In Chile’s last auction for power, SolarReserve bid a world-record-breaking low price at just 6.3 cents per kWh ($63/MWh) for dispatchable 24-hour solar.

SolarReserve’s CSP technology with integrated thermal storage provides 24-hour solar power, and is ideally suited for Chile’s grid with round-the-clock power needs due to its huge mining industry. To bid 24-hour solar at 6.3 cents per kWh is a world record for CSP (Concentrated Solar Power), a form of solar utilizing heat from the sun that can be stored thermally. Chile has open auctions for both fossil energy and renewables, and no subsidies.

SK: You bid Crescent Dunes in Nevada at 13.5 cents, then Redstone in South Africa at 12 cents. Your bid in Chile was 6.3 cents. How are you able to come down so low for solar that includes thermal storage so it can be dispatched any time — 24-hour solar for just 6.3 cents/kWh? 

KS: SolarReserve has made substantial advances in our technology that has increased efficiencies and brought down capital costs since our first project in Nevada.

But there are a number of other factors that influence power prices and the Chilean market appears to be ideally suited for solar thermal with storage. In addition to the best solar resource in the world, the country’s stable financial status along with US dollar denominated power contracts results in excellent financing and investment terms

Interestingly, our thermal solar bids were lower than all but one new-build natural gas project bid into the last tender. Chile has no indigenous fuels, so natural gas needs to be imported in the form of LNG, which is much more expensive than natural gas costs in the US, and is susceptible to spikes in supply pricing in the world markets.

SK: How do you ensure that you can deliver solar power around the clock? Does that require operating at something less than full capacity? [Background explainer: How CSP works: CSP with integrated thermal storage makes solar dispatchable at any hour 24 hours a day.]

KS: Our bulk storage capabilities utilizing molten salt give us tremendous flexibility, without having to consider the degradation issues associated with batteries or the replacement cost issues.

We’re designing the projects in Chile for full capacity 24 hours a day. To do that we put in about 14 hours of storage. That will give us the full capacity of the project essentially 24 hours a day.

We could design it for three times the power for 8 hours a day or twice the output for 12 hours a day, but since Chile’s load is really a 24-hour load we design the storage to handle that.

It really comes down to the design of the steam cycle and turbine capacity, the storage tank capacity, and the size of the heliostat field, which dictates how much additional power you can store when its sunny.

Click Here to Read Full Article

In May of 2016, the US Representative from Silicon Valley, Mike Honda (D), introduced the Energy Storage for Grid Resilience and Modernization Act (H.R. 5350). In short, this bill extends the current 30% Renewable Energy Tax Credit (which was just extended last year) to energy storage technologies, not just the wind, solar, and geothermal power plants that feed electricity into the grid.

This bill would help accelerate deployment of energy storage that’s already underway, and that can play a pivotal role in the expansion of renewable energy.

Here are a few ways energy storage can help.

Balancing Supply and Demand

The big change wrought by renewables is flipping the grid, from a focus on providing electricity to match demand to making both supply and demand flexible. The following graphic illustrates. Among other technologies (like pumped hydro storage, or even fast-response natural gas power plants) batteries can respond instantly to gaps in supply or demand.

Providing Reliable, Quality Power

Batteries also provide an important service called “reactive power” that maintains the grid’s constant voltage. Since the motors and devices we use depend on a consistent voltage, and traditional power plants struggle to do this over long distances, distributed energy storage means higher quality and more reliable power.

Lowering Costs

For electric customers with their own storage system, it can help them reduce costs, sometimes significantly. For many customers, electricity prices are higher at certain times of day, and charging the battery when power is cheap and tapping into it when power is expensive — called arbitrage — can reduce the cost of electricity.

For commercial customers, it’s even more beneficial, since a portion of their electric bill is based upon their highest use in any hour of the month. If the battery (typically in concert with a solar array) can shave that peak, it can substantially reduce costs.

The graphic below, from an energy management company, shows how the battery storage system was able to change the company’s electricity use. The green line with the peaks was the old usage, the blue line represents the new usage with the storage system.

Click Here to Read Full Article

A research team at Oregon State University is very excited over their new energy storage system, and not just because it is the world’s first hydronium-ion battery. They’re also excited because the new device provides a way forward to the next generation of grid scale stationary batteries that will enable the US grid to accommodate more solar and wind power.

So, A Proton Walked Into A Bar…

A hydronium ion (H3O+) is what happens when you add a proton to a water molecule. They have been the object of much study these days, partly because of their emerging importance in battery systems.

Here’s an explainer from our friends over at Quirky Science:

…the water molecule allows acids to ionize. This is possible because of the formation of the hydronium ion. This is of immense importance not only to the physical properties of the universe, but to life itself.

Okay so that’s a little over the top but QS provides a hint why energy storage researchers are so interested in hydronium:

While the hydronium ion contains the hydrogen ion in its structure, the hydronium ion itself is surrounded by yet more water molecules. This serves to spread the positive charge further, stabilizing the system to a greater extent. The number of molecules associated with a given hydronium ion can range from perhaps six to many more than a dozen.

First Energy Storage Device With Hydronium Ions

In the new energy storage breakthrough, the OSU team created a rechargeable battery with hydronium ions as the charge carriers.

The break with conventional energy storage devices is a big one. Until now, positively charged ions that are used in batteries have belonged to the metals family.

The electrode which stores the hydronium ions is made of PTCDA, short for perylenetetracarboxylic dianhydridem. That sounds exotic but it’s basically just a solid crystalline material with a lattice structure, in the class of organics (think: plastic, not metal).

OSU explains why PTCDA was selected for the new battery:

…PTCDA material has a lot of internal space between its molecule constituents so it provides an opportunity for storing big ions and good capacity.

The hydronium ions also migrate through the electrode structure with comparatively low “friction,” which translates to high power.

Here’s chemist Xiulei Ji of OSU enthusing over the potentials:

“This may provide a paradigm-shifting opportunity for more sustainable batteries…It doesn’t use lithium or sodium or potassium to carry the charge, and just uses acid as the electrolyte. There’s a huge natural abundance of acid so it’s highly renewable and sustainable.”

Click Here to Read Full Article

A research team at Oregon State University is very excited over their new energy storage system, and not just because it is the world’s first hydronium-ion battery. They’re also excited because the new device provides a way forward to the next generation of grid scale stationary batteries that will enable the US grid to accommodate more solar and wind power.

A hydronium ion (H3O+) is what happens when you add a proton to a water molecule. They have been the object of much study these days, partly because of their emerging importance in battery systems.

Here’s an explainer from our friends over at Quirky Science:

…the water molecule allows acids to ionize. This is possible because of the formation of the hydronium ion. This is of immense importance not only to the physical properties of the universe, but to life itself.

Okay so that’s a little over the top but QS provides a hint why energy storage researchers are so interested in hydronium:

While the hydronium ion contains the hydrogen ion in its structure, the hydronium ion itself is surrounded by yet more water molecules. This serves to spread the positive charge further, stabilizing the system to a greater extent. The number of molecules associated with a given hydronium ion can range from perhaps six to many more than a dozen.

First Energy Storage Device With Hydronium Ions

In the new energy storage breakthrough, the OSU team created a rechargeable battery with hydronium ions as the charge carriers.

The break with conventional energy storage devices is a big one. Until now, positively charged ions that are used in batteries have belonged to the metals family.

The electrode which stores the hydronium ions is made of PTCDA, short for perylenetetracarboxylic dianhydridem. That sounds exotic but it’s basically just a solid crystalline material with a lattice structure, in the class of organics (think: plastic, not metal).

OSU explains why PTCDA was selected for the new battery:

…PTCDA material has a lot of internal space between its molecule constituents so it provides an opportunity for storing big ions and good capacity.

The hydronium ions also migrate through the electrode structure with comparatively low “friction,” which translates to high power.

Here’s chemist Xiulei Ji of OSU enthusing over the potentials:

“This may provide a paradigm-shifting opportunity for more sustainable batteries…It doesn’t use lithium or sodium or potassium to carry the charge, and just uses acid as the electrolyte. There’s a huge natural abundance of acid so it’s highly renewable and sustainable.”

Click Here to Read Full Article

Spurred by state mandated renewable energy goals, Panasonic, Xcel Energy, and Younicos have formed a public/private partnership with the city and county to promote a microgrid centered around the Peña Station NEXT, a 382-acre transportation hub located near Denver International Airport. The Xcel Energy feeder for Peña Station NEXT already has 20% solar penetration and is expected to have 30% solar penetration by the time the microgrid project is completed in the first half of 2017.

The project will feature a 1.6 megawatt carport solar system, a 259 kW rooftop solar array installed mounted on top of the Panasonic Enterprise Solutions Company’s building and using Panasonic HIT solar panels, and a Younicos 2 megawatt/2 MWh lithium ion battery system with inverter and controls. The battery storage component will be integrated into the company’s innovative Y.Cube system. Panasonic’s Denver operations building, which has an intelligent building energy management system, will serve as the initial anchor load for the microgrid.

“We’re so excited about this ‘portfolio’ microgrid….because of how a system such as this can unlock more benefits for more stakeholders,” said Peter Bronski of Panasonic, “and how this public-private partnership approach to the microgrid and the battery system’s stacked use cases can strengthen the overall economics and value propositions.”

“Many microgrids and energy storage systems are deployed for single use cases by single entities, such as a corporation pursuing demand charge reductions or a university campus strengthening energy resilience. By contrast, the Peña Station NEXT project used a public-private partnership approach that resulted in a multi-stakeholder “portfolio microgrid.”

The battery energy storage system will have five usage scenarios:

1) Solar energy grid integration via solar smoothing ramp control and solar time shifting

2) Grid peak demand reduction

3) Energy arbitrage

4) Frequency regulation

5) Backup power for Panasonic’s network operations center

“As part of Xcel Energy’s Innovative Clean Technologies program in Colorado, we’re eager to demonstrate how energy storage can integrate more solar energy on our system. We’ll also examine how battery systems can become more cost effective by supporting the grid and providing reliability for customers,” said Beth Chacon, director grid storage & emerging technologies at Xcel Energy.

Click Here to Read Full Article

The news has been flying thick and fast about Germany-based sonnen, maker of the sonnenBatterie “eco compact” energy storage system. Billing its technology as “the smart way to capture the sun,” sonnen seems determined to race neck and neck with Tesla to fill strong demand in the US for small scale batteries with slim, sleek silhouettes.

In the latest development, sonnen has just just announced the opening of a new manufacturing and R&D center in Atlanta, Georgia. So, why Atlanta?

Another New Innovation Hub For Atlanta

The new facility, dubbed the sonnen InnovationHub, will start churning out product in April.

As an R&D facility, the InnovationHub will ramp up sonnen’s US business, which is already growing at an “exponential” rate according to the company. Here’s a snippet from Christoph Ostermann, sonnen Group CEO:

We expect that linking our US manufacturing and R&D teams in one facility will increase the rate of product innovation, and enable us to better adapt to the future needs of the high-growth U.S. residential energy storage market.

Like Tesla, sonnenBatterie is based on lithium-ion technology. One difference is that sonnnen enables its customers to dip into the community aspect of small scale, distributed energy production and storage, paving the way for the “virtual power plant” of the future:

Through its sonnenCommunity, energy independent homeowners throughout Europe can produce, store and share their own electricity. sonnen’s latest developments, the sonnenFlat-Box, which connects non-solar customers to the sonnenCommunity and grid services, and the sonnenFlat tariff, which provides community members with energy at $0 for 10 years, are changing the way energy is used.

As for the choice of Atlanta, that’s a natural. Sonnen already has a foothold in California and when it went shopping for an east coast location, Atlanta’s Midtown Alliance probably caught its eye with pitches like this:

Vibrant. Innovative. Sustainable. A community at the epicenter of life and business, urban and natural, technology and culture. Home to the city’s premier green space, historic neighborhoods and Southern landmarks. This is Midtown Atlanta – in the heart of it all.

Midtown Atlanta’s Innovation District is already a hotspot for clean tech companies and other R&D, anchored by Georgia Tech University, so there’s that.

Click Here to Read Full Article

A new report from the World Bank has concluded that energy storage capacity is set to increase dramatically in emerging markets in tandem with and enabling greater renewable energy development.

More specifically, the new report — which was authored by Navigant Research and commissioned by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, along with the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP), a global knowledge and technical assistance program administered by the World Bank — predicted a 40-fold increase in the stationary energy storage capacity in developing countries by 2025, adding more than 80 gigawatts (GW) to the already 2 GW installed.

The report concluded that by 2020, “developing countries will need to double their electrical power output to meet rising demand” and that by 2035, “these nations will represent 80 percent of the total growth in both energy production and consumption.” Unsurprisingly, therefore, to meet these needs while also adhering to global emissions reductions targets, the authors of the report conclude that “a substantial portion of this new generation capacity will likely come from renewable sources.”

“Energy storage technology will be critical in the expansion of renewable energy in remote and rural areas that lack grid infrastructure or reliable electricity supplies,” said Philippe Le Houérou, IFC Executive Vice President and CEO. “By dramatically expanding the capacity to store energy, these technologies will help countries meet their renewable energy targets, support the demand for clean energy, and help bring electricity to the 1.2 billion people who currently lack access.”

According to the conclusions of the report, deployment of energy storage across emerging markets is expected to grow by 40% annually over the next decade.

The report predicts that the largest energy storage markets over the coming decade are likely to be China and India, thanks in large part to the tremendous renewable energy ambitions of those two countries. Latin America will also represent an attractive market for the development of energy storage, as several countries in the region are moving hard toward increasing their renewable energy capacity — including Mexico, Chile, and Brazil.

Click Here to Read Full Article

A new residential energy storage pilot seeks to better understand how batteries installed in homes can be used at the neighborhood level by grid operators to absorb solar power generation excesses during the day and discharge them when needed later in the day.

A partnership between battery manufacturer Moixa, electricity distributor Northern Powergrid, and the community energy company Energise Barnsley aims to put the idea to the test with a new pilot. Specifically, 40 homes will have Moixa lithium-ion batteries installed, including 20 x 2 kWh batteries and another 20 x 3 kWh batteries.

Simon Daniel, CEO of Moixa, said:

“Solar homes with batteries can halve their electricity bills, and this solution will become increasingly popular as costs of storage and PV fall.

“We are working closely with Northern Powergrid and this project will deliver insights to develop incentives which we hope will allow us to roll out solar plus storage to tens of thousands of homes in their region, by creating a business case for homeowners to invest and also by increasing the number of solar connections allowed on each substation.”

These 40 batteries and homes will be linked into a Virtual Power Plant (much like what Next Kraftwerk is doing today but on a smaller scale) which the utility can then utilize to absorb power when solar production is peaking. Conversely, at night when the sun isn’t shining on all those glorious solar panels, or anytime demand exceeds production, the utility can tap into this Virtual Power Plant to supply power to the grid.

Most of the homes in the pilot already have photovoltaic (PV) solar installed (30 of the 40 homes) which will allow the pilot operators to better understand how residentially installed solar PV can play well with residentially installed lithium-ion batteries.

In this pilot, the batteries will be installed at no cost to the residents, with all funding provided by Northern Powergrid in an effort to support the masses of solar being deployed by Energise Barnsley.

Click Here to Read Full Article

A document created for the recent investor event at Tesla’s under-construction Gigafactory facility in Nevada recently made its way into our hands here at CleanTechnica, revealing that the company’s planned solar PV infrastructure for the facility will total 70 megawatts (MW) in nameplate capacity once complete.

Also notable is that the rooftop portion of this planned 70 MW rooftop + ground-installation will apparently be ~7 times larger “than the largest rooftop solar system installed today.”

The document reiterates the point that the Gigafactory will be powered entirely without direct consumption of fossil fuels — on-site electricity use will be provided entirely by on-site solar PV systems and waste heat recovery.

A couple of other things worth noting:

• The Gigafactory’s closed-loop water supply system utilizes 6 “different treatment systems to efficiently re-circulate about 1.5 million liters of water, representing an 80% reduction in fresh water usage compared with standard processes.”
• Work has already begun on the site’s recycling facility, which will reprocess “all types of Tesla battery cells, modules, and packs, into various metal products for reuse in new cells.”

To go over a couple of often discussed figures again, once Phase 2 construction is completed (it’s currently underway) annualized battery cell production capacity will total 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh) and annualized battery pack production will total 50 GWh.

The battery cell figures will reportedly allow Tesla to produce around 500,000 all-electric cars, according to the document. The pack production, on the other hand, relates not just to electric vehicles but also to energy storage products — so it sounds like the company is leaving things open to continue relying on third-party cells for its energy storage products if need be (if demand is too high for current production).

Click Here to Read Full Article

By some estimates, 30 percent or more of the typical organization’s non-capital expenditures are attributed to energy costs, making this line item a focal point for cost-management efforts. However, amid technological, regulatory, and political changes in the energy sector, it’s nearly impossible to predict a particular organization’s future energy costs, which hampers decision making. [Full disclosure: this post has been generously sponsored by Green Charge.]

One way to minimize risk in the face of such uncertainty is to hedge against some of the variables in the energy cost equation. Many businesses and public sector organizations are realizing that a judicious combination of self-generated solar PV and behind-the-meter energy storage can greatly reduce overall energy costs while increasing ratepayer control over those costs. To understand how, let’s look at a typical commercial energy bill.

The two main cost components on most bills are energy use charges (measured in kWh) and demand charges (measured in kW). Energy-efficiency programs address the former. Examples include lighting and HVAC retrofits, building upgrades, and renewable self-generation plants, such as solar PV.

The second component is demand charges, surcharges for maximum demand within a billing period. Demand charges can be hefty for non-residential customers, sometimes accounting for as much as 50 percent of an organization’s utility bill. Even after implementing every feasible energy-efficiency program, demand spikes will occur—and demand charges will persist. Over-reliance on solar PV can actually exacerbate the problem. A short period of cloud cover disrupting solar generation during a peak usage event can result in a very costly demand spike.

One way to reduce demand charges is to negotiate a more advantageous rate structure. However, this is only a temporary fix, since the utility may change its rate structures at any time. A less risky approach is to prevent peak usage events from showing up on the utility’s meter. This is one of the functions of a behind-the-meter energy storage system. It can sense peak load events and instantaneously discharge power to cover that demand. The utility meter never registers the peak, so it does not factor into the demand charge.

Click Here to Read Full Article