March 30 (Renewables Now) – Hitachi Europe Ltd, Mitsubishi Motors (TYO:7211) and Engie (EPA:ENGI) have launched a project in the Netherlands to study the potential for electric vehicles (EVs) to act as energy storage for office buildings.

As part of the project, a vehicle-to-everything (V2X) charger has been linked to Engie’s office building in Zaandam. The charger, provided by Hitachi, allows for bi-directional charging between the electric car battery and the building or power grid. It is connected to the building’s energy supply and, when the building produces more solar power than it needs, the surplus is stored in the car battery. The stored energy can be discharged back into the grid when needed.

“This charger exceeds smart charging as we know it and is basically the first real ‘smart grid charger,” said Hans Boot, chief operating officer at Engie Services Netherlands.

Mitsubishi Motors is contributing its Outlander PHEV SUV to the project to serve as an energy storage centre.

For the next stage of the project, the partners will look into how EVs, renewable energy and building energy management systems can work in concert to make buildings energy neutral.

According to the announcement, vehicle-to-building (V2B) technology can play a key role in reducing carbon emissions globally.

The companies linked what they claim is the first ‘vehicle to everything’ EV charger to energy firm ENGIE’s office in Zaandam, with the aim of providing grid flexibility services and boosting the overall energy efficiency of the building.

The project used Hitachi’s V2X Charger, which the global electronics and engineering company claims is the first EV recharging technology able to both power up an electric car as well as discharge the energy back into a building or grid via a variety of different routes.

It is also possible to connect solar panels and external energy storage directly to the V2X Charger “allowing a much more efficient electricity supply to buildings”, Hitachi explained.

The V2X Charger is connected to the building’s energy supply and, when the building generates more solar power than it needs, this excess energy is stored in the battery of the electric car, the consortium explained.

The resulting energy can then be discharged back into the grid when appropriate, and the car battery therefore acts as an energy storage source, as well as an emergency power supply.

Vincent Cobee, corporate vice president at Mitsubishi Motors, said the aim of the project was to show how EVs and plug in hybrid vehicles could be a “vital” component of urban energy systems. “This demonstration will help providing a new energy solution for energy efficient, low carbon smart buildings,” he said.

Buildings and transport together currently account for around 75 per cent of the total carbon emissions of services-focused companies, according to the three firms.

Common rust forms the inner skeleton of these lovely and intricate nanostructures, while their outer layer is a kind of plastic.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a straightforward way to make this type of conducting polymer with high surface area that is likely to be useful for energy transfer and storage applications.

The new research is the cover story of the March 23 issue of ACS Applied Nano Materials.

“Rust will always pose a challenge in Earth’s humid and oxygenated atmosphere,” said Julio M. D’Arcy, assistant professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences and a member of the university’s Institute of Materials Science and Engineering. “Corrosion makes structures fragile and decreases the ability of components to function properly. But in our lab, we’ve learned how to control the growth of rust so that it can serve an important purpose.”

Conducting polymers rely on a combination of organic and inorganic materials—usually a core of metal and a shell of plastic—made in a single batch.

D’Arcy and his team reported on a new technique that combines vapor-phase synthesis with solution-based hydrolysis to build three-dimensional nanoflowers, two-dimensional nanoplates and one-dimensional nanofibers.

This work advances the understanding of the chemical mechanisms involved with depositing the rust and forming the polymer, which will allow scientists to more easily manipulate and engineer the structures of the materials they make.

Aggreko-owned storage system experts Younicos claimed first place in the pv magazine Energy Storage Highlights award. Alexander Schönfeldt, the company’s VP sales EMEA, describes this award-winning concept and reveals more details about Younicos’ new rental storage system.

For the Energy Storage Europe Exhibition and Conference held in Düsseldorf, Germany in mid-March, pv magazineteamed up with Messe Düsseldorf to produce a 32-page storage special issue that led with a prestigious Energy Storage Highlights Award.

Among the many entrants, the winning storage innovation – as identified via the scoring aggregation from our independent jury – was a combined gas and battery grid services power plant by Berlin-based storage experts Younicos.

The idea of the plant is, as Schönfeldt says, to give aged gas plants a second life via the support of battery storage. “It enables plant owners to respond to requirements in the market with the battery, and for the gas engine to respond in the capacity market with secondary reserve.”

At the Energy Storage Europe Exhibition, Younicos was also showcasing its new rental storage-as-a-service model, which Schönfeldt described as an innovative way to “unlock the storage market in a way that customer’s do not have to worry about investment hurdles or technology risk.”

After Tesla’s massive plan to create a 50,000-home virtual power plant with Powerwalls being in jeopardy in Australia, another similar project is now been announced for a new ‘virtual power plant’.

New Premier of South Australia, Steven Marshall, a member of the Liberal party who just replaced the Labor party, threw some cold water on the project, which is so far still going forward with the first 1,100 installations, but it could face some red tapes for the other 49,000 installations.

But now the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has today announced $7.7 million in funding for Simply Energy to build a second virtual power plant across Adelaide.

Like for Tesla’s own virtual power plant, Simply Energy confirmed that it plans to use Tesla’s Powerwall 2.

They described the project in a press release today:

“The $23 million project will deliver Tesla Powerwall 2 home batteries to up to 1200 Adelaide households representing 6 MW of residential energy storage. A further 2 MW of demand response capacity will be deployed across 10 commercial businesses.”

The goal is to have it up and running by the end of 2019.

It’s on a much smaller scale than the previous project, but ARENA is treating like a pilot project.

ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said about this project:

“We think consumer energy resources have a huge role to play in Australia’s energy future, but we are still figuring out how we can orchestrate rooftop solar and home batteries to feed back into the grid. This is technically hard to do, which is why these pilot projects are so important,” he said. “This is a potential model for how distributed energy resources can be operated at large scale in the future to help reduce energy prices,”

The project has the goal to lower the energy bill of families with the batteries while also stabilizing the grid by reducing peak power demand with the large energy storage capacity.

The energy industry is evolving towards more ‘enterprise platform’-based business models, enabling energy storage to play a vital role for businesses and the grid, NEC Energy Solutions (NEC ES) CEO Steve Fludder has said.

NEC ES, the NEC Corporation’s energy storage system integration and technology business, relies increasingly on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Fludder said in an interview and presentation at last month’s Energy Storage Summit in London. Fludder took over as CEO in November, replacing temporary boss Hiro Ezawa, who in turn replaced longstanding leader Budd Collins.

These IT capabilities not only give NEC ES and its partners better visibility into system operation, Fludder said, but they also enable the company and others like it to capture value across the whole marketplace, making an analogy with the way that online retail giant Amazon uses predictive analytics to stock its strategically-located warehouses with the goods returning customers are most likely to purchase.

“This concept is actually happening around us all the time. You have cars that can tell you when they need to go in to be serviced, for example. I’m quite interested in the Amazon analogy, because that’s something that touches everyone every day. How do they do that? If they did that by building up massive amounts of inventory of everything that’s on sale on their site, they would never make money,” Fludder told Energy-Storage.News.