Without energy storage, the EU target for renewable energy cannot be reached. And that can only succeed if the incentives for investment are set correctly and if “ownership unbundling” rules in the EU energy market are strictly enforced, writes  Dr. Hans Wolf von Koeller.

Dr. Hans Wolf von Koeller is Head of Energy Policy at STEAG GmbH, a German company which plans, constructs, and operates power plants and distributed energy facilities using fossil fuels and renewable energy sources. 

Did you know that The Landlord’s Game is the predecessor of the popular board game Monopoly? In 1903, Elizabeth Magie developed the Landlord’s game, and created two sets of rules for her game: an anti-monopolistic set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolistic set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents.

Monopoly is still fashionable, the design has changed and so has the owner of the trade mark. But the rules of the game itself are not for sale. The most powerful players cannot climb to new levels of dominance where they are able to gain control of the game.

So, is the energy system any different? Unbundling in the EU energy market was intended to create a kind of anti-monopolistic set of rules. Competition in a European energy market was meant to lead to lower prices for customers but also secure the supply of energy, especially electricity. At the core of unbundling is a strict separation of the natural monopoly at all grid levels from power production, supply to customers and load management.

However, these fundamental principles risk being endangered by the electricity market reform currently under discussion at European level. Under the upcoming Austrian presidency of the EU, the Council and the European Parliament are expected to agree on a set of rules that foster innovative solutions for new services to participate in the system, including electricity storage.

Yes, EU energy rules are under constant change. This alone is already challenging for all players. But the greatest threat is if the rule makers decide to allow the game board – the grid – to take an ever increasing part in the game.

File this one under “I” for I’m not dead yet. The iconic US company GE has been weathering stormy seas of late, but its Power Conversion business is still alive and contributing to the renewable energy revolution. In the latest development, GE has just won a high profile contract to supply its high tech variable speed equipment for the massive new $1.87 billion Fengning hydropower and energy storage project in China’s Hebei Province, billed as the biggest facility of its kind in the world.

A Variable Speed Twist On The Old Pumped Energy Storage Tale

The roots of pumped hydro energy storage go back to the 19th century, but the technology really blossomed in recent years with the advent of renewable energy.

The basic idea is to use excess renewable energy to pump water uphill to a reservoir, which serves as a “natural battery,” sometimes called a water battery. When called for, the water is released to a hydropower plant downhill, which means that gravity does all the heavy lifting.

That’s just the basics. Getting the system to work with maximum efficiency is the tricky part.

Earlier this week, GE shared news that describes how the company’s variable speed technology will amp up the Fengning hydropower plant.

The Fengning plant has a capacity of 3.6 gigawatts. The pumped storage will add another 1.8 GW of capacity. Here’s the rundown on the role that variable speed drive will play:

Variable speed drive technology provides a full range of speed that is the best performing and most economical to pump water to the upper reservoir—when in the saving mode—or to release water to a lower reservoir to generate power.

GE’s contribution to the Fengning project will consist of two variable speed converters to match two generators provided by the company ANDRITZ Group, and one static frequency converter for four generators provided by China’s Dongfang Electric Machinery Co., Ltd.

Aside from greater efficiency, China is also counting on variable speed equipment and the Fengning plant to help ensure grid reliability during the Winter Olympics in 2022, when electricity consumption is expected to soar.

‘Batwind’, a much-talked about battery storage project due to being the first grid storage system connected to an offshore floating wind farm 25km off the Scottish coast, is now online.

In January, the project was described as holding great potential to learn from in showing how renewable energy could become a provider of baseload energy, by Statoil (now known as Equinor) and Masdar, two of the project’s partners which have committed to studying and analysing its performance.

The 1MW/1.3MWh ‘Batwind’ battery, designed and constructed by system integrator Younicos, is now complete and paired with ‘Hywind Scotland’, the floating offshore wind farm near Peterhead, Aberdeenshire.

“By adding energy storage capabilities to another world “first” – the world’s first floating wind farm – we hope to demonstrate the essential role that storage plays as we continue pushing the frontier in producing sustainable energy,” Younicos managing director Karim Wazni said.

“Specifically, we’ve equipped Batwind with our intelligent Y.Q software, which ensures that the battery ’learns’ the optimal storage conditions. Our software tells the battery when to store electricity and for how long, and when and how much to inject back onto the grid.”

Equinor has described the project as the first step towards a “scalable, global renewables energy storage system” and said it and Masdar are together developing the algorithms that instruct the system when to store power and when to send it to the grid. The software behind the algorithms will incorporate various data sources including weather forecasting, market pricing, maintenance, expected consumption data and how, when and if to provide grid services.

“Digitalisation is a key driver here. The more we feed Batwind’s power management system with data, the smarter it gets. In addition, Batwind can be utilised for other renewable energy sources including solar and onshore wind. We believe this will expand the market for all renewable energy sources,” Sebastian Bringsvaerd, development manager for Hywind and Batwind with Equinor.

A group of billionaires including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, and Richard Branson have invested in Form Energy. The company, out of MIT, is designing a new type of battery, thought to be based on sulfur. If early reports of success turn into practical solutions, the technology could store energy for months at a time at a fraction of the current cost.

The Readily-Available Solution

Form Energy has so far been reticent to reveal the exact details of their new technology. However, Yet-Ming Chiang, an MIT professor and one of the company’s founders, has confirmed that one of the solutions it is pursuing is a “sulfur-flow battery.” Chiang described this technology in some detail in a scientific paper in 2017.

Flow batteries generally consist of two tanks containing some form of electroactive chemical elements. The liquid is pumped through a central charging chamber containing positive and negative electrodes (anode and cathode). This is where the energy storage and energy release process takes place. The chamber is separated in two by a membrane that ensures the liquids don’t come into actual contact with each other, as shown in the video.

The advantages of flow batteries include easy scalability and long cycle life. Among its disadvantages are relatively low energy density and high component cost.

Form Energy’s use of sulfur, which is both cheap and abundant, lowers those costs dramatically.

As described in PV-Magazine, the battery uses sulfur in the anode and aerated liquid salt in the cathode. Oxygen flowing in and out of the cathode makes the battery discharge and charge.

“This battery literally inhales and exhales air, but it doesn’t exhale carbon dioxide, it exhales oxygen. What this does is create a charge balance by taking oxygen in and out of the system,” Yet-Ming Chiang explained to PV-Magazine.

The largest energy storage system comprising electric car batteries in Europe has been switched on today in Amsterdam, where it will help power the Ajax football team’s Johan Cruijff Arena.

Nissan has supplied the equivalent of 148 new and used Leafbatteries to the location as part of a collaboration with technology firms, including electric power company Eaton, and local authorities. The battery cells enable the storage of energy captured by the 4200 solar panels on the roof of the stadium.

Nissan said the 3MW and 2.8MWh storage technology, which will help to flatline the stadium’s demand from the Dutch electricity grid, would provide “reliable and efficient energy” to the stadium and its neighbours. During low-energy periods, it can even contribute to the grid.

Nissan said the new system “creates a circular economy for electric vehicle batteries”. The company’s energy boss, Francisco Carranza, said “re-purposing the batteries of Nissan electric vehicles can contribute to making the whole energy system more efficient and sustainable”.

Henk van Raan, director of innovation at the Johan Cruijff Arena, said that the system will assure the arena with “a considerable amount of power, even during an outage”. He said the stadium will also “contribute to a stable Dutch energy grid”.

The Dutch power system is the latest of several investments made by Nissan to extend the usability and life of its electric car batteries. Earlier this year, it began a project with the British government to install 1000 vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging points across the UK over the next three years.

Carranza said: “We’re putting our electric ecosystem at the heart of a sustainable future, transforming the way we drive and the way we live”.

The city of Sydney, Australia, has set a goal of obtaining 50% of the electricity it consumes from renewable sources by 2030. As part of that program, it has recently activated a 1,600 solar power installations coupled with a 500 kWh of Tesla Powerpack battery installations, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. The solar panels are installed on the roof of the city’s Alexandra Canal transport depot (see below).

While the solar installation isn’t the city’s largest — Sydney Markets in Flemington is powered by nearly 8,600 solar panels — it is the first to combine solar with large-scale batteries similar to Tesla’s massive battery unit in South Australia. At the commissioning ceremony on Wednesday, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore said the project was part of the city’s wider push towards greater sustainability and fighting climate change. Many parts of Sydney are located on the shores of its famous harbor and could be significantly affected by rising ocean levels.

“Growing the uptake of renewable energy is critical in combating the worst impacts of climate change,” Ms. Moore said. “We’re working towards a target of 50 per cent of all electricity in the City of Sydney area to come from renewables by 2030. To help us achieve that target we’re covering the roofs of our properties with as many solar panels as possible.

“By mid-2021, we expect to have more than 7,800 solar panels on the roofs of our properties. As the mix of storage and generation on our electricity grid changes, solar solutions like this could provide reliability and resilience to our electricity network and potentially prevent blackouts.”

She also said the battery installation will allow the depot to be classified as carbon neutral and eliminate about 600 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.

While not nearly as large as the Tesla battery storage facility installed in South Australia last year, the solar panels and batteries will allow the depot to reduce its demand on the grid during peak times while also cutting power costs. That first installation proved to doubters that battery storage could eliminate the need for costly peaker plants, electric generating facilities that are brought online during the hours of peak demand. The batteries will be remotely managed in real time by electricity transmission group TransGrid.

TransGrid chief executive Paul Italiano said battery storage will be playing a greater role in the future of Sydney’s electricity network. “This initiative with the City of Sydney will afford the depot a significant amount of energy self-sufficiency while also sharing benefits with the wider community through the electricity network. By partnering with a site where this service is needed, we can support the City of Sydney’s renewable energy goals and reduce the cost of the council’s depot,” he said. The goal is to install 1.5-megawatt hours of battery storage capacity across all council buildings in Sydney.

Now that automakers are all working on electric vehicles, the issue of what happens to used batteries has come up. Hyundai, with help from Finnish energy-technology company Wärtsilä, has come up with a solution — turning them into a way to store energy. The South Korean automaker announced the new plan earlier this week. 

Old Batteries As A Form Of Energy Storage

At the moment, companies only have two options when it comes to used car batteries — use them as a form of storage or recycle them for materials. Hyundai and Wärtsilä want to do the former to help the energy storage market, which is growing. Going down the route of using batteries to store energy should also help with the adoption of renewable energy. 

As The Drive points out, using batteries as an energy source helps fill in gaps for when other sources of renewable energy aren’t operating at their fullest. Wind mills and solar panels are fantastics ways of getting energy, but for times when the sun isn’t completely shining or the wind isn’t blowing, electric sources using old batteries can help add some juice to the mix. And the batteries would also help the sources harvest more energy. 

Hyundai has reportedly already made a one-megawatt-hour test array utilizing old batteries from the Ioniq Electric and Kia Soul EV. In the near future, Hyundai wants to provide its used batteries to Wärtsilä. The latter will use its extensive network to provide those batteries to other companies in need. Apparently, Wärtsilä’s network extends across 177 countries around the world. 

In the near future, Hyundai plans to have 29 gigawatt-hours of used electric-car batteries ready for use by 2025. That figure exceeds what the stationary storage market currently has on tap, which is 10 gigawatt-hours for storage. 

“Wärtsilä through the capabilities and integration experience of Greensmith Energy, will develop a cleaner and more powerful approach to second-life battery applications for Hyundai Motor Group,” said Javier Cavada, President of Wärtsilä Energy Solutions. “Our strategic partnership with Hyundai Motor Group represents the life-cycle vision Wärtsilä strives to deliver to our customers and partners around the world. Incorporating second-life-EV batteries into our energy and integration business underscores our deep commitment to building sustainable societies with smart technologies.”