Investor-owned energy company National Grid, responsible for electricity and gas delivery in New York, Massachusetts and Long Island, will build a 5MW / 40MWh energy storage facility in Long Island with NextEra Energy.

A 50/50 joint venture between National Grid subsidiary National Grid Generation Ventures and NextEra Energy subsidiary Long Island Energy Storage Holdings will own and operate the battery energy storage system (BESS), on vacant land leased from National Grid. The joint venture company is called East Hampton Energy Storage Center (EHESC).

Located near a high voltage substation operated by the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) – the non-profit which owns the retail transmission and distribution electric grids on the island – the facility will deliver stored energy to the substation in East Hampton.

The project came about after LIPA offered a request for proposals (RfP) for “sufficient local resources to meet expected peak load requirements on the South Fork (of Long Island)”. According to documents submitted by National Grid to the State of New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC), the BESS will help meet peak load in what is a “highly constrained” area of Long Island.

LIPA selected the East Hampton battery project to provide local power production resources and transmission support to the substation. Under the RfP, the system, which will operate under a power purchase agreement (PPA) for 20 years, must be operational by 2018.

In January, state governor Andrew Cuomo approved the nearby 90MW offshore South Fork Windfarm. Once the wind farm is built, the battery facility will be used to absorb excess wind power generation, in addition to its role in supporting existing infrastructure, enabling constant energy output from the windfarm to the grid.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Developer Anesco has continued to rack up utility-scale storage work after agreeing to retrofit 10 of Ancala Partner’s PV arrays in the UK with battery units.

With a combined capacity of 12MWh, the batteries will be used to provide grid balancing and frequency response services to National Grid through upcoming tenders, although specific mechanisms – such as EFR or demand turn-up – were not disclosed.

Lee Mellor, director at Ancala Partners, said the addition of battery storage units was a “great example” of how the firm could add value for investors through “proactive management of assets”.

Mellor’s view defies other investors who have previously been pessimistic about the present investment opportunity for utility-scale battery storage retrofits, considering the technology to be too nascent and revenue streams too few to be currently bankable.

Nevertheless, Anesco executive chairman Steve Shine said it was an “exciting time” for the UK’s domestic battery storage sector.

Earlier this month Anesco announced a landmark deal with “technology-driven utility” LimeJump under which it will deploy 185MW of battery storage capability by the end of 2018.

Click Here to Read Full Article

California’s Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP), the scheme to incentivise the use of distributed energy, opens for applications at the beginning of next month, weighted to favour energy storage.

When it comes to solar, SGIP has previously been a success in the US state and is administered by the utilities Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE) and Southern California Gas Company (SoCal Gas) as well as the Center for Sustainable Energy.

The programme awards “financial incentives for the installation of new qualifying technologies that are installed to meet all or a portion of the electric energy needs of a facility”. Through to the end of 2019 a total of US$270,165,000 will be made available through SGIP to the programme administrators: just over US$117 million for PG&E, US$91 million for SCE, just under US$36 million for the Center for Sustainable Energy and US$26 million for SoCal Gas.

The biggest change to SGIP is that as of this year, 75% of funds will be allocated to energy storage technologies, and just 25% for generation technologies. Residential energy storage projects of less than 10kW will comprise 15% of the energy storage portion. When the intended budget allocation was announced last summer, GTM Research head of energy storage Ravi Manghani called it a “big win” for the energy storage industry.

The programme opens for formal applications on 1 May 2017. For residential systems smaller than 10kW and systems larger than 10kW that do not take the Investment Tax Credit (ITC), incentive levels are set at US$0.50 per watt-hour. Projects larger than 10kW that take the ITC will receive US$0.36 per watt-hour. These are just the initial figures – incentive levels will come down by US$0.10 per watt-hour once demand has exceeded available funding. If this lowered rate proves popular enough to have allocated all of its budgeted funding within 10 days, the rate drops by the same amount again.

Click Here to Read Full Article

An ambitious retrofit process

An ambitious retrofit process

Filipino renewable energy firm Solar Philippines has started construction on the first utility-scale solar project to be combined with battery energy storage in the Philippines.

It will feature a lithium-ion battery for shifting energy into the early evening and providing ancillary services to the national grid.

A Solar Philippines spokesman told Energy-Storage.News that further details of the storage technology would be announced in May, alongside other PV projects that would be using batteries.

The 150MW PV plant in at Concepcion, Tarlac, will also be the largest solar project in the country to date and the first to start construction after the government’s Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) programme came to an end, under the Duterte administration.

The spokesman said: “It aims to prove that solar is now viable in the Philippines without the FIT, and can in fact replace much of the 10GW of coal planned to be completed over the next five years.”

The project is also the first to feature ‘Made in the Philippines’ solar panels, from the newly-opened Solar Philippines 600MW solar module assembly facility in Batangas. The factory is managed and staffed by the former team of SunPower Philippines.

The spokesman added: “We envision [the] factory paving the way for the Philippines to become a leader in solar manufacturing. Its first modules will be used for our own projects, and then offered to module manufacturers as OEM capacity.

The project is set to power the equivalent of 300,000 households once completed by the end of 2017.

At the ground-breaking ceremony, energy secretary Alfonso Cusi said: “Currently, the country’s power demand is at 13,000MW and our supply is barely 14,000MW, hence we need more power as well as reserve power.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Time is running out for stakeholders offering comments to Washington’s Utilities and Transportation Commission (WUTC) on its draft policy statement regarding how energy storage is treated by investor-owned utilities’ (IOUs) in their integrated resource planning (IRP).  

The commission issued its draft document at the beginning of this month as part of a lengthy undertaking to evaluate the potential roles of mostly large-scale in front of meter energy storage in utility networks which began in May 2015.

Investor-owned utilities in the US offer up integrated resource plans to their regional regulators which outline and explain how they are preparing to meet forecasted peak and energy demand over the coming year.

The WUTC said that following a 2015 whitepaper and subsequent workshop events it had concluded that advances in energy storage and the need for decarbonisation and modernisation of networks meant the technologies had a likely role in IRP going forward. The commission determined to offer guidance for utilities to follow, leading to the latest draft policy. Respondents have until 3 April this year to respond to the 17-page WUTC policy document.

“The Commission releases this draft policy statement for comment, and requests responses from interested persons to assist the Commission in developing a final policy statement that provides useful guidance to investor-owned utilities (IOUs), vendors seeking to promote energy storage for use by IOUs, and those interested in the use of energy storage on electric distribution systems,” the draft said.

Click Here to Read Full Article

AGL has commissioned the first phase of what it claims is the world’s largest virtual power plant (VPP).

The project, in Adelaide, South Australia will be ramped up in three stage with 1000 Sunverge batteries installed across the city. The total storage capacity will reach 5MW/7MWh.

The AU$20 million (US$15.4 million) trial is one of a number of measures being undertaken to improve the security of the electricity network in South Australia. The state has been hit by price shocks and blackouts with extreme weather, reliance on one interconnection and even the large volume of renewables blamed for the problems.

“The VPP will deliver benefits for multiple groups, including: customers by reducing their energy bills; the network by lowering required capital investment to upgrade infrastructure; for AGL by providing another source of generation to deploy into the network with the balance used in our portfolio; and, the environment through reduced emissions,” said Andy Vesey, managing director and CEO, AGL.

According to the utility, customers taking part in the trial will save AU$500 a year.

Sunverge is also participating in an ARENA-backed VPP trial in Queensland.

Click Here to Read Full Article

While Germany is one of the world’s leaders in solar PV and now an early leader in residential energy storage, utility-scale energy storage is still “under discussion” and not yet a mature proposition, industry figures have said.

“The German market as far as I know is pretty much mature when it comes to residential, when it comes to utility-scale and C&I (commercial and industrial) however, to me it is still a lack of regulations and policies which [stop the market from maturing],” Dario Ciccio, global application manager for energy storage systems at global technology group ABB, told Energy-Storage.News at the Energy Storage Europe conference and exhibition in Dusseldorf.

About 50,000 residential energy storage systems have been sold in Germany in the last four years, with ABB among those showcasing a residential product at the show this week, a scalable inverter and 2kWh battery that can be configured to fit three units for a total of 6kWh, allowing households with PV systems to maximise their onsite self-consumption. Germany’s high installed base of residential PV has made it a hotbed for modest but steady growth in the home storage market. The show, which in previous years had appeared to be heavily weighted towards utility-scale solutions, featured a large number of domestic makers of residential systems, such as Solutronic and E3DC which are not heavily promoting their products outside Germany as yet.

ABB was also showcasing an energy storage inverter which can be scaled from 1MW to 100MW but Ciccio said that interest for very large storage systems seemed to be more intense from regions that included the UK, California, Texas and the PJM Interconnection market in the US and regions of Asia such as China, Korea and Japan than from Germany. While Germany has seen a number of high profile pilot projects go online at utility-scale, Ciccio said this interest appeared to have slowed, with outsiders as yet not keen to risk their money on storage at scale.

“We see that there were some major projects in Germany [that] some utilities did, today we see that it’s not really moving fast [as a sector]. The utility-scale projects are very slow, from what I see now,” Cicio said.

“The Energiewende (Germany’s ‘energy transition’) to me is still somehow… investors, are still afraid to make the investment if there is no good balance to move in this direction.”

Click Here to Read Full Article

Swedish start-up Northvolt, which is run by two former Tesla Motors executives, plans to build a huge lithium-ion battery factory in the Nordic region, giving Tesla and Panasonic’s Nevada Gigafactory a close rival within Europe in terms of size.

The Stockholm-based company’s website reveals plans for what will be Europe’s largest battery factory, standing at more than 32GWh divided into four blocks of 8GWh capacity and needing more than €4 billion investment.

The site will require 500,000m2 of land – roughly equivalent to nine football pitches – but the firm is still looking for a suitable location with hopes for making a decision by the middle of the year. Northvolt claims the project will provide an opportunity to create an “industry cluster” for experts in energy storage and batteries.

The Nordic region has been chosen for its access to clean water and energy, stable grids and educated workforce. Perhaps more importantly, the area also holds some of the critical minerals needed for the battery technology.

Northvolt was founded by CEO Peter Carlsson, COO Paolo Cerruti, Carl-Erik Lagercrantz and Harald Mix. Both Carlsson and Cerruti previously served more than four years at Tesla Motors in executive positions, with roles in the supply chain at various points.

With cost still a major barrier to wider energy storage uptake, Northvolt plans to benefit from economies of scale and believes that the world has room and potential demand for another 100 to 150 factories of a similar scale.

It stated: “Until now cost has been too high for widespread adoption. We are now able to bring costs down.”

The batteries produced will be used in electric vehicles (EVs), although Northvolt’s website touts the uses of energy stroage in white goods and for integrating renewables to the grid. The firm is currently offering supply options to customers requiring more than 250MWh per annum.

Northvolt has received external funding the Swedish Energy Agency (Energimyndigheten), Vinnova, Innoenergy, Vattenfall and Stena.

Sending out an optimistic message to industry, the company website stated: “There are strong indications that when the cost of lithium-ion batteries drops below US$100/kWh, a number of user-sectors will reach an inflection point where traditional technology is no longer cheaper.”

Click Here to Read Full Article