Four months after its CEO declared to Energy-Storage.News that hybrid vanadium redox flow-lithium systems would be the “optimal” way to deliver multiple applications for energy storage, redT has delivered equipment to its first such project.

UK-headquartered redT, which makes energy storage systems based on the redox flow technology said yesterday that it has sold a 300kW / 1MWh “hybrid” energy storage system to Melbourne’s Monash University in Australia. The company said this marks two firsts: the delivery of Australia’s first flow-lithium hybrid system and redT’s first deal in the country.

CEO Scott McGregor, who has famously banned employees from defining the systems as “batteries”, instead calling them “flow machines”, said in a June interview that combining the “workhorse” properties of vanadium systems with the more high power capabilities of lithium could deliver the “the lowest cost, highest function out of the two technologies”.

The system at Monash uses 900kWh of redT energy storage, combined with a 120kW C-1 rated lithium battery, to be installed at a biomedical research and learning facility at the university. It will be paired to on-site PV generation and will help maximise the use of renewables, reducing energy costs in a country where abundant sunshine, high electricity costs and isolated grid networks have created a sort of perfect storm of market conditions for PV and latterly for energy storage.

It is hoped the hybrid system will generate both revenues and savings for the university, with plans to offer its capabilities into markets for merchant and contracted grid services in future. It is being integrated into a university-wide microgrid project, which is being deployed in partnership with Monash Energy Materials and Systems Institute (MEMSI). Under that project, the reliability and stability of the local grid is being boosted by the integration of renewables and there is also intent to create a peer-to-peer energy trading network using the microgrid.

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Battery vendors are being hit by a combination of rising prices for raw materials and continuing currency uncertainty, resulting in rapidly changing costs for businesses according to Easystart.

The lead acid battery supplier has reported a recent 30% increase in the cost of producing its products as a result of a higher cost for lead and fluctuations associated with global currencies.

With Brexit continuing to cast a long shadow over all industries alongside the impact of President Trump, the company has experienced a swing of up to 5% in its costs in some weeks. However, Easystart has said it was no choice to accept these variations as part of its businesses instead of passing on the continually changing costs to consumers.

“There’s absolutely nothing to do about it,” a company spokesperson said at Solar & Storage Live, Solar Media’s three-day dedicated exhibition and conference taking place in Birmingham, England, this week.

He added that the UK business was also still subject to the effects of last year’s feed-in tariff cuts, which have put the demand and interest in home storage back to levels seen in 2015, suggesting little progress has been made in boosting the residential market for battery storage.

However, the spokesperson said that while Easystart has little visibility on the applications its range of gel batteries are used for, its customers are purchasing larger quantities suggesting they are expecting business to pick up going forward.

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Four months after its CEO declared to Energy-Storage.News that hybrid vanadium redox flow-lithium systems would be the “optimal” way to deliver multiple applications for energy storage, redT has delivered equipment to its first such project.

UK-headquartered redT, which makes energy storage systems based on the redox flow technology said yesterday that it has sold a 300kW / 1MWh “hybrid” energy storage system to Melbourne’s Monash University in Australia. The company said this marks two firsts: the delivery of Australia’s first flow-lithium hybrid system and redT’s first deal in the country.

CEO Scott McGregor, who has famously banned employees from defining the systems as “batteries”, instead calling them “flow machines”, said in a June interview that combining the “workhorse” properties of vanadium systems with the more high power capabilities of lithium could deliver the “the lowest cost, highest function out of the two technologies”.

The system at Monash uses 900kWh of redT energy storage, combined with a 120kW C-1 rated lithium battery, to be installed at a biomedical research and learning facility at the university. It will be paired to on-site PV generation and will help maximise the use of renewables, reducing energy costs in a country where abundant sunshine, high electricity costs and isolated grid networks have created a sort of perfect storm of market conditions for PV and latterly for energy storage.

It is hoped the hybrid system will generate both revenues and savings for the university, with plans to offer its capabilities into markets for merchant and contracted grid services in future. It is being integrated into a university-wide microgrid project, which is being deployed in partnership with Monash Energy Materials and Systems Institute (MEMSI). Under that project, the reliability and stability of the local grid is being boosted by the integration of renewables and there is also intent to create a peer-to-peer energy trading network using the microgrid.

“Why you would look at hybrid is if you think of the flow machine as your workhorse, it’ll do 60%-80% of the work, it’s really boring, just sit there pumping energy and liquid all the way round many times a day, it will never degrade and you want to utilise that as much as you can,” McGregor had said earlier in the year in explaining the appeal and potential strengths of the hybrid concept.

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In mid-2017, IKEA announced that it would be ‘launching’ a battery storage offering to sell alongside its solar panels in the UK. The week previous to this announcement, Siemens – another household name – announced that it would be joining forces with AES to create Fluence, a company focusing on the global energy storage industry.

The press release by IKEA was viewed by many in the industry as a big deal, with many excited that such a well-known consumer brand could be ready to push storage into the UK market.

But in a world where energy storage will play an increasingly important role – in balancing renewables, reinforcing the network, and reducing energy costs – how important will ‘brand’ be?

Brand will be important for the following three reasons:

• Confidence in the product is paramount to protect a well-known brand:

Despite the fanfare around the announcement, storage and PV wasn’t a completely new offering for IKEA. The company had been offering storage with its PV systems for some time to any customers who requested it. The company had been soft trialling the products for a while before making any big announcement. The IKEA brand has been built up over more than 70 years and companies of this size and heritage don’t risk it over what will be initially an extremely niche offering (IKEA sells one of its BILLY bookshelves every three seconds with one-tenth of furniture purchased in Britain coming from IKEA).

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Senator Martin Heinrich has proposed granting tax relief for purchasers of energy storage systems, in a similar way to how the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) is applied to residential solar PV purchases.

Heinrich, democratic senator for the state of New Mexico, along with Minnesota’s Al Franken, also a democrat, last week introduced S.1851, a bill in Congress to create research and demonstration programmes for energy storage systems. Heinrich, with Franken as co-sponsor, also that week introduced S.1868, “a bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide tax credits for energy storage technologies, and for other purposes”.

At present in the US, the only nationwide, federal support scheme applied to purchases of energy storage systems is the solar ITC, which gives consumers the right to claim back 30% of the cost of installing a PV system from federal taxes. The ITC is applied to both residential and commercial and industrial (C&I) systems. However, at present, the tax credits are only available for energy storage system purchases if installed at the same time that a solar PV system is being deployed.

Heinrich’s bill, which is also known under the abbreviated title “Energy Storage Tax Incentive and Deployment Act of 2017”, has been read twice and now referred to the Senate’s Committee on Finance. The bill was first floated in mid-2016, where it gained support from both Democrat and Republican senators. There are separate provisions for providing an ‘Energy credit’, defined by the internal revenue code as “the energy percentage of the basis of each energy property placed in service during such taxable year” and for residential energy efficiency measures on private properties.

The bill’s ‘Energy credit’ definition would include energy storage equipment from batteries to mechanical energy storage with compressed air, pumped hydropower, hydrogen storage, fuel cells, thermal energy storage, flywheels, capacitors, superconducting magnets and any other applicable technologies. Systems must however have a capacity of 5kWh or above. For the residential energy efficiency tax credit, systems would have to be 3kWh capacity or over.

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SaltX Technology and Vattenfall have signed off on a Letter of Intent to lead a pilot program based on SaltX’s large-scale energy storage technology — EnerStore.

The pilot project will be developed in one of Vattenfall’s district heating networks and will be used to verify SaltX EnerStore technology in full-scale. The project is expected to start in the second half of 2017 — with the first phase expected to run for 18 months.

Sweden’s leading technology consultant – Sweco – will perform the project engineering of the pilot plant, while Stockholm University will lead the validation measurements and performance tests.

Karl Bohman, CEO of SaltX Technology, said: “Vattenfall is the perfect match for us and has the resources and extensive experience to make this pilot project a success. Their technical skills and commercial verification will be very valuable as we launch EnerStore on the market.”

Vattenfall will host the pilot plant and support the operation and maintenance of the pilot project.

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Duke Energy announced plans to install North Carolina’s two largest battery storage systems — which stands as a US$30 million investment as part of Duke Energy’s Western Carolinas Modernisation Plan.

Robert Sipes, vice president of Western Carolinas Modernisation for Duke Energy, said: “Duke Energy has experience with many battery storage projects around the nation. Western North Carolina is an ideal spot to use this technology to serve remote areas, or where extra resources are needed to help the existing energy infrastructure.”

The two sites are just the first part of a larger plan Duke Energy has to spur energy storage in the region.

A 9MW lithium-ion battery system will be developed in the city of Asheville and placed at a Duke Energy substation. The battery will primarily be used to help the electric system operate more efficiently by providing energy support to the electric system, including frequency regulation and other grid support services.   

The other energy storage system will be a 4MW lithium-ion battery system that will help improve electric reliability in the town of Hot Springs, located in Madison County.

Further details on the projects will be filed with the North Carolina Utilities Commission in early 2018. Both projects are expected to be online in 2019.

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While lithium-ion is rapidly racing ahead to become the “de facto grid storage solution” and is the most popular technology choice by far, vendors of other types of batteries are also targeting the market, with varying degrees of success.

US firm Navigant Research published ‘Navigant Research Leaderboard: Non-lithium ion batteries for grid storage’,  earlier this month, examining the technologies, business models and strategies for commercialisation and larger scale production of energy storage batteries that sit outside the many different sub-chemistries making up the lithium battery market ecosystem.

Lithium remains by far the most popular technology in energy storage. A recent edition of GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association’s jointly-published US Energy Storage Monitor, which gives quarterly updates on deployment figures, notable projects, market design and policies, found 94.2% of energy storage systems installed in Q2 2017 in the US used lithium batteries. Around 5% of the remainder were flow battery projects and a further 0.5% used lead acid.

While that percentage was in fact the first time since 2015 that lithium-ion battery systems had been found by GTM to have less than 95% market share, the lead looks all but unassailable. Indeed, even in longer duration applications of up to four or five hours, as one expert from IHS Market recently told Energy-Storage.News, lithium batteries are starting to have fallen enough in price to make sense.

According to Navigant, the speed at which costs of production fall and the presence of reputable, renowned vendors in the lithium battery space are its key advantages. However, as the ‘Leaderboard’ report shows, there are numerous companies making other types of battery energy storage that have reached commercialisation of their technologies and are already deploying them in the field, although still at the pilot stage in some cases. 

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While lithium-ion is rapidly racing ahead to become the “de facto grid storage solution” and is the most popular technology choice by far, vendors of other types of batteries are also targeting the market, with varying degrees of success.

US firm Navigant Research published ‘Navigant Research Leaderboard: Non-lithium ion batteries for grid storage’,  earlier this month, examining the technologies, business models and strategies for commercialisation and larger scale production of energy storage batteries that sit outside the many different sub-chemistries making up the lithium battery market ecosystem.

Lithium remains by far the most popular technology in energy storage. A recent edition of GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association’s jointly-published US Energy Storage Monitor, which gives quarterly updates on deployment figures, notable projects, market design and policies, found 94.2% of energy storage systems installed in Q2 2017 in the US used lithium batteries. Around 5% of the remainder were flow battery projects and a further 0.5% used lead acid.

While that percentage was in fact the first time since 2015 that lithium-ion battery systems had been found by GTM to have less than 95% market share, the lead looks all but unassailable. Indeed, even in longer duration applications of up to four or five hours, as one expert from IHS Market recently told Energy-Storage.News, lithium batteries are starting to have fallen enough in price to make sense.

According to Navigant, the speed at which costs of production fall and the presence of reputable, renowned vendors in the lithium battery space are its key advantages. However, as the ‘Leaderboard’ report shows, there are numerous companies making other types of battery energy storage that have reached commercialisation of their technologies and are already deploying them in the field, although still at the pilot stage in some cases. 

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With grid-connected energy storage a relatively new technology, stakeholders are yet to fully understand many of the risks and business opportunities it presents, DNV GL’s Dr Martijn Huibers has said.

Huibers, business leader in energy storage for the accreditation and certification house, writes in the latest edition of PV Tech Power that diverse aspects of the energy storage business, from using grid-scale energy storage to tackle multiple applications, sizing a system correctly and mitigating risks around battery degradation are all relatively new issues that the industry is learning to navigate.

DNV GL published GRIDSTOR, a recommended practice guide for energy storage technologies and applications, in early 2016, with an updated version due out this quarter. With eight industry stakeholders and 36 reviewing parties contributing to the so-called ‘Joint industry project’, DNV GL claims GRIDSTOR is aimed at creating a “common language” for discussing technical and safety standards.

Volume 12 of PV Tech Power, Solar Media’s technical journal for the downstream sector of the solar PV industry, features Storage & Smart Power, a dedicated section brought to you in association with Energy-Storage.News. ESN commissioned Huibers and colleague Paul Raats, a DNV GL senior solar energy consultant, to write about and shed light on how GRIDSTOR helps stakeholders get to grips with the fast-emerging sector.

There are over 200 guidance documents of various kinds around the world that can be applied to grid-scale energy storage systems or components, Huibers points out in the article, but GRIDSTOR is the first concerted attempt to be a “single comprehensive standard that covers all relevant aspects”, aimed at utilities, investors, developers and others.

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