January 4 (SeeNews) – US geothermal company Ormat Technologies Inc (NYSE:ORA) said on Tuesday it has struck a deal to take over Philadelphia-based demand response and energy storage firm Viridity Energy Inc.

The targeted business uses proprietary software to serve primarily retail energy providers, utilities, and large industrial and commercial customers. Currently, it has under contract more than 850 MW across 3,000 sites. This includes the management of a portfolio of non-utility storage assets in the northeastern US with over 80,000 operational market hours.

“Ormat intends to use the Viridity platform to accelerate long term growth, expand its market presence, and further develop Viridity’s demand response VPower software platform and energy storage services,” said Isaac Angel, Ormat’s CEO. He added that in the long term the company would seek to expand in the broader renewable energy market and not just in the geothermal sector.

Under the terms of the deal, Ormat will pay an initial price of USD 35 million (EUR 33.6m) for Viridity and may provide additional payments upon the achievement of certain performance milestones. The transaction is expected to close early this year.

Ormat noted it anticipates Viridity to generate a positive operating income in 2017.

Click Here to Read Full Article

The bellwether state of Massachusetts often serves as a focal point of energy innovation. Now it has set its sights on energy storage policy.

Over the last few months local and national energy players of various ilk – utility, competitive market, microgrid, distributed energy, renewables, environmental and social justice – have honed in on the state.

Their interest comes as Massachusetts gets ready to set a target for energy storage development that utilities and possibly other electricity providers would be required to meet. Late last month Judith Judson, state energy commissioner, took the next legal step in determining an energy storage target would be ‘prudent.’

Now the state is seeking comments by January 27 on a variety of issues associated with the target, including whether to strive for 600 MW of energy storage — the amount recommended in a state report issued in September — or another target.

The state plans to set the target in July. It also intends to issue a request for proposals offering $10 to $20 million in energy storage grants at a yet to be determined date.

Industry players already have had plenty to say about what’s ahead. Several filed comments last month with the Department of Energy Resources. Some of them have been working in California, the lead state on energy storage policy. They want to bring lessons learned in California to Massachusetts.

Here’s a sampling of what various, sometimes opposing, industry players said Massachusetts should do about energy storage policy.

Utilities on energy storage policy

Utilities are taking a customarily careful approach. Comments filed by Eversource, National Grid and Unitil pushed for aspirational, rather than mandatory targets that carry penalties if the goal isn’t met. They described energy storage as a “nascent technology” and urged that targets reflect manufacturing and development capabilities.

Click Here to Read Full Article

The Gigafactory has been activated.

Hidden in the scrubland east of Reno, Nev., where cowboys gamble and wild horses still roam—a diamond-shaped factory of outlandish proportions is emerging from the sweat and promises of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. It’s known as the Gigafactory, and today its first battery cells are rolling off production lines to power the company’s energy storage products and, before long, the Model 3 electric car. 1

The start of mass production 2 is a huge milestone in Tesla’s quest to electrify transportation, and it brings to America a manufacturing industry—battery cells—that’s long been dominated by China, Japan, and South Korea. More than 2,900 people are already working at the 4.9 million square-foot facility, 3 and more than 4,000 jobs (including temporary construction work) will be added this year through the partnership between Tesla and Panasonic. 4  

By 2018, the Gigafactory, which is less than a third complete, will double the world’s production capacity for lithium-ion batteries and employ 6,500 full-time Reno-based workers, according to a new hiring forecast from Tesla. The company’s shares, having touched their highest point since August, closed up $10 at $226.99 in New York trading. 

The full activation of the Gigafactory carries existential significance for Tesla, representing a new sense of urgency at a company known for its unreachable deadlines. After missing almost every aggressive product milestone it set for itself over the last decade, Tesla must prove to investors and customers that it can stay on schedule for its first mass-produced car.

There are promising signs. Wednesday marks the third successful target Tesla met for the New Year. The company fulfilled its promise to rapidly complete a massive battery storage project to back up the grid in California 5 ; it rolled out promised software upgrades to cars equipped with new Autopilot hardware 6 ; and now it’s begun battery cell production at the Gigafactory. 7  That said, the company did fall short of its target to deliver 80,000 cars in 2016, reporting just 76,230 completed in time. 

Click Here to Read Full Article

SACRAMENTO, CA–(Marketwired – Jan 4, 2017) – Sharp Electronics Corporation’s Energy Systems and Services Group (Sharp) announces today that its SmartStorage® system was selected as the primary energy storage system by Sunworks, a leading California and Nevada-based solar installer. The SmartStorage® system is an intelligent, lithium-ion based solution that uses predictive learning to reduce peak electricity consumption during demand spikes. Sunworks will implement SmartStorage® products into upcoming commercial building projects, thereby allowing customers to benefit from peak energy and peak demand savings simultaneously.

“Sunworks is highly recognized in the industry for quality solar installations. By joining forces to offer their industry-leading solar solutions plus our innovative SmartStorage® system, customers can optimize their energy usage,” said Carl Mansfield, General Manager and Founder of Sharp’s Energy Systems and Services Group. “Increasingly, Sharp’s customers are seeing the benefits of storage paired with solar, resulting in savings from expensive peak demand charges. We’re happy to offer a hybrid solar plus storage solution that enables commercial property owners to shift more of their capital to operations instead of expensive utility bills.”

Sunworks and Sharp expect an increase in the adoption of hybrid solar plus storage energy solutions, especially for projects that reside in areas facing peak demand rates in excess of $18/kW. With its California presence and direct access to Sharp’s zero-down financing program, Sunworks now plans to evaluate all of its commercial projects. For any site that demonstrates a strong economic benefit from a solar plus storage solution, Sunworks will install the SmartStorage® system.

“We are seeing the market move toward energy storage,” said Jim Nelson, CEO of Sunworks. “This is an opportunity to grow our business and provide our customers with a reliable, high performing, and high quality storage solution that can deliver savings. We found that Sharp offered the best solution within the energy storage market and we plan to deploy the SmartStorage® system to all of our commercial projects where the economics make sense.”

The SmartStorage® system features Sharp’s sophisticated, predictive analytics application that manages the release of energy from batteries at the precise time it’s needed to avoid demand charges. As an option for all SmartStorage® system installations, Sharp offers a 10-Year Asset Management Service Agreement coupled with a 10-Year Performance Guarantee that includes routine and unscheduled maintenance. If guaranteed peak demand reductions are not met, Sharp will compensate for the deficit in promised peak demand reductions.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Oregon has become the latest US state to lay out its foundations for electricity companies to procure and deploy energy storage systems, with the state Public Utility Commission (PUC) providing guidelines and timelines.

The state actually enacted bill HB2193, which would authorise utilities to explore the possibilities of deploying energy storage for reasons including deferring spending on transmission infrastructure, back in 2015. The latest document to emerge from the PUC gives details on how it sees that electric companies with over 25,000 retail customers could select storage system providers and present project proposals to the commission. Once approved, they have been given until 2020 to procure projects.

This would apply to two utilities, Pacificorp, trading as Pacific Power, and Portland General Electric Company (PGE). While the systems should have over 5MWh storage capacity each, they would also be capped at 1% of the utility’s peak load in 2014, except, the PUC said, for a project of “statewide significance”. Utilities will be allowed to recover the costs of projects from ratepayers.

GTM Research’s recent report on third quarter 2016 activity in energy storage in the US highlighted policy moves to spur on energy storage development in Oregon and in Massachusetts as two of the states following national leaders California and New York’s lead in recognising the value of energy storage. Massachusetts has determined that it will implement procurement targets for storage, although it has yet to rule on their size or timescale.

Click Here to Read Full Article

In the new world of energy, the supply of electricity from renewable sources fluctuates dramatically. A balance can be achieved by storing the energy to decouple the moment of power generation from the moment of consumption. Electrical energy storage also provides greater stability in transmission and distribution grids, and greater security for the energy system as a whole.

Electrical energy storage can be used in industrial plants, craft businesses, private homes, and electric and hybrid vehicles. The systems in commercial use today can be broadly categorised as mechanical, electrical, chemical, electrochemical, and thermal. There are technologies suitable for large-scale storage, and others for smaller-scale applications. Siemens is working to develop solutions for many different storage technologies and systems. Obviously, all these forms of storage have their pros and cons.

Decision makers must carefully ponder the merits of each alternative in light of the particular use case. We’ve summarised the options and some of their main characteristics.

Click Here to Read Full Article

China’s deployment of energy storage looks set to continue an upward trajectory, with almost 600MW in the pipeline as of the third quarter this year.

According to figures released by the China Energy Storage Alliance (CNESA), 14 new projects were announced in Q3 2016 totalling 587MW. This includes projects that are in planning stages, under construction and that have gone online in the quarter. This appears to represent a significant boost to the sector, and is a vast 586% increase on the same period of last year. Up until the beginning of the quarter, CNESA found, 170.6MW of energy storage was in operation in the country.  

The bulk of this large figure is contributed by a single project, a touted 400MW supercapacitor storage station with storage duration of four hours in Guazhou County, in the northern Gansu province, a couple of hundred kilometres south of the border with Mongolia. This project will be used to demonstrate the use of storage in preventing wind power capacity curtailment on a microgrid. The project, by Shidai Jiahua Co, requires US$680 million in investment and has an expected payback time of 16 to 18 years.

There was also a 160MW local government project in Inner Mongolia, another microgrid to be used for renewables integration. The local authority of Xilin Gol, one of Inner Mongolia’s 12 sub-divided regions, is keen to trial retail sales of electricity from independent suppliers and this project represents a major step forward in this regard.

While these two huge projects are in northwestern regions of China, Jiangsu in the east will get some significant new projects including a 1.5MW/12MWh project from partners including battery maker Narada Power, inverter maker Sungrow and project developer GCL Power, which is an arm of one of China’s biggest PV groups, GCL Poly. Narada Power was also involved in a 15MW/120MWh project in Jiangsu’s Wuxi City Xingzhou Industrial Park.

Overall, renewables integration appears to be the biggest application driver for energy storage in China, as seen in the diagram below. While big announcements were plentiful, only 1.5MW of storage actually came online in Q3, which was nonetheless a 50% increase on the same period of 2015.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Software for energy storage systems will be a mixture of in-house solutions by integrator/developers and third-party providers, in an industry segment set for a steep rise in value, according to one expert.

A new report from Navigant Research has predicted a steep rise in the value of energy storage software. Navigant analyst Alex Eller told Energy-Storage.News that cumulative vendor revenues will rocket from US$201.2 million this year to US$3.4 billion by 2025. The report itself looks at both utility-scale and behind-the-meter energy storage software, including residential, commercial and industrial (C&I) and large-scale, from a range of providers with a range of approaches.

Software is a vital piece of the advanced energy storage puzzle, used in three key areas: analysing projects, controlling and operating storage systems, and system optimisation. As Eller points out, software determines how effectively the storage will achieve revenues or savings, whether that be in helping C&I customers reduce demand charges on their bills or providing multiple or ‘stacked’ services to grid operators.

While on the one hand the right software can effectively manage and control systems, it also plays its role even before systems are built.

“Usually a lot of the same vendors that have management systems platforms also do system design and analysis,” Eller said.

“So before anything even gets built they can model how components are going to interact, the optimal size for the system and all different operating parameters that are going to allow streamlined installation, make the whole process faster and more accurate, you’re not going to have systems that are oversized or undersized, theoretically that’s the idea there.”

Click Here to Read Full Article

U.S. energy producers of all kinds see reasons for optimism as they start 2017, though the incoming Trump administration may spell trouble for some of a greener hue.

Among oil drillers, a recent uptick in prices suggests an end to a slump that has persisted since mid-2014, while natural gas, solar and wind energy companies aim to build on their gains in U.S. electric power markets in 2016.

Even the struggling nuclear sector can point to victories in New York and Illinois, where unprofitable reactors were saved by state actions last year.

That said, here’s a list of some of the most notable energy developments for the U.S. in 2016 — ones that may set the stage for how Americans produce and use energy in 2017.

The re-emergence of OPEC

For the first time since 2008, OPEC agreed to cut its oil output in a bid to boost prices and recover some market control. Saudi Arabia and other cartel members were joined by Russia and other non-OPEC nations in agreeing to curtail production by nearly 1.8 million barrels a day in 2017. It’s still too early to say whether the deal will stick, though Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, was up by 12% on Friday from   Nov. 30, when OPEC met. Not bound by the deal are U.S. producers, whose output could jump thanks to higher prices.

Trump promises energy shakeup

Donald Trump’s surprise election will mean a significant shift in U.S. energy policy. The president-elect has promised to promote oil, natural gas and coal aggressively, and pull back on Obama administration commitments to fighting climate change. The men he has chosen to head the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department, not to mention the State Department, indicate he intends to follow through on those commitments.

Temperatures up, carbon emissions flat

The year 2016 is likely to be the hottest on record, surpassing record highs set in 2015 and 2014. This comes as the 2015 Paris climate agreement, signed by the U.S. and nearly 200 other nations to avoid a catastrophic increase in temperatures, took effect. Still, carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are likely to rise only slightly globally in 2016 and fall a bit in the U.S., thanks considerably to reductions in coal use, the Global Carbon Project reports.

Click Here to Read Full Article