the release issued to promote the annual report made no mention of attempts to develop battery chemistries with less ecologically damaging materials.

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (SGRE), known for its wind turbines used in both large onshore and offshore projects, in June began operation of an electric thermal energy storage (ETES) system in Germany (Figure 1). The technology is designed to store large quantities of energy, using volcanic rock as the storage medium.

“The technology employs an electric heater to charge the storage and a conventional heat recovery steam cycle to discharge the storage,” Veronica Diaz Lopez, who handles external communications for Siemens Gamesa, told POWER. “For charging, electricity is converted into hot air and blown through the storage, which is filled with volcanic rocks.”

The project includes about 1,000 metric tons of volcanic rock. The electrical energy is converted into hot air by means of a resistance heater and a blower that heats the rock to 750C/1,382F (Figure 2). “In the storage the heat is transferred from the air to the rocks and stored,” said Lopez. “During discharging, the flow direction through the storage is reversed and cold air enters the storage from the opposite end. In the storage, the air is heated up by the rocks and leaves the storage as hot air. The hot air is guided through a boiler where the energy is used to produce steam. The steam runs a steam turbine, which in combination with an electric generator, produces electricity.”

The system is installed at the Trimet SE aluminum smelter site in Hamburg-Altenwerder. The ETES pilot plant can store up to 130 MWh of thermal energy for a week, and its storage capacity remains constant throughout the charging cycles, according to SGRE. The company said the plant has a generator rated at 1.4 MW that produces energy for up to 24 hours. SGRE wants to use the storage technology in commercial projects, with plans to increase the storage capacity and power output as the technology is developed. SGRE said its goal is to store energy in the range of several GWh in the future. “Currently we are planning to do the commercial rollout in the mid 2020s,” said Lopez.

“Decoupling generation and consumption of fluctuating renewable energy via storage is an essential contribution to implementing the energy system transformation,” said Andreas Feicht, state secretary at Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy, which funded the project known as Future Energy Solutions (FES). “We therefore need cost-effective, efficient, and scalable energy storage systems.”

A new report released July 31 details continued growth in global energy storage, driven by lower costs for lithium-ion batteries.

Research company BloombergNEF (BNEF) in its latest forecast published Wednesday said energy storage installations worldwide will grow across the next two decades, from the 9 GW/17 GWh of capacity deployed as of last year, to 1,095 GW/2,850 GWh by 2040, as battery costs fall by half by 2030 compared to today’s levels. It said two markets—stationary storage and electric vehicles—will drive demand for batteries.

BNEF said most of the new energy storage capacity for the power market is likely to be grid-scale.

Yayoi Sekine, a co-author of the report, in a news release said the latest research has “two big changes,” noting that “this year … we have raised our estimate of the investment that will go into energy storage by 2040 by more than $40 billion,” with BNEF forecasting $662 billion will be invested in storage over the next 20 years. Sekine, an energy storage analyst for BNEF, said, “We now think the majority of new capacity will be utility-scale, rather than behind-the-meter at homes and businesses.”

‘Energy Shifting’
BNEF’s analysis points to how less-costly batteries can be used in more applications, including “energy shifting,” or moving in time the dispatch of electricity to the grid, often during periods of excess solar and wind generation; peaking in the bulk power system, or using storage to deal with spikes in demand; and programs enabling customers to pay less for their electricity, by enabling the purchase of power at times when it’s cheaper, and storing it for later use.

Several speakers at Storage Week Plus, a July 23-25 energy storage conference in San Francisco, California, attended by POWER, noted how growth in storage likely is dependent on a continuing decline in battery cost, advancements in battery technology, and more applications for storage. Legal and regulatory mandates for storage also will play a role.

Thom Byrne, CEO of the clean energy investment group CleanCapital, told POWER his company is investing in “new markets and new renewable energy asset classes, with a specific focus on distributed solar and energy storage.” Byrne’s group earlier this month announced its largest acquisition to date with the purchase of Olympic, a 75.2-MW solar portfolio comprising 15 operating solar projects in New Jersey, from KDC Solar, a private, non-utility-affiliated owner and operator of large-scale commercial and industrial solar power generation.

CleanCapital’s investments are part of the growth forecast by BNEF. CleanCapital recently closed on a $300 million debt warehouse facility with Credit Suisse, leveraging funds managed by CarVal Investors, a global alternative investment fund manager.

Brandeis University is launching a new energy storage project that is projected to save the campus upwards of $50,000 annually in electricity costs.

The Massachusetts university is partnering with AMS and FirstLight Power to install and operate a 780-kWh battery-based energy storage system that will connect with the school’s electrical power system. According to Brandeis, large enterprises like college campuses typically pay variable rates for electricity that are set in part by supply and demand – the more demand for electricity, the more the utility charges. By charging overnight when the price of electricity is at its lowest, the battery will be able to send electricity into Brandeis’ system during the day when prices peak – enabling the university to buy less electricity at the most expensive times.

Increasing Use of Energy Storage
Energy storage installations around the world will multiply exponentially, from a modest 9GW/17GWh deployed as of 2018 to 1,095GW/2,850GWh by 2040, according to the latest forecast from BloombergNEF (BNEF).

This 122-fold boom of stationary energy storage over the next two decades will require $662 billion of investment, according to BNEF estimates. It will be made possible by further sharp declines in the cost of lithium-ion batteries, on top of an 85% reduction in the 2010-18 period.

And in national news, energy storage deployments in the United States during the first quarter of 2019 were up 232% year-over-year, Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewable’s latest US Energy Storage Monitor shows. The market saw 148.8 MW deployed in Q1 of this year.

Each quarter, Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and the Energy Storage Association (ESA) gather data on US energy storage deployments, prices, policies, regulations, and business models. This information goes into the report.

On August 6, the California Contractors State License Board (CSLB) will hold a vote which could have serious consequences for the largest residential energy storage market in the nation. In specific, CSLB is considering restricting the ability of solar installers who hold a C-46 solar installation license, but not a C-10 electrical license, to install batteries.

California Solar and Storage Association (CALSSA) issued an action alert yesterday afternoon, calling on its members to come to Sacramento and fight the proposal to restrict battery installations. “We need you and your colleagues to attend this hearing to voice opposition to this decision and to protect the solar and storage market going forward,” reads the alert.

In an interview with pv magazine, CALSSA Executive Director Bernadette Del Chiaro was explicit about the danger that this represents:

Safety issues?

As everyone who reads the news or has boarded a flight knows, lithium-ion batteries can enter a dangerous state where the heat buildup gets out of control. And while improper installation can cause problems, research by pv magazine suggests that most instances of thermal runaway are the result of poorly designed software with inadequate safety controls.

CALSSA argues that two and a half years of public hearings and reports have not turned up evidence of a safety risk to justify the proposed changes. Instead, it alleges that CSLB is considering this change due to pressure from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), with support from the state’s investor-owned utilities.

Whether or not these specific accusations are accurate, utilities across the nation have consistently worked to kill rooftop solar markets. In California, the shift to mandatory time-of-use rates under Net Metering 2.0 created an incentive to pair solar with storage. And if utilities can restrict how many workers can install these systems, this will inevitably have effects not only on the behind-the-meter battery storage market, but also the rooftop solar market in the state.

Wärtsilä remains tight-lipped on the exact location of a hybrid power plant 100MW / 100MWh energy storage in Southeast Asia which will “leverage abundant wind and solar resources”.

The company has signed an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract with an unnamed customer. Wärtsilä SE Asia regional director Nicholas Leong told Energy-Storage.news that the project “will help the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meet its commitment to achieving 23% of its primary energy needs from renewables by 2025, and put the region on the path to achieving 100% renewables”.

It is thought to be the largest battery energy storage deal in the region, which has seen very few grid-connected systems deployed, although Energy-Storage.news has reported on various microgrid projects in remote areas including a Tesla lithium-ion battery project by Solar Phillippines to increase energy security for a village prone to brownouts and a project in rural Thailand which runs on solar and a hybrid of lithium and flow batteries. Solar Philippines did say in 2017 that it would be developing a 50MWh project paired with a 150MW PV system in the country.

The project will lean heavily on the capabilities of Greensmith Energy, the battery energy storage system integrator Wärtsilä acquired in 2017. This includes Greensmith Energy Management (GEMS) software platform and its GridSolv-brand standardised energy storage hardware solution.

Wärtsilä is touting the role of combined renewable energy-gas engine-battery energy storage hybrid power plants, with group VP for Europe Melle Kruisdijk recently telling this site that the company’s legacy technology can therefore complement and enable renewables.

Despite its strong grounding in building gas engines, initially for large ships and then later for land-based applications, the Finnish company is pushing a “100% renewable energy vision” which Kruisdijk outlined in that interview. Greensmith’s system integration capabilities are as central to that premise as their ability to put batteries into energy networks, Kruisdijk said.

The global stationary energy storage market is set for surging growth over the next two decades, as sharp declines in lithium-ion battery costs and rising demand for wind and solar power drives capacity to more than 1,000GW worldwide by 2040.

That is the latest forecast today from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), which has revised up its predictions from last year as the market gears up to “multiply exponentially”.

The influential energy analyst now expects a 122-fold boom in stationary energy storage installations by 2040, which it estimates will require $622bn of investment over the next two decades – $40bn higher than its previous forecast.

Most of the expected capacity increase, from 9GW deployed in 2018 to an estimated 1,095GW by 2040, will come from grid-scale applications that are being driven by sharp declines in lithium-ion battery costs that have already plummeted by 85 per cent since 2010.

Yet BNEF expects a further halving of lithium-ion battery costs per kilowatt hour, as demand takes off from both stationary energy storage installations and the burgeoning electric vehicle market. The plummeting cost of energy storage capacity is set to have significant ramifications for a global electricity system increasingly dominated by intermittent renewables, the update argues.

Low cost batteries are expected to be used in a widening number of applications, BNEF said, from balancing demand on the electricity grid between times of peak and lowest demand to helping shift power to different parts of the grid where it is needed most and driving down domestic energy bills through new smart home technologies.

But Logan Goldie-Scot, head of energy storage at BNEF, added that he expected the majority of storage applications over the next two decades to be focused at the grid-scale, rather than providing behind-the-meter solutions for homes and businesses.

“In the near term, renewables-plus-storage, especially solar-plus-storage, has become a major driver for battery build,” he said. “This is a new era of dispatchable renewables, based on new contract structures between developer and grid.”

A group of energy industry joined together recently to launch the Energy Storage Research Center on the engineering campus of Southern Research in Birmingham, Ala.

The project is a collaboration between Southern Research, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Electric Power Research Institute, Southern Company, Alabama Power, and the state of Alabama.

“As an R&D leader, Southern Company continues to advance technologies that can help us better meet customers’ needs in the rapidly evolving energy landscape,” Southern Company R&D Director Roxann Walsh said during a ribbon-cutting ceremony. “The Energy Storage Research Center will broaden our work with stakeholders and technology developers to better understand energy storage systems and how to fully use this technology to build the future of energy.”

The facility will serve as a resource to help the industry test and develop energy storage technologies. Initially, the center will evaluate a flow battery system developed by Avalon Battery.

“We will need newer, better, more cost-effective energy storage in a low-carbon future – and R&D efforts like the Energy Storage Research Center will help bring these cutting-edge technologies to full deployment,” Walsh said.

There was not lot of public data pv magazine USA could find on these projects, however, it was most important to note that a conservative electricity utility – the one that emits the second largest volume of greenhouse gases by an electric utility in the United States – sees energy storage as part of its “growth and low-risk business strategy of developing or acquiring interests in projects covered by long-term contracts.” And it quite jives with this publication’s pontification that energy storage is investment grade.

Southern Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, has partnered with esVolta to develop four energy storage facilities located, some located in Southern California Edison (SoCal) territory. The four facilities total more than 86 MW / 345 MWh. Southern Power has fully closed on the investment in one of the four projects, with the other three subject to completion.

Other projects recently developed by esVolta in California and beyond, below, might give insight into what is being invested in here.

In the fall, esVolta won four other projects in SoCal territory – the Wildcat Energy Storage project (above image) will feature a 3 MW/12 MWh near Palm Springs, and the three Acorn Energy Storage (Acorn I in below image) projects will total 6.5 MW/26.5 MWh in Thousand Oaks. The Wildcat Energy Storage project is intended to bolster local distribution networks enabling wires upgrades to be deferred. The technical aspects of the projects were outlined in SoCal’s “Energy Division Technical Review and Disposition” (pdf).

In a press release published in January, esVolta President & Founder Randolph Man noted that the contract responsibilities in their projects vary – as in some, the utility customer purchases capacity, while the developer retains the ability to provide additional value-added energy and ancillary services into the local market. Whereas, at their 6.5 MW/26 MWh Don Lee system in Escondido, the utility bought the whole bundle of services.

esVolta’s Stratford Energy Storage project (featured image of article) is an 8.8 MW/40.8 MWh system located in the city of Stratford, Ontario, Canada, and is the largest battery storage facility in Canada. The facility provides voltage control, frequency regulation, and system peak reduction operations.

Partially overshadowed because of other larger projects, esVolta also participated in PG&E’s ground breaking (and now at risk due to a bankruptcy) 567 MW / 2.27 gigawatt-hours (GWh) energy storage solicitation last year. The 75 MW / 300 MWh Hummingbird facility is esVolta’s largest project to date and it is primarily intended to relieve local capacity constraints caused by retiring fossil fuel units.