CHATEAUGAY, N.Y. (AP) — A massive battery storage project is in the works in northern New York.

The $30 million project is designed to help support renewable energy mandates recently signed into law by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. The law sets a goal of zero carbon emissions from the electricity sector by 2040.

The 20-megawatt project in the Franklin County town of Chateaugay will include a one-hour lithium-ion battery system to absorb excess generation for later use.

The New York Power Authority’s Board of Trustees approved $23.8 million for the project at its July 30 meeting. The board awarded the project’s contract to O’Connell Electric Company of Victor in Ontario County.

Construction is expected to start in October, with operation anticipated by June 2020.

Germany energy storage systems market is anticipated to witness growth over 3% by 2025. Increasing dependency on renewable energy sources in line with the introduction of RE targets will drive the business growth. For instance, Government of Germany has set the goal to meet 65% of its electricity consumption from renewable energy by 2030.

Japan energy storage systems market is set to exceed USD 65 billion by 2025. Widespread implementation of smart grid technologies along with the decentralization of the grid at local and regional level will drive the business growth. Surging demand for integration of solar PV plants with ESS to reduce the electricity bills and minimize the carbon emission will further enhance the business landscape.

ESS market from renewable capacity firming application will grow over 10% by 2025. Control of the ramp rate, maintenance of the variable intermittent power output of renewable technologies and output smoothening are some of the key features which will positively influencing the demand for energy storage systems over the forecast timeframe.

Global Energy Storage Systems Market is set to register USD 500 billion by 2025, as reported in the latest study by Global Market Insights, Inc. Rising consumer awareness toward energy efficiency coupled with shifting trends toward renewable energy utilization will drive the energy storage systems market size. For instance, as per the International Energy Agency, share of renewables in electricity generation is anticipated to reach 40% by 2040. In addition, increasing demand for continuous power supply and effective load management will positively influence the product demand.

Browse key industry insights spread across 490 pages with 674 market data tables & 59 figures & charts from the report, “Energy Storage Systems Market By Technology (Pumped Hydro, Electro-Chemical {Lithium Ion Battery, Sodium Sulphur Battery, Lead Acid Battery, Flow Battery, Others}, Electro-Mechanical {Flywheel, Compressed Air Energy Storage}, Thermal {Water, Molten Salt, Phase Change Material, Others}), By Application (Electric Energy Time Shift, Electric Supply Capacity, Black Start, Renewables Capacity Firming, Frequency Regulation, Other), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, China, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico) Application Potential, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2019 – 2025” in detail along with the table of contents:

https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/energy-storage-systems-market

ESS market will witness growth on account of declining storage costs along with growing consumer awareness toward adoption of clean energy technologies. Policymakers across the globe have introduced financial incentives to promote the utilization of renewable energy which has positively influenced the price of storage systems. For instance, in 2017, the Government of Italy announced 50% tax deduction for the installation of residential energy storage systems. Ongoing research and development to improve the energy density and cycle life of storage technologies will further enhance the product penetration.

Electro-chemical energy storage systems market is set to witness strong growth on account of their ability to offer high energy density and temperature stability during operation. Lithium Ion, Lead Acid, Flow batteries and Sodium Sulphur are some of the most prominent electro-chemical technologies deployed for stationary storage. Cost effectiveness, high power conversion and safe operation are some of the eminent features favoring the product deployment. In addition, technological advancement in system design to enhance the battery performance will further boost the product demand over the forecast timeline.

Renewable energy and battery storage are hot topics in the U.S. today. Lawmakers throughout the country debated various new energy policies during the 2019 legislative session. Nevada is among the states leading the way forward. Several new laws were passed in the state that will affect power companies and consumers for years to come.

Curt Ledford, a Nevada-based attorney who is a partner with Davison Van Cleve PC, was a guest on The POWER Podcast. Ledford’s practice is focused on utility, administrative, corporate, cooperative, and regulatory law, as well as general matters affecting energy developments, generation facilities, renewable energy, and Nevada’s utilities.

On the podcast, Ledford touched on several legal and legislative developments that occurred recently. Among the topics were changes to Nevada’s fundamental utility ratemaking structure and changes to the state’s open access for large customers. He also elaborated on an update to the state’s renewable portfolio standard, which requires 50% of Nevada’s energy to come from renewable sources by 2030.

In December, the Nevada Public Utilities Commission approved NV Energy’s proposal for the state’s largest-ever solar energy investment, six new solar energy resources totaling more than 1,000 MW, as well as 100 MW of battery storage capacity. Ledford talked about the company’s commitment to double its renewable energy by 2023.

Many of the topics provide examples for other states and utilities to emulate. Hear the entire interview on The POWER Podcast.

A pale orange-and-gold sunset bathes the macadamia plantations and avocado orchards that sweep down to Australia’s Byron Bay. The coming dusk is a cue for two sleek Tesla battery packs in the garage at Amileka, a secluded holiday villa nearby. They stir silently into action—powering the appliances in the five-bedroom home’s twin kitchens, recharging a $100,000-plus Model X SUV, driving a filter pump for an 18-meter swimming pool sparkling in the shade of a century-old native black bean tree.

From first light on this Southern Hemisphere autumn day, a bank of 33 rooftop solar panels has been capturing the sun’s energy. At times, the electricity is directed back to the local grid. But mostly it’s funneled into the garage and stored in Powerwall units, in the same type of rechargeable cells that fuel the automaker’s vehicles. The batteries—as tall as refrigerators, as thin as flat-screen TVs—will power this unusually energy-hungry villa deep into the evening.

But not all night. The solar array and batteries meet just half of Amileka’s average energy needs. So after a few hours, the 25-acre, $1,160-a-night miniresort that Tesla Inc. uses to promote its products must tap into the local electricity grid.

The photogenic demonstration on Australia’s eastern coast presents a vision of what some see as the most significant shift in the energy sector since the late 19th century: rechargeable batteries—in electric vehicles, homes, industrial plants, and power grids—that will make the transition to renewable energy possible.

The actual future of energy may be less postcard-worthy. It may look more like a fleet of electric school buses. And the end of utility companies as we know them.

By 2050 solar and wind will supply almost half the world’s electricity, bringing to an end an energy era dominated by coal and gas, according to forecasts by BloombergNEF, Bloomberg LP’s primary research service on energy transition.

It can’t happen without storage. The switch from an electricity system supplied by large fossil fuel plants that run virtually uninterrupted to a more haphazard mix of smaller, intermittent renewable sources needs energy storage to overcome two key hurdles: using power harvested during the day to supply peak energy demand in the evening and ensuring there’s power available even when the wind drops or the sun goes down.

Continuously falling battery costs, and rising capacity and usage of clean energy are set to result in booming global stationary energy storage over the next two decades, which will require total investments of as much as US$662 billion.

That’s one the key findings of the latest report on new energies by research company BloombergNEF (BNEF) published this week.

Energy storage installations across the world are expected to soar to 1,095GW, or 2,850GWh, by 2040, compared to a modest current deployment of just 9GW/17GWh as of 2018, according to BNEF’s latest forecasts.

Unsurprisingly, the key driver of the energy storage installation boom will be additionally plunging costs of lithium-ion batteries, which will give financial rationale to additional uses of storage and surging installations of stationary energy storage.

Costs of lithium-ion batteries dropped by a whopping 85 percent between 2010 and 2018, BNEF says, as it expects battery costs to further halve per kilowatt-hour by 2030, thanks to rising demand in two markets—stationary storage and electric vehicles (EVs).

In the energy storage report this year, BNEF has raised its estimates of global investments in storage by more than US$40 billion, said Yayoi Sekine, energy storage analyst for BNEF and co-author of the report. The other major change in BNEF’s predictions this year is that the analysts now think that most of the energy storage capacity will be “utility-scale, rather than behind-the-meter at homes and businesses.”
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Geographically, South Korea is the current market leader, but it will soon cede the crown to China and the United States which will be the two major energy storage markets two decades from now. India, Germany, Latin America, Southeast Asia, France, Australia, and the UK will be the other major energy storage installation hotspots, according to BNEF.

Energy storage is the glue that holds the renewable energy revolution together, and if the latest forecast from the firm BNEF (aka Bloomberg New Energy Finance) holds true, there are more fireworks to come. BNEF has just revised its forecast for global energy storage upward to a 122-fold increase, from the current marker of 9 gigawatts globally to 1,095 gigawatts by 2040.

By way of comparison, just last November BNEF was anticipating 942 gigawatts by 2040, though the underlying result is the same: “Cheap batteries mean that wind and solar will increasingly be able to run when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.”

There’s plenty more energy storage news outside of the new BNEF report. It focuses on lithium-ion battery technology and it doesn’t even count pumped hydro, which is by far the major form of utility scale energy storage currently available in the US and other markets.

Alternative battery materials and alternative systems like thermal energy storage and renewable hydrogen are also coming on strong, but for now let’s focus on that thing about lithium.

There was supposed to be a shortage of lithium, but the world’s top lithium producer, Australia, has been on a mine-opening tear. The second place producer, Chile, is also planning to ramp up output.

Lithium recovery from brine and recycled batteries will also be contributing to the pot.

All of this activity has already contributed to a drop in the global price of lithium in recent months, and the bottom is a long way down. BNEF foresees that the surge in energy storage installations will be fueled by a 50% drop in the cost per kilowatt-hour of Li-ion batteries by 2030, partly due to the advent of low cost lithium.

Who’s Gonna Pay For All This Energy Storage?
There being no such thing as a free lunch, BNEF notes that it will cost many benjamins for the Li-ion energy storage market to reach its 122-fold potential by 2040.

BNEF puts the figure at a US$622 billion investment over the next 20 years. That’s chump change! Just look at the US Congressional Budget Office estimate for national defense in the fiscal year 2020. It is looking at a total of US$727,569 million for just one year if you throw in the Energy Department’s nuclear programs and the Maritime Administration.

The falling price of renewable energy has been dominating the headlines, but more dramatic change is happening behind the scenes, where battery storage is disrupting the way utilities provide power.

The change is driven not just by cheap renewables and cheap batteries, but by the electronics that link them together, said Mark Ahlstrom, the president of the non-profit Energy Systems Integration Group.

“Unlike all the old spinning generators that were electromechanically coupled to the grid, these are using power electronics, computers, state-of-the-art technologies that scale really well, as we’ve seen with other industries,” said Ahlstrom, who also serves as vice president for renewable energy policy at NextEra Energy. “And it really is the digital revolution finally hitting the power industry.

“We saw it coming a little bit with wind and solar and what we’re really doing with storage is going to push it over the edge in a big way.”

In the past, utilities had to “take what they could get” from slow, inflexible fossil-fuel plants, Ahlstrom said. Their primary concern was having enough energy to meet peak demand.

Now, utilities will have abundant cheap power from renewables. Paired with batteries, that power can be deployed by computer in microseconds to ensure reliability or fulfill other ancillary services.

“What really surprised me—this is all I work on now—is hybrid projects,” Ahlstrom said at a workshop hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. “What happens when you tightly couple storage with solar PV, what you end up with of course is a solid-state computer-controlled power plant. When you really step back and think about this means, we’re really talking about virtual power plants becoming real. It’s very dramatic.”

The rise of electromobility and demand for stationary storage will drive lithium-ion battery costs down by a further 50% by 2040, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s latest Energy Storage Outlook report.

With costs for the technology having already tumbled 85% from 2010 to 2018, the business intelligence firm predicts 1,095 GW/2,850 GWh of energy storage will be installed in 21 years’ time, up from 9 GW/17 GWh last year.

By that point, China and the U.S. will dominate, according to the Energy Storage Outlook 2019 study, with significant markets in India and Germany and only slightly lower volumes in Latin America, Southeast Asia and France.

Australia, the U.K. and Japan will also have significant markets, as will current world leader for energy storage South Korea.

The role played by solar in the energy storage revolution was highlighted by BloombergNEF’s head of energy storage Logan Goldie-Scot in a press release issued by the firm to promote the report, published yesterday.

Solar-plus-storage

“In the near term, renewables-plus-storage – especially solar-plus-storage – has become a major driver for battery build,” said Goldie-Scot. By 2040, however, BloombergNEF predicts energy storage will have become a practical alternative to newly built generation assets of any kind.

In a significant indicator of the rapid rate at which stationary storage is altering the energy market, the 2019 report now predicts utility scale batteries will make up the majority of storage deployment by 2040. Until now the analysts have expected behind-the-meter batteries – whether in homes or businesses – to take the lead.

BloombergNEF also revised up the amount of investment energy storage will attract over the next 21 years, adding $40 billion for a predicted $662 billion.

The analyst has predicted solar and wind energy will supply almost 40% of the world’s energy by 2040, up from 7% today and driving demand for the energy shifting/peaking services available to grid operators through battery storage. The study also predicts electric vehicles will make up a third of the global passenger transport fleet in 21 years’ time, up from less than half a percent today.

Noting the explosion in demand for energy storage will be good news for lithium, cobalt and nickel miners, the release issued to promote the annual report made no mention of attempts to develop battery chemistries with less ecologically damaging materials.

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (SGRE), known for its wind turbines used in both large onshore and offshore projects, in June began operation of an electric thermal energy storage (ETES) system in Germany (Figure 1). The technology is designed to store large quantities of energy, using volcanic rock as the storage medium.

“The technology employs an electric heater to charge the storage and a conventional heat recovery steam cycle to discharge the storage,” Veronica Diaz Lopez, who handles external communications for Siemens Gamesa, told POWER. “For charging, electricity is converted into hot air and blown through the storage, which is filled with volcanic rocks.”

The project includes about 1,000 metric tons of volcanic rock. The electrical energy is converted into hot air by means of a resistance heater and a blower that heats the rock to 750C/1,382F (Figure 2). “In the storage the heat is transferred from the air to the rocks and stored,” said Lopez. “During discharging, the flow direction through the storage is reversed and cold air enters the storage from the opposite end. In the storage, the air is heated up by the rocks and leaves the storage as hot air. The hot air is guided through a boiler where the energy is used to produce steam. The steam runs a steam turbine, which in combination with an electric generator, produces electricity.”

The system is installed at the Trimet SE aluminum smelter site in Hamburg-Altenwerder. The ETES pilot plant can store up to 130 MWh of thermal energy for a week, and its storage capacity remains constant throughout the charging cycles, according to SGRE. The company said the plant has a generator rated at 1.4 MW that produces energy for up to 24 hours. SGRE wants to use the storage technology in commercial projects, with plans to increase the storage capacity and power output as the technology is developed. SGRE said its goal is to store energy in the range of several GWh in the future. “Currently we are planning to do the commercial rollout in the mid 2020s,” said Lopez.

“Decoupling generation and consumption of fluctuating renewable energy via storage is an essential contribution to implementing the energy system transformation,” said Andreas Feicht, state secretary at Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy, which funded the project known as Future Energy Solutions (FES). “We therefore need cost-effective, efficient, and scalable energy storage systems.”