[Graeme]

EPRI’s Cool New Grid-Scale Energy Storage Tool

Last week, EPRI announced that it had taken its next step with the CPUC, by providing it an interesting piece of software called the Energy Storage Valuation Tool, or ESVT. Think of the ESVT as an energy storage modeling app, one that takes data and turns it into a measurement of value that can be fine-tuned by users like utilities, grid operators and energy storage technology makers and project operators.

“The CPUC wanted to look at a lot of different cases that their stakeholders had identified, but they didn’t have a tool they could [use] to analyze a large number of cases in California," Ben Kaun, senior project engineer at EPRI, said in a Friday interview. "We agreed to do that.” That led to the launch of the tool for users beyond the CPUC, which now includes a handful of utilities including Duke Energy and Sacramento (Calif.) Municipal Utility District, he said. (UPDATE: As the EPRI product abstract web page notes, the software doesn't come cheap, at $10,000 a pop, but it is available to buyers beyond its core utility membership, including the 30+ energy storage program funders that already receive access to it.)

greentechmedia

[Graeme]

The Fuel Cell Technology Market will grow at a CAGR of 32.2% in the next five years

According to research firm MarketsandMarkets, the Fuel Cell Technology Market will grow from an estimated $629.8 million in 2013 to $2,543.1 million by 2018, with a CAGR of 32.2% from 2013 to 2018.

Asia is the biggest market for green technologies and governments there are fixing renewable energy targets backed by favorable policies such as the Kyoto Protocol. The potential markets in Asia are Japan and South Korea. The Asian region is the largest end user market for stationary fuel cells and is expected to continue with the same trend. The revenue trend estimates Asia dominating followed by North America and Europe.

Stationary Market: Biggest Market by Applications

Hydrogen leads as a Primary Fuel for Fuel Cell Technology

tgdaily

[Graeme]

Recommendations for a European energy storage technology development roadmap towards 2030

The European Association for Storage of Energy (EASE) and European Energy Research Alliance (EERA) have recently set out joint recommendations for a European energy storage technology development roadmap towards 2030.

The recommendations are aimed to describe future European needs for energy storage in the period to 2030, and cover those energy storage technologies that are believed to hold the largest potential for economic and technical development over the coming 20-year period. These include chemical energy storage; electrochemical energy storage, including batteries and electrochemical capacitors (supercapacitors); mechanical energy storage, including compressed air energy storage, flywheel energy storage and hydro energy storage; thermal energy storage; and multi-functionality hybrid energy storage systems such as liquid hydrogen in combination with superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES), which is a potentially future applicable storage technology.

According to the report Europe’s short term electricity balancing market is believed to be where energy storage will be first applied in the region based on commercial business cases and the need for additional balancing power will be substantiated already within the next 5 years. However today only a few energy storage applications can justify market-based business cases and this is the reason why many energy storage technologies have not already spread into the market.

In the longer term – up to 20 years – energy storage will become an even more significant part of the electricity system. In this time perspective not only ancillary services but also energy arbitrage based on stored energy will be finding bridgeheads on the shore of the energy market. This will be one consequence of the increasing penetration of renewable supply sources alongside the corresponding withdrawal of fossil, dispatchable generation capacity.

metering

[Graeme]

Australian Invention Could Revolutionise Solar Energy Storage

ANU researchers have developed a material that can store large amounts of power rapidly - and with very little energy loss.

Based on the mineral rutile, it is a 'dielectric' material; which are used in the construction of capacitors.

The researchers say their material is superior to current capacitors in energy absorption, is cheaper to manufacture and can function effectively in a massive temperature range: -190°C to 180°C.

"With further development, the material could be used in ‘supercapacitors’ which store enormous amounts of energy, removing current energy storage limitations and throwing the door wide open for innovation in the areas of renewable energy, electric cars, even space and defence technologies," says Associate Professor Liu of the ANU Research School of Chemistry.

"When we first found this material we knew it had great potential. It’s friendly to the environment, non-toxic and abundant."

Aside from use in electric cars, co-author of a paper detailing the new material, Professor Ray Withers, says capacitors based on the material could be particularly useful in conjunction with wind and solar power generation.

energymatters

[Graeme]

The hydrogen solution

Around the world, governments and businesses are constantly being called upon to make big investments in solar, wind, and geothermal energy, as well as biofuels. But, in the US, unlike in Europe and Asia, discussion of hydrogen energy and fuel cells as systemic, game-changing technologies is largely absent. That needs to change: these clean, renewable energy sources promise not only zero-emission baseload power, but also a zero-emission fuel for cars and trucks, the biggest polluters of them all.

By now, many have heard about plans by big car makers—including Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai—to launch hydrogen fuel-cell cars commercially around 2015. Daimler, Ford, and Nissan plan to launch such cars around 2017. Germany plans to build at least 50 hydrogen fuelling stations by 2015 as the start of a countrywide network. Japan and Korea have announced similar plans. But a bigger, largely unreported, message is that some European countries, especially Germany, have launched projects that combine renewables like solar and wind with hydrogen for energy storage, implying clean, zero-emission, stable power grids that require no coal, oil, or nuclear power.

Indeed, the bottom line of a new study by two American researchers, Willett Kempton and Cory Budischak, is that the combination of renewables and hydrogen storage could fully power a large electricity grid by 2030 at costs comparable to those today. Kempton and Budischak designed a computer model for wind, solar, and storage to meet demand for one-fifth of the US grid. The results buck “the conventional wisdom that renewable energy is too unreliable and expensive”, says Kempton. “For example,” according to Budischak, “using hydrogen for storage, we can run an electric system that today would meet a need of 72 gigawatts (GW), 99.9% of the time, using 17GW of solar, 68GW of offshore wind, and 115GW of inland wind.”

livemint

[Palpatine]

I like to solution proposed by SolarCity and Tesla Motors.

http://www.solarcity.com/residential/en ... orage.aspx

SolarCity Says Batteries Reduce Risk of Utility Backlash
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-2 ... klash.html

SolarCity plans solar power storage solution, due in 2015
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/l ... 0795.story

Basically using the battery technology pioneered by Tesla Motors and pairing it with Solar City solar systems on houses and companies.
While your solar panels are producing during the day, store the energy for night use. Theoretically you could just drop the utility bill. Most would likely maintain the utility connection as a backup though in case of cloudy weather for a few days in a row.

Taken to the next step, home and business owners can sell to the utilities during peak demand periods (summer AC season) at the highest rate.

Combining that with the used battery packs that Tesla will have in a few years, grid storage is a perfect second life for battery packs that no longer meet the needs of cars. Most people consider that when the batteries reach about 60% of original capacity. But Tesla cycle testing indicates that it might take 18 years for a typical Tesla EV battery pack to reach that level of reduced capacity. We will see what happens. Some people may simply want to trade in their battery packs sooner for the latest range battery packs. Tesla's current best pack is 85 kwh for a 300 mile range. But they are testing packs that are in the 400-500 mile range. Some owners may want to upgrade.

Solar City has deep pockets and is backed by billionaire Elon Musk (worth about $5 billion now).
These guys have a record of producing what they say.
Examples include: Tesla Roadster, Tesla Model S, paid back government loans 9 years early, Elon Musk is building rockets with SpaceX that are crushing the competition (Boeing, Lockheed, Ariane rockets) by launching into orbit satellites at 1/2 the price of his competitors.

[Graeme]

Texas Calls for 317 MW of Compressed Air Energy Storage

Compressed-air energy storage, or CAES, is one of the cheapest ways to store really massive amounts of energy for long periods of time. In fact, beyond pumped hydro storage, compressing air when power’s cheap and plentiful and then using it to boost natural gas-fired power turbines during times of peak demand is really one of the only ways to shift hundreds of megawatts of load from one hour to the next.

So why have so few CAES-backed power plants been built? One problem is cost: while they’re much cheaper and easier to site than pumped hydro projects, CAES projects are still massive infrastructure projects at the $100-million-and-up scale.

They also have their geographic restrictions: specifically, the availability of vast underground cavern structures to use as reservoirs for all that compressed air. Then, of course, there are regulatory and economic factors that have limited energy storage’s appeal in general, which apply to CAES as well.

Put caves and power plants together, however, and the energy storage that results is cost-effective and reliable, as the world’s two first CAES projects -- the 290-megawatt plant in Huntorf, Germany, built in 1978, and the 110-megawatt McIntosh, Alabama plant, built in 1991 -- have proven over their combined decades of operation. That’s led to a resurgence of CAES projects over the past half-decade or so, driven by technology advances, as well as grid operators’ growing need for energy storage to balance intermittent wind and solar power with ever-shifting demand.

The latest comes in Texas, where Dresser-Rand and Apex Compressed Air Energy Storage announced last week that they’re building the first big CAES project in the United States in decades. Known as the Bethel Energy Center, the 317-megawatt, $200 million project will serve Texas grid operator ERCOT, and is the first of more to come from the partners, both in the United States and elsewhere, the companies said.

The project is being built near Tennessee Colony, Texas, a rural crossroads about 100 miles southeast of Dallas featuring a church, a general store, and a Calpine natural gas facility. That part of the state has its share of giant underground “salt dome” caverns, suitable for storing natural gas, as well as pumped air.

Dresser-Rand, the Houston-based supplier of “high-speed rotating equipment and services solutions” for the oil and gas industries, also built the equipment for the Mcintosh, Ala. CAES plant in 1991. Since then, it’s developed an integrated energy storage technology, called SMARTCAES, that it’s using in the Bethel project.

greentechmedia

Isentropic’s Pumped Heat System Stores Energy at Grid Scale

Mark Wagner, the Chairman of Isentropic, spoke at a recent energy event and said that the capital cost for Isentropic's energy storage technology was very low, with "a levelized cost of $35 per megawatt-hour." Jonathan Howes, the CTO of Isentropic, has claimed a path to large-scale storage costs that are an order of magnitude lower than lithium-ion batteries or other stored energy technologies.

In 2012, the firm announced a $22 million investment from the U.K.-government-backed Energy Technologies Institute (ETI).

The short-term goal is to deploy a 1.5-megawatt, 6-megawatt-hour storage unit on a U.K. grid-connected primary substation owned by Western Power Distribution, a distribution network operator with 7.7 million customers -- and to get it to demonstration scale.

Wagner, the company's Chairman, shared some conclusions on energy storage based on what he called a "whole-systems approach" in the form of a U.K. grid model developed with a university. The grid model accounts for all generation assets, transmission and distribution, and interconnection.

According to the model, the value of storage decreases after the third hour. Wagner said, "Three hours is enough," adding, "Distributed storage is significantly more valuable than centralized storage."

Wagner takes the stance that "peak shifting is the most valuable thing you can do -- but there is no value after six hours; optimum is about 3 hours." He also said that "The value of storage depends strongly on the nature of the system." With a renewable penetration of greater than 50 percent, storage has a "huge value." Wagner believes that high frequency storage is much less valuable.

greentechmedia

[Graeme]

Energy Storage: Next Growth Market in US and Europe

Now that more homes and businesses are installing photovoltaic systems, a new trend for combining these with battery backup is emerging.

Previously, battery storage systems were only thought necessary with solar PV and wind in stand-alone systems, separate from any grid connection, but as the grid supports more and more PV and wind systems, which can supply power only at certain times, the need for storage backup is becoming more apparent.

For large commercial installations this is especially attractive because, although they may have negotiated contracts with utilities that bring down their overall electricity rates, the fees that they are charged for the times when they do draw power, which can be based on their highest peak energy use during a month, have been rising as much as 10-12% per year.

According to Marcus Elsässer and other executives attending the Intersolar North America 2013 trade show held over the last three days, large commercial electricity users can reduce their peak demand and lower their demand charges by installing a storage system alongside a PV system.

Last month California set a proposed 2020 procurement target of 1.3GW of battery storage for network operators.

In Germany, grants from a scheme with a total value of €25 million are being offered to offer storage to existing solar installations.

Last month’s Intersolar Europe trade show consequently saw over 200 exhibitors, including major brands, presenting their storage and smart grid solutions.

energytribune

[Graeme]

Eos To Conquer The World?

Eos Energy Storage is one of the energy storage startups we have highlighted as being a potentially “breakthrough energy storage company.” Before delving into the latest big news from Eos — you know, its plans to take over the world — let me just insert a little bit of context about market potential in the energy storage sector.


It’s clear from watching the situation in Germany that, as solar power capacity grows, it won’t be too long before more electricity will be generated in the middle of the day than is needed on the surrounding grid. The same goes for wind power at night. A lot of wind power production has driven wholesale electricity prices below $0.00 in Texas, Germany, and Europe as a whole. So, energy storage becomes increasingly valuable. With it well understood across the industry that wind and solar power are the future and that energy storage costs are projected to drop (due to companies like Eos, as well as simple economies of scale), it’s projected that the energy storage market will indeed grow considerably in the coming years. Here’s a chart on just that from Eos itself:

In short, several of the world’s largest utilities, competitive energy providers and IPPs have committed to piloting Eos’s grid-scale battery storage technology and are intimately involved in Eos’s product development and demonstration process. Collectively known as the Genesis program, these partners represent over 300 gigawatts of generation, 1.6 million miles of transmission and distribution, and 76 million customers in over 70 countries – creating an unprecedented platform for introduction and ultimately widespread implementation of the technology.

cleantechnica

[Graeme]

FERC’s Energy Storage Ruling Could Jump-Start Big Batteries

If the price of grid-scale energy storage fell to zero dollars per megawatt-hour, regulators and utilities would still be puzzled in how to deploy the boon of energy storage.

That's because storage doesn't fit neatly into the electrical utility's regulatory universe of generation, distribution, and load -- or into the utility rate recovery structure.

But that regulatory uncertainty is starting to clear.

It started with FERC Order 755, enacted in 2011, a ruling from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that increased the pay for “fast” responding sources like batteries or flywheels that are bidding into frequency regulation service markets. Flywheel energy storage operator, Beacon, sells into this market.

That opportunity for storage got bigger yesterday with the issuance of Order 784. It pits fast batteries, flow batteries and flywheels against slower gas- or coal-fired plants in the ancillary services market.

"FERC Order 784 is a huge step forward for energy storage, as it will help to open ancillary services markets for storage project developers. Also, it expands FERC Order 755 pay-for-performance requirements to ensure that speed and accuracy, two attributes where storage excels, is considered when utilities purchase regulation service for transmission. Finally, the new accounting and reporting rules introduced in this order will help utilities achieve rate recovery for energy storage equipment," wrote Janice Lin, Managing Partner, Strategen Consulting and Co-Founder and Executive Director of the California Energy Storage Alliance in an email to GTM.

greentechmedia

[Graeme]

Legislation spotlights building-scale energy storage

Energy storage allows people to crank up the air conditioning without adding any stress to the power grid. Most renewable energy does not provide a consistent flow of electricity. The amount of sunlight differs throughout the day and the wind isn’t always blowing. Using energy storage allows for power to be dispatched quickly in order to compensate for intermittent availability. This also allows for two-way flow of electricity and will ultimately keep electricity prices lower than if new power plants and infrastructure needed to be built.

This is why recent legislation, policies and programs have been proposed to encourage the implementation of building-side energy storage. This year, senators from across the country introduced the bipartisan Storage Technology for Renewable and Green Energy Act of 2013, offering a tax credit for the deployment of energy storage technologies that can be used to lower peak demand.


Ice-based energy storage is one of the thermal technologies that would qualify under the new PLS program. Using an ice-based thermal energy storage system, a building can leverage a standard chiller to create ice overnight. The ice is stored in tanks and used the next day to cool the building when the building is full of occupants, outside temperatures are at their highest, and demand for electricity is peaking. Building-side energy storage also helps accelerate the integration of renewable energy.

greenbiz

[Graeme]

Why Battery Storage Should Be A No Brainer — Take Two

Monday’s report on the assessment of battery storage technology costs was met by a volley of reaction – emails, comments and phone calls – particularly from some battery technology developers and their boosters, and some independent experts. Part of the issue was over the cost of the technology, but the really important bit was over its “value”.

This, of course, is the central theme of a changing energy market – one that is transforming from a very simple hub-and-spoke model to a distributed network where the savings gained from avoiding excess capacity (in generation as well as poles and wires) are recognised in the cost of introducing new technologies such as solar PV, and more particularly storage and demand controls.

Some of this was captured in the recent report by the Institute of Sustainable Futures, some of it in the Federal Government’s recent assessment on energy efficiency.

The bottom line, however, is that battery storage and its potential should not be assessed on a simple price assessment to residential or even business users – but as a value proposition to the entire network, and therefore all users. And that’s where the assessment of numbers “not adding up” (yet) quickly morphs into one which its proponents says it is a “no-brainer”.



Turner provided these tables below to illustrate his point. The first on the left fits in broadly with the conclusions that we reported on yesterday, although the payback period is slightly quicker (11 years versus 13 years) because Zen reckons their system comes in cheaper than the average cost estimated by IBESA and others.

But then it gets interesting. Because if the utilities – instead of hitting everyone with costs to upgrade the grid – focused that expenditure on subsidising battery storage, then the value proposition changes enormously. At $2,000 per kW/kV, the payback to households for installing battery storage with solar PV is 6.9 years; at $4,000 per kW/kVa, the payback is 2.3 years.

cleantechnica

[Graeme]

UK Launches Europe’s Largest Energy Storage Trial

The largest European energy storage trial is underway in the United Kingdom. The project, which brings together S&C Electric, Samsung SDI, and Younicos, will deploy a 6-megawatt/10 megawatt-hour lithium-ion battery at a primary substation in Bedfordshire to assess the cost effectiveness of energy storage as part of the UK’s Carbon Plan.

The companies claim the storage could save more than US $9 million compared to traditional upgrades, such as replacing lines and transformers. Unlike many other regions, the UK’s deregulated utility market is incentivized towards low-carbon operations in which they are rewarded for better utilization of their existing assets, rather than just adding hard assets onto the networks.

ieee

'Soft' Approach Leads to Revolutionary Energy Storage: Graphene-Based Supercapacitors

Monash University researchers have brought next generation energy storage closer with an engineering first -- a graphene-based device that is compact, yet lasts as long as a conventional battery.

Published today in Science, a research team led by Professor Dan Li of the Department of Materials Engineering has developed a completely new strategy to engineer graphene-based supercapacitors (SC), making them viable for widespread use in renewable energy storage, portable electronics and electric vehicles.

SCs are generally made of highly porous carbon impregnated with a liquid electrolyte to transport the electrical charge. Known for their almost indefinite lifespan and the ability to re-charge in seconds, the drawback of existing SCs is their low energy-storage-to-volume ratio -- known as energy density. Low energy density of five to eight Watt-hours per litre, means SCs are unfeasibly large or must be re-charged frequently.

Professor Li's team has created an SC with energy density of 60 Watt-hours per litre -- comparable to lead-acid batteries and around 12 times higher than commercially available SCs.

"It has long been a challenge to make SCs smaller, lighter and compact to meet the increasingly demanding needs of many commercial uses," Professor Li said.
Graphene, which is formed when graphite is broken down into layers one atom thick, is very strong, chemically stable and an excellent conductor of electricity.

To make their uniquely compact electrode, Professor Li's team exploited an adaptive graphene gel film they had developed previously. They used liquid electrolytes -- generally the conductor in traditional SCs -- to control the spacing between graphene sheets on the sub-nanometre scale. In this way the liquid electrolyte played a dual role: maintaining the minute space between the graphene sheets and conducting electricity.

Unlike in traditional 'hard' porous carbon, where space is wasted with unnecessarily large 'pores', density is maximised without compromising porosity in Professor Li's electrode.

sciencedaily

[Graeme]

Impact of Energy Storage on Solar PV Grid Parity

Proponents of intermittent renewable energy such as solar PV and wind often claim that these energy sources will reach parity with standard grid power in the near future. As discussed in a previous article, however, this is a highly misleading claim, primarily because intermittent and non-dispatchable renewable energy is worth much less per kWh than steady and dispatchable baseline power.

In order to illustrate the implications of this distinction, the aforementioned article valued intermittent PV similarly to unrefined coal. The central assumption underlying this way of thinking is that the costs associated with energy storage (which is required to make PV useful to society at higher penetration levels) are comparable to the costs associated with thermal power plants (which are required to make coal and gas useful to society at higher penetration levels). Under this assumption, solar PV turned out to still be about one order of magnitude more expensive than coal power.

Naturally, this is a fairly crude assumption and accurate calculation of the real grid parity target for solar PV will be much more complex. This article will discuss the most important complexity: the fact that the costs associated with energy storage of intermittent renewables will be a strong function of the level of penetration into the local electricity grid.

theenergycollective

[Graeme]

633 Energy Storage Projects Now Underway Worldwide

Government funding for energy storage technology is creating serious returns on investment around the world with distinctly focused industries taking shape in Europe, North America, and Asia.

633 advanced energy storage projects encompassing 865 separate systems are currently in operation or under development worldwide, according to Navigant Research’s “Energy Storage Tracker 3Q13.” The industry added 38 new projects during the first half of 2013.

Even though global energy storage markets are growing fast, up from 562 projects at the end of 2012, they remain fragmented in both technologies in use and applications in each region. France’s Alstom leads all vendors with 19% of total market share, closely followed by Germany’s Voith with 16%, and America’s Gridflex with 13%

cleantechnica

[Graeme]

California Aims To Store More Solar Power and Wind Power To Boost Its Electricity Supply And Broaden Supply Base

California hopes to increase its solar and wind storage capabilities in order to integrate renewable power into its electricity grid, Reuters reports Monday.

"We can't just rely on sunlight," California Gov. Jerry Brown recently told the Intersolar conference in San Francisco. "We've got to bottle the sunlight."

The movement toward storing solar and wind power comes as the Golden State aims to make renewable energy one-third of the state’s electricity supply by 2020. California wants to store as much as 1.3 gigawatts by 2020, which is enough to power more than 1 million homes.

A report published by Environment America Research and Policy Center last month, titled “Lighting the Way, What We Can Learn from America’s Top 12 Solar States,” highlighted California as one of the top 12 states that are leading the U.S. in solar power.

ibtimes

[Graeme]

New rechargeable flow battery enables cheaper, large-scale energy storage

MIT researchers have engineered a new rechargeable flow battery that doesn’t rely on expensive membranes to generate and store electricity. The device, they say, may one day enable cheaper, large-scale energy storage.

The palm-sized prototype generates three times as much power per square centimeter as other membraneless systems — a power density that is an order of magnitude higher than that of many lithium-ion batteries and other commercial and experimental energy-storage systems.

The device stores and releases energy in a device that relies on a phenomenon called laminar flow: Two liquids are pumped through a channel, undergoing electrochemical reactions between two electrodes to store or release energy. Under the right conditions, the solutions stream through in parallel, with very little mixing. The flow naturally separates the liquids, without requiring a costly membrane.

The reactants in the battery consist of a liquid bromine solution and hydrogen fuel. The group chose to work with bromine because the chemical is relatively inexpensive and available in large quantities, with more than 243,000 tons produced each year in the United States.

In addition to bromine’s low cost and abundance, the chemical reaction between hydrogen and bromine holds great potential for energy storage. But fuel-cell designs based on hydrogen and bromine have largely had mixed results: Hydrobromic acid tends to eat away at a battery’s membrane, effectively slowing the energy-storing reaction and reducing the battery’s lifetime.

To circumvent these issues, the team landed on a simple solution: Take out the membrane.

mit

[Graeme]

The energy storage holy grail

Storage is seen as energy's "holy grail" because of the efficiency it brings to any grid. For example, California has 51 gigawatts of peak capacity to handle heat that boosts air-conditioning demand, even if only two-thirds of that is needed for most of the year.

Still, without more government money, utilities like PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego's Sempra Energy will shoulder much of the upfront costs.

A natural gas-fired plant costs about $1,000 per kilowatt to build, whereas EPRI's base case for a battery substitute has a breakeven capital cost of $1,684 per kilowatt.

"We all agree, as we sit here today, storage is uneconomic," SunPower Corp Chief Executive Tom Werner told a meeting of utility executives in San Francisco. "But if you go out five years, I wouldn't bet against it."

The market potential means many are willing to play the odds.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, who founded Tesla Motors, is deploying the car maker's battery technology in solar systems installed by another company he backs: SolarCity.

"I am increasingly confident that there will be major breakthroughs in electricity storage tech," Musk told the Reuters Global Markets Forum chat room.

Germany, having subsidized a massive roll-out of rooftop solar, is aggressively funding storage to balance its grid, driving a domestic market predicted to be worth $19 billion by 2017.

businessspectator

Compressed Air Energy Storage

[Graeme]

Advances in Energy Storage Research

Access to cheap energy storage is viewed as a great impediment to more widespread implementation of renewable energy. It is estimated that our current electrical grid, without storage or “smart grid” applications such as demand-side management, could only support up to 20% renewables with conventional, dispatchable forms of electricity generation necessary to compensate for demand deficiencies.


Research in solar energy storage

For solar, long-term storage at present comes in the form of utility-scale solar thermal. Research in solar thermal storage is focused on engineering materials able to store more heat for longer. One example of an improvement comes with phase change materials. When a material changes phase, it goes from a solid to a liquid, and energy can be stored within the bonds of the molecule even without a change in temperature. This energy is called latent heat. A consortium of researchers from universities, national labs, and private industry sponsored by the US Department of Energy have estimated that the use of phase change materials could reduce the amount of thermal storage material needed by 30% while increasing overall system efficiency by 2 to 3%.



In the UK, £30 million has been set aside for research into grid-scale energy storage research, including £4.9 million has been awarded to the Universities of Manchester and Liverpool jointly for a facility focused on research for grid-scale electrochemical storage.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) has allocated $30 million specifically to overcoming the challenges of solar intermittency, which they estimate could limit its potential to providing only 5% of US energy needs.

In Germany, where a flood of PV on the grid has forced excess electricity to be exported during times of peak generation, the government has created subsidies to cover up to 30% of PV-tied storage systems along with low interest loans. Perhaps by being one of the first countries to get behind energy storage so aggressively, Germany is hoping to lead the world in storage just as they did with solar.

solarnovus

[Graeme]

Compressed Air Energy Storage Poised to be a Contender

Despite being commercially available for nearly 30 years, compressed air energy storage hasn’t really taken off, until now, primarily because it was expensive in nearly all applications. But these days, as the need for energy storage increases, CAES is becoming a more attractive option.

CAES systems do not require rare materials and have great durability. These systems can be recharged and discharged rapidly. It’s not a sexy technology, and some detractors consider it “low-tech” due to its simplicity.

Experts at Navigant Research maintain that macro conditions will drive up the demand for CAES, and will breathe new life into a sector that has been dormant for the last 20 years. Interest in CAES will be driven by the more scalable, modular technologies, like isothermal and adiabatic CAES. This technology is expected to be commercially validated within the next 36 months.

Next-gen CAES technologies not limited by geological considerations are on the brink of commercialization. They are able to address the gap in availability of long duration energy storage technology that can be sited where needed. Experts forecast that worldwide installed capacity of compressed air energy storage systems will reach 11.2 GW by 2023.

greenoptimistic