Adding energy storage gives solar developers and the industry in general the ability to “keep going”, while offering both lithium and flow battery systems covers a “wide-range of use cases”, NEXTracker CEO Dan Shugar has said.

The US’ leading provider of single-axis trackers, mainly for large-scale solar PV installations, NEXTracker was bought up by multinational technology manufacturer Flextronics for over US$300 million back in 2015. The company has recently touted such milestones as reaching 10GW of global sales, including a gigawatt of sales into India, a market which NEXTracker only really began prioritising last year.

NEXTracker has launched two energy storage products that sit alongside the trackers at customer’s sites. NX Fusion Plus, a package that included NX Horizon tracker, inverter, battery and software components, was made available from late 2016, using flow batteries from manufacturer Avalon. Company sales director Ralph Fallant had told Energy-Storage.News a few months later that NEXTracker was aiming to shift around 15MW of those units per week, worldwide.

Then, late last year, the company relaunched the flow product as NX Flow and also released NX Drive, an integrated energy storage solution using lithium batteries.

“For us it’s really just that the needs now have landed there foursquare [in the] mainstream for the market,” Dan Shugar told Energy-Storage.News, about the decision to diversify the product offering to include not only energy storage but two types of battery solution.

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Trade associations NY BEST and the Energy Storage Association have been quick to applaud New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s historic setting of a 1,500MW energy storage procurement target for his state.

Energy-Storage.News reported earlier this week that Cuomo, in his annual State of the State address, had set out plans for US$200 million to be invested via New York’s NY Green Bank and US$65 million via NYSERDA in the development and deployment of energy storage projects, while the 1,500MW target should be reached by 2025.

The announcement was made along with a raft of other environmental, energy and sustainability policy measures as Cuomo attempted to set out a “comprehensive agenda to combat climate change”.

These included establishments of energy efficiency targets, moves to cap greenhouse gas emissions and limit pollution from natural gas plants, establish a solar PV programme for 10,000 low-income households and to reconvene a scientific panel on climate change disbanded by the Trump presidential administration.

Energy Storage Association CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman said her group “heartily applauded” the establishment of the target. Meanwhile William Acker at NY BEST, pitched as a regional trade association as well as a technology development group – NY BEST has its own battery testing and research facilities available to its members – said the deployment of 1,500MW by 2025 and the US$265 million investment would help cement New York’s position as a leader in the energy storage industry while contributing strongly to the state’s climate change and sustainability goals.

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Legislation proposed in Florida could see solar and energy storage become part of the go-to solution for providing energy resiliency against natural disasters and helping restore power in their aftermath.

Holly Raschein, a Republican member of the House of Representatives for the US’ so-called ‘sunshine state’, introduced HB 1133 ‘Energy security and disaster resilience program’ on 2 January. The bill calls for the establishment of a pilot programme within Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to investigate and correctly value the use of solar-plus-storage systems in preventing or coming back from energy supply and delivery problems stemming from natural disasters and other causes.

Creation of the pilot would “encourage and demonstrate the effectiveness of distributed energy generation and energy storage technologies to provide for the energy needs of critical disaster resilience facilities located in areas of critical state concern during a natural disaster or declared state of emergency,” the bill’s text reads.

Through the pilot the benefits and costs of such solutions would be assessed and valued, with key facilities such as community centres, airports, public buildings, hospitals and disaster and emergency assembly zones under particular consideration for deployment of systems.

It defines the systems to be used as solar PV systems with integrated energy storage that could offset all or the majority of a facility’s energy demand in the event of a grid outage. Systems would have to have ‘islanding’ capabilities i.e. to be able to work independently of grid, with another technical specification proposed being that the batteries on any given site are capable of powering the facility for 24 hours of backup power for critical, ‘must-run’ functions, or for five hours of the facility’s “average daily usage”. Grants would be provided towards the cost of leasing or purchasing systems that are placed to serve critical disaster resilience facilities.

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While acknowledging that the economics “vary significantly” by region and application, Navigant Research has forecast that energy storage for integration of renewables and co-located with solar or wind could be worth more than US$20 billion by 2026.

‘Energy storage for renewables integration’, a new report from the Colorado-headquartered research and analysis group, looks at the point at which the falling costs of new solar and wind generation will meet with the falling costs of lithium and other advanced batteries to converge on a ‘sweet spot’ for adding storage to generation assets.

To date, the higher value applications of batteries have been found not in their combination with solar or wind – where they could maximise self-consumption of PV or minimise the grid curtailment of wind – but in areas such as providing ancillary services to the grid like frequency response. While the huge drop in the cost of renewables has provided a driver for the addition of energy storage, the cost of the storage systems themselves still remains the biggest obstacle, authors Adam Wilson and Alex Eller said. The challenge presented in adding ever-higher shares of renewables to grids around the world means it is increasingly likely energy storage will be used as a facilitating agent.

Many factors influence the cost and suitability of energy storage for this use, including the condition, state and size of the local grid, the amount of renewable generation being added to it, local electricity rates, policies and the available options for financing. Meanwhile the industry, still in its early stages, lacks standardisation and a dearth of the aforementioned financing options, Navigant found. Complicating the picture further still is the fact that solar PV prices have dropped in some regions to the point where it would be simply uneconomical at this point to add the more expensive energy storage component.

Navigant said that while some regions have stripped back policy support for solar PV, phasing out or removing feed-in tariffs (FiTs), leading to a corresponding drop in demand from customers behind-the-meter, even some of these regions, where electricity prices are still rising, the economic competitiveness of solar and energy storage grows. The research firm also pinpointed Australia, California, New York and Germany as solid examples of regions where policy support and rising electricity retail rates have converged to see “strong deployment” of energy storage for renewables integration (ESRI).

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Changes to the de-rating factors for battery storage projects competing in the UK’s Capacity Market (CM) will push the sector towards longer-duration batteries, while potentially sparking a shift towards energy arbitrage as a source of revenue for shorter duration applications.

That is the view of storage sector participants in the UK following the announcement last Monday, which cut the de-rating factors for 30 minute duration batteries by almost 80%.

UK Power Reserve, which secured pre-qualification for 400MW of battery storage across the upcoming T-1 and T-4 auctions, has said attention will now be directed towards technologies which can be better rewarded in the CM. UK Power Reserve is a provider of electricity and related services and a developer of low carbon energy projects. 

Michael Jenner, director of policy and regulation at UK Power Reserve, told our sister site Clean Energy News: “We support the de-rating factor because the CM is designed to ameliorate stress events, so you should be rewarding assets for their ability to help reduce those stress events. The incentive now is there for investors to think about building longer duration battery storage, there’s no question about that.

“I still think there’s value in the bankable 15 year revenue of a CM even after the de-rating rates, so investors certainly won’t discount that but the incentive now is firmly there for investors to think about longer duration assets that can actually help to ameliorate a CM stress event.”

Speaking to CEN earlier this week at the Low Carbon Network Innovation (LCNI) conference in Telford, Georgina Penfold, chief executive of trade association Electricity Storage Network (ESN), added that “the writing has been on the wall for a long time” regarding the changes and that investors were already considering their options.

“The initial consultation documents did say that if it went ahead their proposal was from January and it was something we put in our consultation response. It’s not a surprise to the industry.

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Changes to the de-rating factors for battery storage projects competing in the UK’s Capacity Market (CM) will push the sector towards longer-duration batteries, while potentially sparking a shift towards energy arbitrage as a source of revenue for shorter duration applications.

That is the view of storage sector participants in the UK following the announcement last Monday, which cut the de-rating factors for 30 minute duration batteries by almost 80%.

UK Power Reserve, which secured pre-qualification for 400MW of battery storage across the upcoming T-1 and T-4 auctions, has said attention will now be directed towards technologies which can be better rewarded in the CM. UK Power Reserve is a provider of electricity and related services and a developer of low carbon energy projects. 

Michael Jenner, director of policy and regulation at UK Power Reserve, told our sister site Clean Energy News: “We support the de-rating factor because the CM is designed to ameliorate stress events, so you should be rewarding assets for their ability to help reduce those stress events. The incentive now is there for investors to think about building longer duration battery storage, there’s no question about that.

“I still think there’s value in the bankable 15 year revenue of a CM even after the de-rating rates, so investors certainly won’t discount that but the incentive now is firmly there for investors to think about longer duration assets that can actually help to ameliorate a CM stress event.”

Speaking to CEN earlier this week at the Low Carbon Network Innovation (LCNI) conference in Telford, Georgina Penfold, chief executive of trade association Electricity Storage Network (ESN), added that “the writing has been on the wall for a long time” regarding the changes and that investors were already considering their options.

“The initial consultation documents did say that if it went ahead their proposal was from January and it was something we put in our consultation response. It’s not a surprise to the industry.

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In Massachusetts, grants totaling $20 million were recently awarded to 26 projects that will develop the state’s energy storage market.

The programs are positioned to deliver benefits to the Massachusetts’s ratepayers and the electrical grid. The awarded projects will benefit 25 communities and draw in $32 million in matching funds, helping to grow the Commonwealth’s energy storage economy.

According to telegram.com, the grants were awarded as part of the Baker-Polito Administration’s Energy Storage Initiative (ESI) Advancing Commonwealth Energy Storage (ACES) program, funded by the Department of Energy Resources (DOER) through Alternative Compliance Payments (ACP) and administered by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC).

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With energy storage deployments in the US up almost 50% year-on-year, according to GTM Research analysis, the next big question for the industry might be who gets to own all of the assets.

In the latest edition of PV Tech Power, Solar Media’s downstream tech journal for the global PV industry, Jigar Shah, clean energy entrepreneur and financier says in an interview that he expects 2018 to be a year that utilities in the US start to carve themselves a bigger stake in the nascent industry.

Speaking in the ‘Storage & Smart Power’ section of the journal, which is brought to you by the Energy-Storage.News team, Shah says that many utilities in the US, that were similarly sceptical on the potential of solar PV some years back before beginning a wave of deployments and acquisitions, are increasingly seeing the value of energy storage.

“Energy storage has broken through such that utilities [in the US] admit that their value is very high, at least to a 3.5% penetration,” Shah says in the interview.

“The fight now is really about who owns the storage – I am inclined to believe that the utility companies will win that battle.”

In solar, there was a long period – still extant in some states of the US – when utilities were often accused of trying to shut down the industry, particularly rooftop PV. Having seen their retail electricity business eroded and less and less customers fully reliant on the grid, utilities were often accused by the industry and advocates of lobbying against solar through self-interest. The picture is now rapidly changing, with major utilities such as Duke Energy and California’s main investor-owned utilities all prolifically deploying renewables.

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The latest confirmed initiative supporting the restoration of power in Puerto Rico is the donation of 6MW of batteries from AES, which has suggested microgrids and large-scale solar could be the answer to long term stability issues.

The US island territory has been hit hard by hurricanes over the past few months, leading to controversy regarding various aspects of rebuilding, from Donald Trump’s twitter row with the mayor of the capital San Juan to the award of US$300 million in grid repair contracts to Whitefish Energy, a mostly unknown US company which brought an army of linemen and other subcontractors to Puerto Rico.

Amongst all of this, clean energy and energy storage companies including Tesla, Sonnen and Tabuchi America have been prominent in making equipment donations and contributing time and labour to local efforts. Energy-Storage.News was recently also contacted by PBES (Plan B Energy Storage), a company servicing the marine sector (powering boats), which has branched out into energy storage systems. PBES said it was in discussions with the governments of Puerto Rico and Barbuda “regarding the creation of resilient renewable power plants, using retractable solar panels and battery storage”.    

AES chief technology officer Chris Shelton confirmed to Energy-Storage.News recent reports that the company, one of the US’ biggest independent power producers (IPP) and an existing supplier of energy in the island territory, is making its own donation.

“We are in the process of shipping 6MW of transportable batteries in shipping containers to help stabilize renewable facilities and form microgrids where they can have the most impact,” Shelton said.

“Our goal is to deploy these resources where the power is likely to not come back anytime soon because of the damage sustained from the storm.”

According to Shelton, AES, which makes the Advancion grid-scale lithium battery energy storage platform via AES Energy Storage, will determine where the units, thought to be a megawatt each, will be deployed through consultation with regulatory authority PREPA “and other stakeholders”. Shelton said AES is committed to approaching potential communities once identified and working with local leaders.

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Construction on Australia’s first utility-scale wind, solar and energy storage hybrid project to be connected to the national grid is about to start near Hughenden in northwest Queensland.

Australian developer Windlab put out a similar release in October, but construction on the roughly 60MW plant is now due to start today. The project is owned by Windlab and its equity partner Eurus Energy Holding Corporation of Japan.

The innovative AU$160 million Kennedy Park Energy will take around 12 months to construct and is expected to be completed and start feeding clean energy into the network by late 2018, according to Windlab’s executive chairman and chief executive Roger Price.

He added: “This is an industry first that will produce and feed clean renewable energy into the grid with much greater consistency and reliability from a combination of solar, wind and battery storage. It’s also an important and valuable demonstration of how renewable energy can be used to cost effectively meet most network demand for power – day and night. We believe that this style of hybrid configuration will be increasingly used, particularly in remote locations and emerging markets, as the world transitions to a clean energy future. We are excited about the opportunities that the expertise gained from this pioneering project will present as we seek to replicate it across selected locations in Australia and Southern Africa.”

The park includes 43MW of wind, 15MW of solar on single-axis trackers, and two lithium-ion batteries. This includes 56,000 solar panels and twelve Vestas V136, 3.6MW wind turbines.

Kennedy Energy Park secured finance from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), as part of ARENA’s Advancing Renewables Programme.

Utility CS Energy will purchase the energy from Kennedy Energy Park under a 10-year power purchase agreement.

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