For the first time, battery storage has won agreements as part of the UK’s latest Capacity Market auction, winning over 3.2 gigawatts (GW) of contracts according to provisional auction results.

The UK’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy has published provisional auction results for the T-4 Capacity Auction for delivery in 2020/21, which concluded on December 8. Over 52 GW was awarded at a clearing price of £22.50 kW/year, including new gas generation.

However, the big news out of the provisional auction results was the awarding of over 3.2 GW of energy storage contracts, the first time energy storage has won agreements as part of the market wide auction. Specifically, four battery projects which had previously been successful under the National Grid’s Enhanced Frequency Response (EFR) tender were provided with 15-year contracts as new build generators under the T-4 Capacity Auction. These four projects are the 10 MW Cleator and 40 MW Glassenbury projects being developed by Low Carbon, a 49 MW project being developed in West Burton by EDF Energy Renewables, and the 10 MW Blackburn Meadows project under construction in Sheffield by E.ON UK.

“Our homes and businesses need an electricity supply they can rely on all year round. We’ve provided them with that certainty, at a low cost to bill payers, years in advance,” said UK Business and Energy Secretary Greg Clark. “Technological innovation, as part of our low carbon future, will create jobs and opportunities across the UK. We are rebuilding an archaic energy system, bringing forward brand new gas power and innovative low-carbon capacity like battery storage to upgrade our energy mix.

“This is about more than just keeping the lights on. A modern, reliable, and flexible electricity system powers the economy and Britain’s future success.”

Hydropower was also awarded agreements of 711 MW, though the lion’s share was awarded to gas generation.

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Europe’s first grid-scale Tesla Powerpack energy storage system installation was recently officially unveiled in Somerset (England), according to recent reports.

The new Tesla Powerpack installation was designed to store the electricity generated at a solar photovoltaic (PV) project located at the site. The energy storage project, which was developed by Camborne Energy Storage, is intended to provide enough electricity to supply for the needs of about 500 regional households if necessary.

The UK’s Energy Minister Baroness Neville Rolfe attended the recent unveiling event and stated:

“We welcome this exciting project from Tesla and Camborne. Innovation in storage technologies will help manage our electricity grid more efficiently, support greater energy security and, crucially, drive down consumer bills.

“Our upcoming industrial strategy will build on this work further, working with businesses to ensure the UK continues to be at the forefront of low-carbon technology, creating the conditions for future success.”

Business Green provides more: “The industry has been calling on the government to provide a clearer policy landscape for energy storage projects and take steps to accelerate investment in the sector. However, Business and Energy Secretary Greg Clark delivered a boost for the fledgling industry last month, delivering a speech in which he argued energy storage and smart grid technologies would play a critical role in the UK’s energy system in the future and launching a call for evidence on how smart systems should be developed.”

The managing director at developer Camborne Energy Storage, Dan Taylor, commented at the recent unveiling as well: “Camborne is pleased to have developed Europe’s first Tesla grid scale installation by co-locating with a solar farm in Somerset, England. This project is already commercially operational providing low carbon power during times of high demand. Our first co-located site is an early step in the right direction, both for Camborne and for the industry and we look forward to continuing to deliver further low carbon power to the UK.”

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Accompanying the launch of the its Powerwall 2.0 offering, Tesla will reportedly begin completely overhauling many retail locations to focus more on the energy storage side of its business.

The retail facelift will reportedly involve the installation of various interactive displays explaining how the firm’s energy storage products work in simple language.

Importantly, this overhaul will also involve a transition to the company actually taking Powerwall 2.0 orders in the store, as well as online, according to Business Insider (previously, all ordering of the Tesla Powerwall was done online).

Notably, the move closely follows the SolarCity acquisition, and likely serves as a sign of things to come. Presumably, the company will be highlighting the recently unveiled solar PV roof options at its stores soon enough as well.

The display of stylish all-electric vehicles, home energy storage systems, and solar PV roofs all in one store will lead to some nice sales synergies. As an imaginary example: someone stops in for a home energy storage system, takes a closer look at a Tesla Model 3 on display, reads/watches the information on display concerning Autopilot, and decides to put down a deposit for one. Or: someone stops in to work out the details of a vehicle purchase, and decides after looking around that the solar roof options are more affordable than they would have guessed, etc.

Business Insider provides more: “Tesla has already updated some stores in key locations across North America, Europe, and Australia. The company chose to focus the rollout on markets with the most demand for energy products, but the company plans to add its energy products to more stores in the near future.”

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It makes more sense from an economic standpoint to recycle old plug-in electric vehicle batteries than to reuse them directly for home energy storage, according to a new report from Lux Research.

The primary reason? According to Lux Research, reused plug-in electric vehicle batteries will “deliver questionable returns on account of reduced performance, limiting them to application with less frequent and shallower depth of discharge cycles.”

This echoes what Tesla CTO JB Straubel said earlier this year. Tesla has said repeatedly that it plans to recycle almost 100% of the materials in its batteries at its Gigafactory. When asked about simply reusing batteries instead of recycling them, though, JB Straubel indicated that Tesla continuously finds that this doesn’t work out as a cost-competitive approach. Here were his comments on the matter:

“We’ve looked at reuse or kind of the second life of automotive batteries for grid applications very closely, and you know, ultimately, every time we’ve studied this we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not a very economical or very good use of those assets.

“You know, by the time they come out of a vehicle that’s lived its life, the technology will be quite old. We expect 10 maybe 15 year life at a minimum from these batteries. And, you know, the degradation is not entirely linear. By the end of their life, the efficiency has degraded on every cycle, you see lower efficiency, the capacity will have somewhat degraded, and for a lot of reasons, it makes it very difficult to deploy those efficiently back into a grid setting, where you want high reliability and you do want predictability.

“So, my view is that we’ll see new batteries dedicated to that market, that also have slightly different characteristics — they should have higher cycle life. In an electric vehicle that has 200+ miles of range, you don’t need as many cycles as you do on a battery that’s designed to charge and discharge every single day on the grid. There’s perhaps a factor of about 4 or 5 difference in the cycle life — so that’s one aspect.”

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Pumped-storage hydro is a known concept. It is the largest existing form of storing peak electricity for time slots with less supply.

Now Fraunhofer has started an experiment with a new idea. According to Georg Küffner writing at FAZ,  they built a sphere with concrete, diameter of three meters. Then they immersed that into the Bodensee lake.

The idea is to have a large sphere at the bottom of some lake or ocean and use that as the lower reservoir of pumped storage.

I have no idea if that works out to be cheaper than using mountains. But it might be a good idea for small scale projects sitting right next to some wind park. One advantage that comes to mind: This would probably be fast to build and modular, so you could start out small and easily add capacity as needed. That’s one of the advantages of solar and wind projects as well, so this might be a nice fit for them. In contrast, the old concept needs to build at a large scale fixed for decades.

Anyway, just like the idea of moving mountains, I thought it was worth keeping in mind.

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While cost (down) and capacity (up) have been the focus of much of the hype around Tesla’s newly launched Powerwall 2, the US company’s addition of an inverter to its second-generation battery units could also have major market implications.

At least that is the view of Simon Hackett, seasoned cleantech investor and CEO of Australian energy storage company Redflow, which makes zinc-bromine flow batteries and whose newly launched ZCell competes with Tesla’s Powerwall in the residential battery storage space.

In a blog published on his website on Monday, Hackett argues that Tesla’s launch of the Powerwall 2 battery with a built-in AC inverter marks “a clear breakpoint” for manufacturers of home energy storage systems, by taking a leaf from the Appleplay-book of vertical integration.

“As with the Apple product ecosystem, this aims to establish Tesla as a single entry point for energy generation and storage systems in the home environment,” he writes. “Tesla has both the name and the resources to become a strong player in this realm.”

But Hackett believes that this “vertical stance” will take Tesla in the opposite direction to most of the rest of the industry, which has tended to more of a “horizontal” orientation: “a commercial ecosystem that offers choice at all layers of the energy storage system, using standardised interfaces to allow mix-and-match assembly of devices in the solution ‘stack’.”

The move also puts the company into direct opposition to its former allies, says Hackett – both existing inverter/charger vendors, that may be cut out of the Tesla solution set, and experienced energy system installers.

“The Powerwall 2 unveiling is an interesting day for inverter/charger vendors such as Solar Edge, manufacturer of the inverter of choice for the original Powerwall, which is no longer required with Powerwall 2.

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One of the top electric vehicle charging station firms in the US, EVgo, has won an Energy Storage North America 2016 Innovation Award for its Stationary Storage + Electric Charging (SSPEC) project, according to an email sent to CleanTechnica.

To explain, the EVgo SSPEC project was created to help develop ways of lowering the cost and immediate power demand of electric vehicle (EV) charging to host facilities. To be more specific, it explores the incorporation of energy storage with DC Fast Charging infrastructure.

The project used 4 BMW Group 2nd-life batteries taken from retired test fleet EVs. The batteries were used alongside a solar photovoltaic (PV) system and intelligent site power control.

“DC Fast Charging plus storage presents an exciting opportunity for drivers and charging companies alike,” stated Terry O’Day, Vice President, Product Strategy and Market Development at EVgo. “This project has the potential to shortcut some of the barriers facilities face when looking to install DC Fast Charging stations by reducing operating costs, improving charging service and convenience for EV drivers, and ultimately can help to put more electric vehicles on the road.”

The email provides more information: “For the SSPEC project, EVgo partnered with the University of California San Diego, which is recognized as one of the top 15 research universities worldwide and operates what is considered one of the world’s most advanced microgrids. EVgo worked with UC San Diego to locate a demonstration site on the campus microgrid that would also ensure the stations would be accessible to the public and which results in the chargers serving over 100 drivers per week. The project is part of the CPUC Technology Demonstration Program, a program designed to help demonstrate the benefits of energy storage coupled with public DC Fast Charging stations.”

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A Dutch startup called LeydenJar is boldly going where no one else in the energy storage field has apparently gone before. The company, a spinoff from the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands, has come up with a new version of lithium-ion battery technology that uses 100% silicon instead of graphite.

At first glance, that’s a risky proposition, because normally silicon goes through destructive cycles of shrinkage and expansion when used in rechargeable batteries. However, if the new battery can be manufactured at scale with a reasonable lifespan, the payoff is an increase in capacity of up to 50% over conventional graphite-based energy storage.

With an all-silicon recipe, the LeydenJar team claims that it has increased the capacity of the anode in its new lithium-ion battery by a factor of 10.

They managed to do that without ending up with crumbled bits of battery on the floor by applying a one-machine, plasma-based fabrication method to the anode.

The silicon is deposited onto a copper substrate in nanoscale columns, achieving a height of about 10 microns (that’s the thickness required for commercial application, according to LeydenJar).

The resulting pattern of filled and empty spaces provides enough room for the silicon to expand safely when the battery is recharged.

Yet Another Happy Accident

The team also drew on lessons learned from failed experiments in the solar field. The silicon column approach dates back at least a dozen years, when researchers at the Energy Research Centre were trying to develop the material for use in solar cells.

That didn’t work out as planned, but all that effort was not lost since the technology has been transferred to the energy storage field.

The new battery’s ties to the solar field also carry over to the manufacturing process.

The plasma-based method enables commercial-scale production of what was previously possible only in small batches. As described by LeydenJar, there is a huge difference between their one-machine, one-step process and conventional anode production.

Conventional graphite anodes can be enhanced with small amounts of silicon, but that requires “active material, binder, and other components in a capital-intensive process consisting of slurry making, a coating process, a baking process, calendering and slitting.”

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Wet’n’Wild Hawaii and Stem Inc have activated a large customer-sited energy storage system in Hawaii, connecting mutiple sites. According to a press release, the system has been supported by Hawaii’s Energy Excelerator, the Hawaiian Electric Company, and the US Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative.

As for specifics, the storage system, equaling 108 kilowatts / 216 kilowatt-hours, represents an important stage in the deployment of storage solutions, stated  Tad Glauthier, vice president of Hawaii Operations at Stem last January:

“By providing increased visibility and control of customer-sited resources, Stem is adding a new arrow to utilities’ quivers and turning a challenge into a solution. This project not only supports Hawaii’s goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045, but also serves as a replicable model for global energy companies of how today’s distributed resources can truly compete with traditional, fossil fuel-based alternatives.”

This storage endeavor is part of a three-year pilot to deploy electric storage systems at about 30 local businesses on O‘ahu, Maui, Hawaii Island, using Stem’s storage solution.

The platform goal is to help improve reliable electric service for customers of utilities with high levels of rooftop solar and other distributed energy resources. The project will be part of the U.S. DOE SunShot Initiative’s “Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV (SHINES)” to demonstrate visibility and control of edge-of-network resources.

“Hawaii’s renewable energy growth and isolated location present unique and significant challenges for local grid operators,” said John Carrington, CEO of Stem. “Utilities and regulators are watching Hawaii to determine the viability of storage-enabled grid services. We are proud to be working with Hawaiian Electric to address those grid challenges with our technology.”

Deploying its software platform, supported by real-time data and predictive analytics, Stem will work to better integrate energy storage at customer sites to help customers manage their loads and provide the Hawaiian Electric Companies with grid responsive resources. For the first time, grid operators will be able to see and manage customer-sited resources, including energy storage, alongside conventional generation resources from their existing control platforms.

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Australians are no longer able to count on revenue generated from excess solar energy feeding into the grid, so they are turning to energy storage solutions to keep excess energy for themselves.

Falling by the wayside, Australia’s household solar feed-in tariff (FIT) schemes have entered their first wave of drastic reductions as around 63,000 households in South Australia feel the first pinch. [Disclosure: This is a sponsored post from Australian Solar Quotes.]

By the end of 2016, over 275,000 solar homeowners in South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales will see their solar feed-in tariffs dropping by as much as 90 percent.

Declining FITs are Promoting Demand for Energy Storage

In September, South Australia’s FIT fell from AU$0.16/kWh to a minimum required payment of AU$0.068/kWh. Also by the new year, 67,000 solar homes in Victoria will see tariffs and net metering programs falling from AU$0.25/kWh to AU$0.05/kWh.

The biggest drop will hit around 146,000 solar customers in New South Wales. On 1 January 2017, current FITs from AU$0.60 to AU$0.20/kWh in New South Wales will fall to between AU$0.055 and AU$0.072.

Australian Solar Quotes (ASQ) CEO Darryn Van Hout notes that the previously generous FITs enabled many solar consumers to learn the basics of solar energy and PV technology.Scrapping the tariffs, says Darryn, has further promoted demand for energy storage systems.

“It’s definitely a trigger point for most consumers to look at this new technology,” says Van Hout. ASQ reports that it has seen “an increase in demand for quotes for storage batteries from buyers looking to save thousands of dollars on their bills, with the Australian market seeing around 300 homes come together to buy storage batteries at discounted rates.”

Van Hout adds, “many of the customers approaching ASQ have been solar customers coming off the New South Wales solar bonus scheme.”

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