Swiss institutional investment group SUSI Partners has agreed to finance C$120 million (US$94.56 million) of commercial and industrial (C&I) sector energy storage projects by Canadian project developer/owner NRStor.

Toronto-headquartered NRStor completed one of Canada’s first large-scale grid-connected energy storage systems, a 2MW flywheel system using 10 separate Temporal Power flywheels, in 2014. That appears to be the only completed project in the company’s portfolio as listed on the NRStor website, but in late 2016, the company signed a deal with fellow Canadian company Hydrostor, which delivers advanced adiabatic compressed air energy storage (A-CAES) from underground caverns, to jointly develop utility-scale energy storage projects across Canada.

Meanwhile SUSI Partners’ SUSI Energy Storage Fund hit energy storage industry headlines when it provided third-party project financing for 12MW of Canadian energy storage projects with developer Convergent Energy and Power. At the time, Florian Mayr of consultancy Apricum, who advised on the deal, said the arrival of an institutional investor such as SUSI in the space spoke volumes about the promise of energy storage as a technology and economic opportunity.

“SUSI Partners has clearly realized the high potential of the energy storage market for its institutional investors seeking attractive risk-adjusted returns in a rapidly growing infrastructure asset class that also contributes to the mitigation of climate change,” Mayr said at the time.

The investment group has earmarked a total of €250 million (US$298.7 million) for investment in energy storage and related areas such as smart microgrids, which SUSI said will be open to investors until early next year. SUSI reached the closing of a €66 million (US$70.4 million) fund in April, garnering investments from pension funds and other institutional investors. 

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StorEn Technology* is developing a new generation of vanadium flow batteries to meet the growing market demand for cost-effective energy storage.

Unlike conventional batteries that store their reactive materials within their cells, vanadium flow batteries are a type of rechargeable battery in which the energy is stored chemically in a liquid electrolyte contained in two tanks.

Stor.En has developed Multigrid™ technology that improves the electrical efficiency of the stack, helping reduce costs for storage solutions for residential, industrial, or utility needs.

The following is an interview with StorEn’s Chief Technology Officer, Angelo D’An

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Filipino firm Kennedy Renewable + Technology Corp has partnered with AC Energy to provide seven school campus buildings in the Island of Tawi-Tawi, south Philippines, with solar-plus-storage systems.

In this remote province, just 30% of the population has access to electricity, with most power sourced from diesel generators and often hit by blackouts.

Such rolling blackouts have negatively affected the Mindanao State University (MSU) in Bongao, Tawi-Tawi, which is aiming to be a centre for excellence in the areas of fisheries, marine and maritime science and engineering, as well as oceanography.

Kennedy is the main developer, while AC Energy is offering technical and financial support. The two firms equipped the campuses with solar panels, hybrid inverters and batteries, providing not only 141kW capacity to the university but also energy storage capability to help the school deliver uninterrupted education despite the inefficiencies of the local power supply.

Dr. Philip Ella Juico, chairman of Kennedy Renewable + Technology Corp, said: “The successful launch of this project highlights the reality of conglomerates successfully working with small companies that labour under challenging circumstances to promote sustainable development. This installation is a living, although modest testament of how organizations like AC Energy and Kennedy Renewable + Technology Corp. solve real problems of power shortages that affect critical institutions in remote areas. Many more projects like this will help advance the cause of energy derived from sources that are replenished by nature.”

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Tesla has now finished construction work on the 129 megawatt-hour (MWh) energy storage facility that it was contracted to build in South Australia, the government of the region has revealed.

The news means that Tesla has finished construction well before its self-imposed 100-day deadline — which means that Tesla won’t be providing the installation free of charge to South Australia (the promise had been “100 days from contract signature or it is free”). To clarify, that meant within 100 days of the signing of a grid connection agreement (which was signed on September 29th).

The facility reportedly now represents the world’s largest lithium-ion battery energy storage installation — dwarfing most others. The large size was important to help South Australia avoid power supply issues, which have been topics of much news coverage and political rugby ball in recent times.

Reuters provides more context on how quickly Tesla got the job done, and touches on other matters I’m sure readers are interested in: “When the grid connection deal was signed on Sept 29, Tesla was already half way through installing the battery packs. The Tesla Powerpacks have now been fully installed at a wind farm run by France’s Neoen, and testing is set to begin to provide grid security services in South Australia. … The state has yet to say how much it would pay for the battery, which is part of a A$510 million ($390 million) plan that includes diesel-fired generators to help keep the lights on following a string of blackouts over the past 18 months.”

“While others are just talking, we are delivering our energy plan, making South Australia more self-sufficient, and providing back up power and more affordable energy for South Australians this summer,” commented South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill.

While the new energy storage installation will no doubt be helpful in dealing with grid supply over the coming years, there will still be a tight power supply this summer — particularly in South Australia and in Victoria — owing to the recent closure of a large coal-fired power plant. That’s according to Australia’s energy market operator. So, don’t expect that this giant 129 MWh Tesla Powerpack facility gets the region completely out of the woods.

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The growth of energy storage from a complementary but ultimately unnecessary addition to renewable energy projects to a valuable standalone commodity has rocked the energy world and even entrenched fossil fuel-dependent countries like Australia, and new figures from Navigant Research identify over 1,700 energy storage projects around the world.

Clean energy technology research firm Navigant Research published its Energy Storage Tracker 3Q17 report this week in which it identifies more than 1,700 energy storage projects worldwide, well up from the 1,420 energy storage projects in existence identified in the first quarter of this year. The following chart outlines new deployed storage power capacity across global markets year-to-date through to the end of the third-quarter of 2017:

“The global energy storage industry is poised to continue to grow quickly over the next several years, especially in emerging economies,” said Ian McClenny, research analyst with Navigant Research. “With emerging infrastructure becoming increasingly integrated, dynamic, and complex, flexible resources like storage will provide added value to existing and new power generating assets.”

Further, improvements in energy storage technologies, developing regional regulatory and market drivers, and emerging new business models are all poised to drive the growth of the energy storage industry, according to Navigant Research. More than growth in the sector itself, Navigant predicts a growing need for energy storage around the world.

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The energystorageindustry is set to rise dramatically — for those companies that can play the long game. 

Bloomberg New Energy Finance released a report Tuesday that forecasts the global energy storage market will “double six times” from now to 2030, from a meager starting point of less than 5 gigawatt-hours last year, to more than 300 gigawatt-hours and 125 gigawatts of capacity by the end of the next decade. An estimated $103 billion will be invested in energy storage over that time period.

The trajectory for energy storage mirrors the market expansion that solar went through from 2000 to 2015, when the share of solar PV as a percentage of total generation doubled seven times. 

This rapid global growth rate tracks well with the U.S. energy storage market forecast from GTM Research, which projects a twelvefold growth in the U.S. alone between 2016 and 2022, to reach 7.2 gigawatt-hours, or 2.6 gigawatts, of capacity. 

This growth is going to be driven by both cost reductions for batteries and associated systems, and a rising need for more gigawatts of flexibility to manage the ups and downs of an increasingly wind- and solar-powered grid, according to BNEF energy storage analyst and lead report author Yayoi Sekine. “With so much investment going into battery technology, falling costs and with significant addition of wind and solar capacity in all markets, energy storage will play a crucial part in the energy transformation,” she said.

On the cost side, BNEF sees utility-scale battery systems falling from about $700 per kilowatt-hour in 2016 to less than $300 per kilowatt-hour in 2030. That’s in line with other projections that see stationary storage benefiting from investments into the mass manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries for consumer electronics and electric vehicles.

On the demand side, 70 percent of global capacity through 2030 will be installed in eight countries: the U.S., China, Japan, India, Germany, U.K., Australia and South Korea. The primary driver in each will be managing an increasingly renewable and intermittent energy resource mix.

Earlier this month, BNEF released a report that illustrated how some of the most renewables-rich markets will be pressed to incorporate energy storage at record scale. The report found that “future energy systems in the U.K. and Germany with very high levels of variable renewable generation must be complemented by flexible resources, including energy storage.”

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Vertical integration of supply chain

Titanium electrode supply deal for Primus

For the most part, it will take some years for solar-plus-storage in the ASEAN region to become economically viable on a large scale, but panellists at the opening day of Solar and Off-Grid Renewables Southeast Asia event in Bangkok, have warned that investors who come on board quickest are going to gain a huge advantage.

The ‘ASEAN Storage Market Potential’ session saw panellists disagree strongly over whether solar-plus-storage had already become an economically viable solution, with some claiming it had already reached grid parity with conventional power generation.

Leandro Leviste, CEO, Solar Philippines, said there was a need for more “daring” developers to enter Southeast Asia and take risks to allow for solar and storage to take on coal-fired power through the unregulated market. This echoed comments back in October about how Leviste’s company had commissioned a large-scale solar project in the Philippines without receiving approval from the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC), achieving a sub-6 US cents per unit tariff by taking merchant risk.

However, not all developers are able to take these risks from either a PV or solar-plus-storage perspective.

Edward Douglas, partner at Southeast Asia renewables-focused firm, Armstrong Asset management, said that putting together a commercial solution for PV and storage had been a challenge. He also noted that there is a lack of system integrators in the region and the storage technology providers were not interested in the smaller markets so far.

He added: “You’ve got this situation where, commercially, from a financing standpoint, the battery guys won’t want the work of the system integrator and vice versa.”

However, he also said the potential for solar-plus-storage is enormous, adding: “Investors aren’t waking up to it really yet; they are beginning to, but the execution of that idea or potential into real projects isn’t happening quickly enough and I think investors who manage to put their pieces in place quickest are going to gain a very significant advantage, because the cost curves like solar are moving much more quickly than most people anticipate.”

Patrick Jaeger, vice president of Conergy Group, a frontrunner in storage deployment, said there was still a lack of understanding of how storage and solar really work when connected to the grid. This was in spite of the large amount of theorising and risk modelling that has been undertaken already. Jaeger also said regulation is far behind the energy storage concepts and this “throws wrenches” into people’s economic models.

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Australia has been named as one of eight countries expected to lead a massive boom in energy storage uptake that will see the global market double six times over between 2016 and 2030, to an installed total of 125GW/305 gigawatt-hours in 2030.

In its Energy Storage Forecast, 2017-30, released on Tuesday, Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts the global energy storage market will follow a “remarkable” growth trajectory similar to that charted by the solar industry between 2000 to 2015.

The report predicts that the global energy storage market will grow to a cumulative 125GW/305GWh by 2030, attracting $US103 billion in investment over this period, as behind the meter storage becomes “ubiquitous” in countries like Australia, and combines with utility-scale storage to play a crucial role in the transition to renewables.

And as we have seen with solar, energy storage market momentum will be driven by falling costs – in the case of lithium-ion battery systems, for example, BNEF is forecasting annual cost reductions of around 10 per cent from now to 2020, and 7 per cent a year by 2030. (Although this will mostly be driven by demand from a booming electric vehicle market, the report says.)

“The industry has just begun,” said BNEF energy storage analyst Yayoi Sekine, lead author of the report, in comments on Tuesday. “With so much investment going into battery technology, falling costs and with significant addition of wind and solar capacity in all markets, energy storage will play a crucial part in the energy transformation.”

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The global energy storage market looks to mirror the rapid growth the solar industry experienced between 2000 and 2015, with a new Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) report predicting that the energy storage market will double six times by 2030.

BNEF released a new report on Monday (20 November), which predicts that the energy storage market will grow to 125GW between 2016 and 2030, creating an output of 305gWh. This growth is remarkably similar to the trajectory the solar industry experienced for 15 years from 2000, when the share of photovoltaics in the energy mix doubled seven times.

BNEF energy storage analyst Yayoi Sekine said: “The industry has just begun. With so much investment going into battery technology, falling costs and with significant addition of wind and solar capacity in all markets, energy storage will play a crucial part in the energy transformation.”

The Global Energy Storage Forecast report notes that the UK, the US, China, Germany, Australia, Japan, India and South Korea will account for 70% of all installed capacity. Both utility-scale and behind-the-meter installations will be issued to create a “crucial source of flexibility” capable of handling an influx of renewable energy, the report notes.

BNEF predicts that more than $100bn will be invested during the next 15 years in the energy storage markets, spread equally across continents. A previous energy storage forecast from BNEF suggested that energy storage system investments would cost $8.2bn annually by 2024, before reaching $250bn by 2040.

The revised investment prediction is based on BNEF’s own calculations that battery technology costs will fall to $120 per kWh by 2030.

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