Eos Energy Storage, the startup that’s attracted utility interest from around the world in its low-cost, zinc-based batteries, is raising money to build more of them, and to get those units out in the field. Deployments are needed to prove the company’s bold claims of multi-hour, long-lasting energy storage at a cost of $160 per kilowatt-hour.

On Tuesday, Eos announced the initial closing of a sale in a private placement of approximately $23 million. The New York-based startup previously raised $23 million in May 2015 in a round led by AltEnergy, and about $27 million in two previous funding rounds from investors including OCI, NRG Energy and Fisher Brothers.

The money will fund the scale-up of contract manufacturing and commercial deployment of its Eos Aurora batteries. These cargo-container-sized, 1-megawatt, 4-megawatt-hour units use cathodes made from zinc, a much cheaper metal than lithium, but one that’s proven to be a challenge for rechargeable batteries.

Eos says it’s solved these problems through a proprietary coating that reduces corrosion over multiple charge-discharge cycles, as well as other materials and design improvements, to yield a battery with 75 percent round-trip efficiency and a 10,000-cycle, or 30-year, lifetime.

As for price, the company has long been targeting $160 per kilowatt-hour, which is about half the cost of the cheapest lithium-ion batteries on the market — although lithium-ion’s massive manufacturing base is sure to drive down those prices in the years to come.

Eos’ batteries sacrifice round-trip efficiency in comparison to lithium-ion, which is in the 90 percent range. But they have a better profile for multi-hour discharge cycles, particularly in the 4- to 6-hour range, where lithium-ion batteries really struggle.

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SAN DIEGO, CA–(Marketwired – Oct 18, 2016) – Energy Storage North America (ESNA), the largest gathering of policy, technology and market leaders in energy storage, concluded its fourth annual event last week in San Diego. Mirroring the growth and maturation of the storage industry at large, ESNA grew in its attendee numbers, expo floor space, and the number of organizations represented at its conference and expo.

More than 1,900 industry professionals attended ESNA, held October 4-6, hailing from over 1,000 different organizations and 25 countries. The nearly 15,000-square-foot expo floor, the largest ever for Energy Storage North America, provided over 100 exhibitors with an opportunity to showcase the latest software and hardware storage technologies, systems and services.

Senior executives from utilities, grid operators, investors and storage developers took part in panel sessions alongside elected officials and regulators to discuss the changing regulatory landscape, the process of valuing benefits of storage and the latest system deployments and assets, among other trending industry topics. In total, the ESNA conference featured nearly 150 speakers on 21 different panel sessions, 6 keynote addresses and 8 in-depth workshops.

“The optimism, excitement and innovation that underscored ESNA’s program, expo and networking events all point to the tremendous growth of energy storage over the past year,” said Janice Lin, Chair of Energy Storage North America. “By bringing utilities, policymakers, storage developers and financiers into the same room to break down barriers and share successes, we can leverage the potential of storage even further to modernize and strengthen our electric power system.”

Special events at ESNA also highlighted important sectors and stakeholders in energy storage. The annual ESNA Awards Ceremony recognized innovative storage projects in the centralized, distributed and mobility sectors, as well as policy and utility champions who have advanced storage through their work. ESNA hosted its first annual Women in Energy Storage networking event to foster connections among women in the storage industry, and continued its tradition of hosting a utility-only networking reception to encourage dialogue among utility professionals. In 2016, the number of utility employees who attended ESNA doubled compared to 2015, reflecting the increasing utility focus on and investments in energy storage.

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Strategic planning of Chinese industry at a state level could see electrical energy storage installations grow in importance, rocketing to as much as 24GW by 2020, according to one analysis firm.

Asia Europe Clean Energy Advisory Co Ltd (AECEA) said in a report sent out today that electrical energy storage as the “next big thing” could represent China’s “solar PV 2.0” moment. The firm’s China expert Frank Haugwitz included a look at energy storage as the closing segment to a briefing paper on solar market development.

Haugwitz said that while around 105MW of EES systems were installed by the end of 2015, under a business-as-usual scenario AECEA anticipated the market reaching 14GW and 24GW under a more optimistic modelling.

The reasoning given for this was that, in common with solar PV, which received a huge amount of government backing and has gone beyond 10GW of new installations each year since 2013, China has identified opportunities in the energy storage industry. Government officials in Beijing consider the development of an energy storage industry domestically to be “strategically important,” Haugwitz wrote.

The country appears keen to capture the industry’s value domestically and has included electrical energy storage in its “13th Five year plan on science and innovation” as well as its “National energy administration energy innovation action plan (2016-2030)” in which it also included solar as one of 15 key technologies.

“In light of these recent developments, it is obvious that EES applications are high on the political agenda, in order to make sure that Chinese companies will be in the position to meet the anticipated future demand,” Haugwitz wrote.

According to Haugwitz, industry observers now expect that the forthcoming “13th Five year plan for solar energy development (2016-2020)” will include policies designed to drive up demand for EES.

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PV is now producing more electricity than coal in the U.K. But don’t expect a storage boom to follow.

According to GTM Research’s Global Solar Demand Monitor, the U.K. has become the largest market for solar demand. But concerns over the eligibility for subsidies are forcing asset owners to delay adding storage to PV projects, said Jill Cainey, director of the Electricity Storage Network. 

The U.K. PV industry is largely supported through a Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROC) scheme that was designed before the advent of solar-plus-storage plant designs. 

PV asset owners wishing to add storage to their plants would have to reapply for ROC accreditation with their distribution network operator. Payments under the ROC scheme would then be suspended pending the outcome of the accreditation process. 

Even though any interim payments would still be awarded once the accreditation was granted, the temporary halt in cash flow “is something an investor would not be excited about,” Cainey said. 

This month, she attended a U.K. renewable energy trade show, Clean Energy Live, and “there were no solar farms deploying storage.” 

At the same time, the U.K. market for residential solar-plus-storage looks unlikely to take off in the near future because of unfavorable economics. 

Recent research by Delta Energy & Environment suggests the payback time for U.K. residential PV-plus-storage could be 16.9 years for a new system and 24.5 years for a retrofit, not taking subsidies into account.  

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Rival energy storage companies sonnen and Tesla each started the week angling for the emerging smart battery market, with news of financing and partnerships.

Sonnen is positioning to grow its virtual energy business sonnenCommunity, a move it sees boosted by $85 million in new equity investments. The German-based company is expanding on its native turf as well as in the United States, Australia, UK and Italy.

Sonnen wants to become an “energy supplier of the future,” said Christoph Ostermann, CEO of sonnen Group, in announcing two new minority equity partners, including international energy technology company Envision Energy.

“Fast growth and leadership in innovation are the keys to reaching this goal,” he said. “With Envision Energy, we have gained a strategic investor who shares our vision, supplements our technology and has a strong presence in both the U.S. and Asian markets.”

Sonnen’s energy sharing platform, sonnenCommunity, allows customers with solar-plus-storage to feed excess energy into a software-linked pool. Others in the network then tap into the supply rather than purchase power from a utility.

More recently, the company began offering sonnenFlat, a virtual power plant product that allows aggregation of sonnenBatteries into a storage pool that provides balancing energy for Germany’s grid.

Thomas Putter, former CEO and ex-chairman of Allianz Capital Partners, also took a new minority stake in sonnen. Earlier investors include CAPITAL, MVP, SET Ventures, Inven Capital and GE Ventures.

Meanwhile, Tesla and Panasonic have formed a partnership to manufacture solar photovoltaic cells and modules in Buffalo, New York.

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What’s on tap? The makings of advanced batteries and a better way to deal with brewery wastewater.

Engineers at University of Colorado Boulder have come up with a process to make lithium-ion battery electrodes from the sugar-rich wastewater created in the beer-making process. The bio-manufacturing process is not only a sustainable source for battery materials and fuel cells, but it’s also an inexpensive way to deal with the large amount of wastewater breweries produce.

“Breweries use about seven barrels of water for every barrel of beer produced,” said Tyler Huggins, a graduate student in CU Boulder’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and lead author of the new study. “And they can’t just dump it into the sewer because it requires extra filtration.”

The use of biomass in battery and fuel cell technologies isn’t new, but the researchers found that the beer wastewater was especially suited to the task. They found that they could easily cultivate a fast-growing fungus, Neurospora crassa, which then becomes the carbon-based electrode, in the wastewater. The partnership between the researchers and breweries is mutually beneficial: the scientists need a sugar-rich material for cultivating the fungus and the breweries have a lot of wastewater that needs to be treated.

The university said, “By cultivating their feedstock in wastewater, the researchers were able to better dictate the fungus’s chemical and physical processes from the start. They thereby created one of the most efficient naturally-derived lithium-ion battery electrodes known to date while cleaning the wastewater in the process.”

The process could easily be scaled up because everything needed to produce the energy storage material already exists. The engineers are teaming up with Avery Brewing in Boulder to work on a large pilot program. Watch the video below to hear more about the process.

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Carmaker Daimler has completed construction of the world’s largest energy storage facility using second-hand car batteries in Lünen, Westphalia, in Germany.

The new site, which utilises batteries from Daimler’s second-generation smart fortwo electric cars, will provide 13MWh of capacity to the German energy market by the end of the year. Daimler said the first power units are already plugged into the German energy grid.

Daimler said in a statement energy output from the facility will be made available to the “winner of weekly auctions among the network operators for primary controlling power range”.

The project, a joint venture between German firms Daimler, The Mobility House, GETEC and Remondis, will see 1,000 used EV battery systems grouped into a single storage solution.

Each partner takes a distinct role in the new operation, with Daimler covering the initial manufacture and configuration of the battery systems, The Mobility House and GETEC handling their installation and marketing to the energy markets, and Remondis taking charge of their recycling at end-of-life.

Meanwhile, German manufacturer Bosch said in a blog post it has worked with car giant BMW and energy company Vattenfall on a parallel storage project using “second-life” EV batteries. Its project, located in Hamburg, incorporates 2,600 battery modules from 100 electric cars, and provides 2MW of output and 2.8MWh of capacity.

“This energy is available within seconds to stabilize the power grid,” it said in the post.

The German Ministry for the Economy and Energy (BMWi) wants around 45% of power consumed in Germany to be generated from renewable resources by 2025, increasing to around 60% by 2035.

EV batteries remain operational even after the electric vehicles themselves have been scrapped. Daimler said: “If used in stationary power storage, the systems are fully operational even after the service life guaranteed by the manufacturer – with slight capacity losses only of secondary importance. Cost-effective use in stationary operation is possible for at least 10 years longer.”

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The U.K. government should learn from California and incentivize energy-storage technology to help move away from dirty fuels, a cross-party panel of lawmakers said.

Ministers should reform the Capacity Market, a subsidy program designed to lower the risk of blackouts, to reward both energy-storage projects and power users who lower consumption at times of high demand, Parliament’s Energy and Climate Change Committee said in a report published on Saturday. 

“There is an incredible opportunity for the U.K. to become a world leader in these disruptive technologies,” Chairman Angus MacNeil said. “Yet our current energy-security subsidies favor dirty diesel generation over smart new clean-tech solutions.”

Britain is trying to ensure it avoids power cuts as coal-fired power stations and aging atomic reactors close down. In March, the government said it would begin payments to power generators to guarantee electricity supply in the winter of 2017 to 2018, a year earlier than previously planned, in an attempt to encourage the building of new gas plants. 

Ministers should aim to spur projects that store excess power at times of low demand and feed it back into the grid when demand peaks, as well as those that encourage users to reduce their own demand, the committee said.

Get it Right

“We need to learn from California where strong public financial support and clear legislation have helped develop a storage industry and integrate storage infrastructure into the grid,” MacNeil said. “Getting demand-side response right will empower consumers, reduce bills, ease pressure on the grid, and lower carbon dioxide emissions.”

“We are fully committed to a low carbon energy future and the potential benefits that new technologies such as storage could bring to this,” the government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said in an e-mailed statement. “However, for the capacity market to work effectively it relies on flexible technology that is ready to be deployed.”

The committee also concluded that there are only “limited” short-term effects on electricity and gas supply of the U.K.’s decision to withdraw from the European Union. It urged ministers to publish an emissions-reduction plan because “the vote to leave has reduced already weak investor confidence in the energy sector.”

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PAIA — The end of incentive programs doesn’t mean the door has closed on rooftop solar, but customers and businesses will have to start relying more on the still-growing technology of energy storage, industry experts explained at a community forum Thursday night.

Held at the Kaunoa Senior Center in Paia, the forum took a community-focused look at Maui’s energy future. After the Public Utilities Commission rejected the merger between Hawaiian Electric Co. and Florida-based energy company NextEra over the summer, the state now has a little more clarity on the path to its goal of 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, moderator Dick Mayer said.

But community involvement in this goal has become tougher since Maui Electric Co.’s net-metering program closed last October, and the customer-grid supply program hit its 5-megawatt capacity in June. Both gave customers credits for energy they sent to the grid.

Now, batteries are “the way forward for the grid,” said Brad Albert, co-owner of Rising Sun Solar.

“Industry-wide there’s a big transition going on,” Albert said. “Between the price of batteries coming down and what it can do for the grid, I think there’s a lot of opportunity.”

MECO’s customer self-supply program allows customers to install solar as long as they don’t export to the grid. However, the solar industry has had little time to adjust to the rising need for energy storage, and many companies are still working to create viable products. Rising Sun Solar, for example, has worked with Tesla and has a battery that Albert thinks will bring cost savings similar to the MECO programs.

“The issue today is that there is no compensation if you have a distributed battery for the energy services you could provide to the grid,” Albert said. “As soon as we create that incentive, I think we’ll have a lot more batteries to be installed. . . . Customers can be part of the solution.”

Stored energy could help residents in power outages, possibly bring energy to the grid in the future and reduce the need for fossil fuel, Albert said.

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