Turnkey energy storage system provider Demand Energy has commissioned a solar-plus-storage microgrid in Costa Rica at a medical manufacturing facility.

The company, which has also recently announced a microgrid at a low-income housing complex in New York for utility Con Edison, has already completed the 500kW/1MWh battery storage system at Establishment Labs’ facilities. It is paired with a 276kW solar PV array.

Demand Energy worked with Rio Grande Renewables, a US-headquartered company with a track record of developing a handful of projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. The microgrid provides multiple services, which include assisting the grid. Behind-the-meter it reduces peak demand and ‘smoothes’ out variable solar energy output for effective onsite self-consumption as well as being a source of backup power in the case of outages.

The microgrid, claimed to be the largest in Central America, runs on Demand Energy’s Distributed Energy Network Operating System (DEN.OS), which will also be used for the New York microgrid. It will enable Establishment Labs to cut power costs through peak power reduction while maintaining stability of supply – essential for the facility’s manufacturing processes. It will also enable Establishment Labs to reduce its reliance on diesel.

“The system eliminates the stranded costs of traditional diesel generators while offering a healthy return on investment through optimizing renewable solar generation, which drives a reduction in GHG emissions that supports Costa Rica’s goal to be the world’s first carbon-neutral country,” Shane Johnson, vice president of operations for Demand Energy said.

“This new generation of microgrid technologies is a game-changer in the region,” Rio Grande Renewables’ president Brian J Schmidly said.

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The cost of energy storage technologies is set to reduce significantly over the next five years driven by economies of scale and improvements in both technology and standardisation, according to a new report from financial advisory and asset management firm Lazard.

The second of Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Storage Analysis compares the costs of various energy storage technologies in detail across different segments in terms of capital cost and LCOE. The analysis was conducted with support from Enovation Partners.

The cost reductions will also be pushed forward by increased demand as regulatory environments improve, the penetration of renewables increases, and as ageing grids begin to need more support.

More demand for energy storage will also result in enhanced manufacturing scale. Meanwhile, the increasing deployment of both renewables and storage will create a mutually beneficial growth cycle where one technology’s success supports the other.

However, the extent of cost reductions in the five-year period has seen a mix of projections. Lazard cited some industry members forecasting lithium, flow and lead battery capital cost declines of around 40%. Lazard said cost reductions for lithium are already well underway since last year.

Ultimately it will be manufacturing and engineering improvements in batteries rather than balance of system (BOS) costs that drive the cost reductions.

Another key takeaway from Lazard was that some technologies are increasingly attractive for a number of specialised power grid uses, but not all uses are economically attractive right now. The main use at present is to strengthen the power grid through frequency regulation, transmission and distribution investment deferral. Another main use is to reduce energy bills for commercial and industrial energy users.

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The cost of energy storage technologies is set to reduce significantly over the next five years driven by economies of scale and improvements in both technology and standardisation, according to a new report from financial advisory and asset management firm Lazard.

The second of Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Storage Analysis compares the costs of various energy storage technologies in detail across different segments in terms of capital cost and LCOE. The analysis was conducted with support from Enovation Partners.

The cost reductions will also be pushed forward by increased demand as regulatory environments improve, the penetration of renewables increases, and as ageing grids begin to need more support.

More demand for energy storage will also result in enhanced manufacturing scale. Meanwhile, the increasing deployment of both renewables and storage will create a mutually beneficial growth cycle where one technology’s success supports the other.

However, the extent of cost reductions in the five-year period has seen a mix of projections. Lazard cited some industry members forecasting lithium, flow and lead battery capital cost declines of around 40%. Lazard said cost reductions for lithium are already well underway since last year.

Ultimately it will be manufacturing and engineering improvements in batteries rather than balance of system (BOS) costs that drive the cost reductions.

Another key takeaway from Lazard was that some technologies are increasingly attractive for a number of specialised power grid uses, but not all uses are economically attractive right now. The main use at present is to strengthen the power grid through frequency regulation, transmission and distribution investment deferral. Another main use is to reduce energy bills for commercial and industrial energy users.

The report stated: “Energy storage appears most economically viable in use cases that require relatively greater power capacity and flexibility as opposed to energy density or duration.”

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China’s deployment of energy storage looks set to continue an upward trajectory, with almost 600MW in the pipeline as of the third quarter this year.

According to figures released by the China Energy Storage Alliance (CNESA), 14 new projects were announced in Q3 2016 totalling 587MW. This includes projects that are in planning stages, under construction and that have gone online in the quarter. This appears to represent a significant boost to the sector, and is a vast 586% increase on the same period of last year. Up until the beginning of the quarter, CNESA found, 170.6MW of energy storage was in operation in the country.  

The bulk of this large figure is contributed by a single project, a touted 400MW supercapacitor storage station with storage duration of four hours in Guazhou County, in the northern Gansu province, a couple of hundred kilometres south of the border with Mongolia. This project will be used to demonstrate the use of storage in preventing wind power capacity curtailment on a microgrid. The project, by Shidai Jiahua Co, requires US$680 million in investment and has an expected payback time of 16 to 18 years.

There was also a 160MW local government project in Inner Mongolia, another microgrid to be used for renewables integration. The local authority of Xilin Gol, one of Inner Mongolia’s 12 sub-divided regions, is keen to trial retail sales of electricity from independent suppliers and this project represents a major step forward in this regard.

While these two huge projects are in northwestern regions of China, Jiangsu in the east will get some significant new projects including a 1.5MW/12MWh project from partners including battery maker Narada Power, inverter maker Sungrow and project developer GCL Power, which is an arm of one of China’s biggest PV groups, GCL Poly. Narada Power was also involved in a 15MW/120MWh project in Jiangsu’s Wuxi City Xingzhou Industrial Park.

Overall, renewables integration appears to be the biggest application driver for energy storage in China, as seen in the diagram below. While big announcements were plentiful, only 1.5MW of storage actually came online in Q3, which was nonetheless a 50% increase on the same period of 2015.

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An Arizona scheme to study the use of energy storage and smart inverters in integrating solar to the grid has contracted the deployment of 4MW of AES Energy Storage’s lithium battery systems.

While regulators in the state are poised to rule next week on the value of solar to the network and consumers, ending what Energy-Storage.News’ solar sister site PV Tech reported today amounts to “years of drawn-out discourse”, execution of this project, for utility Arizona Public Service (APS) is already underway.

The 4MW of storage will be deployed as two separate 2MW installations of AES’ Advancion energy storage systems. They will form part of APS’ ongoing ‘Solar Partner Program’, which evaluates the possibilities for integrating a high penetration of PV on the grid.

The utility has already put 10MW of PV onto more than 1,500 customers’ rooftops through the programme. Participants receive a US$30 monthly bill credit for 20 years and do not have to pay for panels themselves. APS claims this will help inform them and other utilities around the country on how smart inverters and storage can play a part in lowering emissions, maintaining reliability of the system and best manage peak demand while renewable energy assets increase their share of generation.

‘The best renewable energy is the type a customer never thinks about’

AES’ Advancion systems will be located in the cities of Surprise and Buckeye and will be used to keep electricity service reliable and to meet times of high demand and high electricity prices. They will be among the first Advancion systems to be under utility ownership, with AES having opened up the platform to third-party ownership in 2015. There are some 120 customers with PV installed through the APS Solar Partner Program in the two cities.

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An open fund for solar energy and energy storage in various emerging markets has been launched by Franck Constant, the co-founder of Sonnedix Group and director of Sithe Pacific, Energy-Storage.News’ sister site PV Tech revealed today.

The new fund named ‘Constant Energy’ aims to reach US$100 million by the end of 2017 and while predominantly aimed at solar, it will have 20% focused on energy storage, Constant told PV Tech at the Solar & Off-Grid Renewables event in Bangkok.

Target nations in Asia include Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Korea, Taiwan, as well as selected African markets such as South Africa and possibly Kenya, depending on how the market evolves. Several of these countries have had regulation and policies favourable to PV deployment evolve at a slower pace to neighbours.

Nevertheless, Constant said: “A lot of these countries already have a tradition of private power generation in the conventional space. It’s only a matter of time before they are moving to private power generation in the solar space.”

To date, only a few funds have specifically focused on both solar and energy storage.

Constant added: “Storage is today where solar was nine years ago when we started Sonnedix. Probably as a first step, I expect it will be a combined solution, where we get land, we have a solar plant, and we add storage to improve the dispatch of the solar plant or to support the grid, like we have done in Puerto Rico in the past.”

Constant also expects a rise in standalone energy storage systems as has been seen in the UK – adding: “With this fund we want really to surf the wave of storage and I think it is coming to countries like Japan over the next few years. It is coming to countries like Indonesia, or some fragmented grids like in Cambodia. We want to do that.”

Isolated grids, as are common in Cambodia or across the multiple islands of Indonesia, are also “fertile ground” for storage .

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Zinc-air battery-based energy storage system maker Fluidic Energy has received US$20 million in investment for projects in Southeast Asia from a private equity fund which includes the Asian Development Bank as a partner.

Asia Climate Partners (ACP), the private equity fund which has invested in Fluidic, includes Japanese financial services company ORIX and Dutch asset management firm Robeco – which is also owned by ORIX – as joint venture partners alongside the Asian Development Bank.

Headquartered in Arizona, USA, with production facilities in Indonesia, Fluidic claims its batteries are made with low cost, non-toxic materials. The company is particularly keen to target remote applications such as telecoms towers and off-grid and microgrid rural electrification projects.

Fluidic claims to have installed more than 100,000 batteries already, including 22MWh at 96 solar-plus-storage projects in the Indonesian archipelago which serve more than 100,000 people. Following the signing of an MoU earlier this year, Fluidic is also deploying some 45MWh to rural Madagascar, enabling more than 400,000 people to have access to energy. The company has also signed an agreement with heavy machinery maker Caterpillar for solar-plus-storage projects and was selected as a supplier to US utility Duke Energy’s first “non-demonstration” microgrid earlier this month.

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The US energy regulator has opened a consultation process on the integration of energy storage into a competitive market structure.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said it wanted “to more effectively integrate electric storage resources into organised wholesale markets to enhance competition and help ensure that these markets produce just and reasonable rates”.

It has circulated a proposal and requested input from the country’s six regional transmission organisations (RTO) and independent system operators (ISO).

The proposal would require each RTO and ISO to alter their tariff structure in order to recognise the specific characteristics of energy storage resources and classify storage operators in a way that enables their participation in wholesale energy markets.

“Today’s announcement is a major step forward in transforming America’s power sector, and FERC’s action lays the foundation for competitive markets where energy storage and distributed energy resources are considered side-by-side with traditional grid assets,” said Matt Roberts, executive director of the Energy Storage Association.

“Regulatory and market certainty is paramount for our emerging industry, and the outcomes of this rulemaking will undoubtedly fuel continued energy storage growth – bringing even more jobs and investment in the advanced energy economy, and accelerating our transition to a more resilient, flexible, and sustainable grid,” he added.

The public have 60 days from the date of publication to respond. FERC began working with network operators in the spring.

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The US energy regulator has opened a consultation process on the integration of energy storage into a competitive market structure.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said it wanted “to more effectively integrate electric storage resources into organised wholesale markets to enhance competition and help ensure that these markets produce just and reasonable rates”.

It has circulated a proposal and requested input from the country’s six regional transmission organisations (RTO) and independent system operators (ISO).

The proposal would require each RTO and ISO to alter their tariff structure in order to recognise the specific characteristics of energy storage resources and classify storage operators in a way that enables their participation in wholesale energy markets.

“Today’s announcement is a major step forward in transforming America’s power sector, and FERC’s action lays the foundation for competitive markets where energy storage and distributed energy resources are considered side-by-side with traditional grid assets,” said Matt Roberts, executive director of the Energy Storage Association.

“Regulatory and market certainty is paramount for our emerging industry, and the outcomes of this rulemaking will undoubtedly fuel continued energy storage growth – bringing even more jobs and investment in the advanced energy economy, and accelerating our transition to a more resilient, flexible, and sustainable grid,” he added.

The public have 60 days from the date of publication to respond. FERC began working with network operators in the spring.

Click Here to Read Full Article

The US energy regulator has opened a consultation process on the integration of energy storage into a competitive market structure.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said it wanted “to more effectively integrate electric storage resources into organised wholesale markets to enhance competition and help ensure that these markets produce just and reasonable rates”.

It has circulated a proposal and requested input from the country’s six regional transmission organisations (RTO) and independent system operators (ISO).

The proposal would require each RTO and ISO to alter their tariff structure in order to recognise the specific characteristics of energy storage resources and classify storage operators in a way that enables their participation in wholesale energy markets.

“Today’s announcement is a major step forward in transforming America’s power sector, and FERC’s action lays the foundation for competitive markets where energy storage and distributed energy resources are considered side-by-side with traditional grid assets,” said Matt Roberts, executive director of the Energy Storage Association.

“Regulatory and market certainty is paramount for our emerging industry, and the outcomes of this rulemaking will undoubtedly fuel continued energy storage growth – bringing even more jobs and investment in the advanced energy economy, and accelerating our transition to a more resilient, flexible, and sustainable grid,” he added.

The public have 60 days from the date of publication to respond. FERC began working with network operators in the spring.

The latest proposal is available online.

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