SAN DIEGO, May 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — NeoVolta Inc. has received approval from the California Energy Commission to connect its NV14 home energy storage system to California’s state regulated electricity grid. Approval immediately opens NeoVolta’s energy storage solutions to California’s existing 940,000 solar installations that generate nearly 17 percent of all of California’s electricity. By storing energy instead of sending it back to the grid, consumers can protect themselves against blackouts and avoid expensive nighttime ‘peak’ rates charged by the utility companies when solar isn’t producing.

California is the largest solar market in the US representing 47 percent of the over 2 million installations according to Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). The 2 million mark comes three years after installations hit 1 million, a figure it took the industry 40 years to reach. Wood Mackenzie forecasts that there will be 3 million installations in 2021 and 4 million in 2023, continuing the swift rise of solar.

“Considering the widespread growth of solar in California combined with increasing utility prices, we anticipate the demand for solar batteries to increase significantly throughout the market,” said Brent Willson, CEO of NeoVolta. “Until recently consumers have had few options for home energy storage and in many markets the waitlist for product installation is greater than 6 months due to lack of supply.”

Recently, on May 8, NeoVolta announced the closing a $3.5 million equity financing to ramp up production, expand distribution and grow market share.

Acquisitions in the energy storage sector have begun to heat up. In February, Shell purchased NeoVolta competitor Sonnen for an undisclosed sum after having led a $71 million financing in May 2018. Most recently on April 29, Generac purchased NeoVolta competitor Pika Energy for an undisclosed sum.

NeoVolta designs, develops, manufactures, sells and installs home energy storage systems and products. The company’s flagship product NV14 is a complete home energy management system, designed with a 14.4 kWh rechargeable Lithium Iron Phosphate battery, a 7,680 W inverter and a web-based energy management system with 24/7 monitoring. By storing energy instead of sending it back to the grid, consumers can protect themselves against blackouts, avoid expensive peak demand electricity rates charged by utility companies when solar panels aren’t producing, and get one step closer to grid independence.

The new Venture Capital (VC) firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) only invests in technologies they vet as both “scientifically feasible at scale” and with the potential to reduce “at least half a gigaton of greenhouse gases every year.”

Along with Alfa Laval and Concord New Energy Group, BEV has invested $26 million in early stage funding for Malta, a storage start-up incubated by X.-company (formerly Google X) to build a standalone thermal energy storage pilot.

Malta’s technology concept is simple. Thermal energy storage is charged with electricity from the grid the same way as any battery, stored cost-effectively in steel tanks and discharged as electricity back to the grid when needed later.

“We plan to build a pilot plant with 10MW power and at least 6 hours of storage duration, depending on customer specifications,” Malta engineer Sebastian Freund told SolarPACES this week. As the first step towards commercialization, Malta expects to be able to attract enough investors over the next three years to complete their 80MWh thermal energy storage pilot.

Standalone thermal energy storage
The technology is based on CSP’s long-proven low-cost thermal energy storage using molten salts. A mix of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate is heated by the sun in a CSP plant, raising the temperature from a warm liquid at 290C to a heat of 565C, with the heat driving a power block.(How CSP storage works)

Because of the low cost compared to battery storage, the idea of building standalone thermal storage is not new. The world’s largest steel producer, Arcelor Mittal has already begun to decarbonize steel making using thermal storage in slag and German research institute DLR has proposed siting thermal “batteries” of molten salt at decommissioned coal plants.

DLR’s proposed thermal storage would generate and receive and deliver power back to the grid by utilizing the former coal plants existing infrastructure: its steam cycle and transmission in and out. But when thermal storage is converted to electricity, the steam cycle in coal plants has efficiency limits in the 40% range. So Malta goes one step beyond the DLR concept of repurposing decommissioned coal plants.

Researchers have built a more efficient, more reliable potassium-oxygen battery, a step toward a potential solution for energy storage on the nation’s power grid and longer-lasting batteries in cell phones and laptops.

In a study published Friday in the journal Batteries and Supercaps, researchers from The Ohio State University detailed their findings centering around the construction of the battery’s cathode, which stores the energy produced by a chemical reaction in a metal-oxygen or metal-air battery. The finding, the researchers say, could make renewable energy sources like solar and wind more viable options for the power grid through cheaper, more efficient energy storage.

“If you want to go to an all-renewable option for the power grid, you need economical energy storage devices that can store excess power and give that power back out when you don’t have the source ready or working,” said Vishnu-Baba Sundaresan, co-author of the study and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. “Technology like this is key, because it is cheap, it doesn’t use any exotic materials, and it can be made anywhere and promote the local economy.”

Renewable energy sources don’t emit carbon dioxide, so they don’t contribute to global warming — but they provide energy only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. In order for them to be reliable sources of power for a region’s energy grid, there needs to be a way to store excess energy gathered from sunshine and wind.

Companies, scientists and governments around the world are working on storage solutions, ranging from lithium-ion batteries — bigger versions of those in many electric vehicles — to giant batteries the size of a big-box store made using the metal vanadium.

Potassium-oxygen batteries have been a potential alternative for energy storage since they were invented in 2013. A team of researchers from Ohio State, led by chemistry professor Yiying Wu, showed that the batteries could be more efficient than lithium-oxygen batteries while simultaneously storing about twice the energy as existing lithium-ion batteries. But potassium-oxygen batteries have not been widely used for energy storage because, so far, they haven’t been able to recharge enough times to be cost-effective.

As teams tried to create a potassium-oxygen battery that could be a viable storage solution, they kept running into a roadblock: The battery degraded with each charge, never lasting longer than five or 10 charging cycles — far from enough to make the battery a cost-effective solution for storing power. That degradation happened because oxygen crept into the battery’s anode — the place that allows electrons to charge a device, be it a cell phone or a power grid. The oxygen caused the anode to break down, making it so the battery itself could no longer supply a charge.

An annual highlight of the already-packed renewable energy industry calendar, Intersolar Europe brings tens of thousands of people to Munich each year to do business in the glorious Bavarian sunshine. Yet even there the sun occasionally fails to do its own business, which is a vaguely humorous way of saying that, by logical extension, the ees Europe show, representing the electrical energy storage industries, has become a bigger and bigger companion piece to the “main” event in Germany.

Of course, there will be plenty of battery and energy storage that doesn’t necessarily sit directly alongside solar, including batteries for frequency response and various e-mobility and electric vehicle and fleet solutions. Nonetheless, here are some of the products and companies we can look forward to seeing showcased this week at ees Europe. Note that this is just a small sample of what we can expect to see. It may perhaps seem a little biased towards the ‘solar’ end of the equation, but in reality, we think the overall keyword here will be ‘smart’.

Residential & Small Commercial Scale
While in economic terms it’s still considered a challenge in many parts of the world, Germany’s home energy storage market continues to deploy thousands of units each month, driven forward by falling feed-in tariffs and falling system prices. Many of the market participants in Germany will be looking now to not only consolidate their position and increase the value of their offerings in that market, they’ll also be seeking to do it internationally as well.

Hanwha Q CELLS integrates Eguana battery ahead of ‘smart supply’ launch

PV module manufacturer Hanwha Q CELLS has partnered with Canada’s Eguana Technologies, which makes its own AC-coupled home energy storage unit, Enduro. The system will be made available through the sales networks of Hanwha Q CELLS, mainly focused on the rooftop solar market.

The two have entered an exclusive agreement for Hanwha Q CELLS to market, sell and distribute Enduro into the European Union countries, Switzerland and in Norway under the Q CELLS brand. Hanwha claims it sold more than 15,000 residential units in Europe in 2018. The company has teased that it will be launching an integrated energy supply solution at Intersolar this week, so we will be watching closely.

VARTA concentrates on smart homes

There’s a focus on smart home connectivity in the launch for the second generation of VARTA’s Pulse home storage unit, Pulse neo.

French firm Voltalia has started building the largest energy storage system in French Guiana made up of two separate lithium-ion batteries.

The Mana Stockage facility with 10MW / 11.3MWh of storage is located close to Voltalia’s under-construction Savanes des Pères project within the Toco storage complex, which couples a 2.6MW / 2.9MWh battery system and a 3.8MW solar plant.

The new project was a winner in the French Commission for Energy Regulation (CRE) call for projects in 2018. In fact, the Mana Stockage faciluty represents 90% of the storage capacity awarded for French Guiana.

One battery unit of 5MW / 4MWh capacity will be used to regulate the frequency of the network, while the second unit of 5MW / 7.3MWh capacity will be used for arbitrage.

Together with the neigbhouring Savane des Pères project, the storage and PV systems are due for completion in the second half of the year

Sébastien Clerc, CEO of Voltalia, said: “Battery storage is a nascent market: it represented less than 1% of the renewables market in 2018. With the drop in batteries prices, but also in the cost of other storage technologies, the sector will experience a fast and sustainable growth. Active in the market since 2017, we continue to build an expertise on both small and large storage capacities, a strategy which will open up many opportunities.”

A new research network is being formed to create solutions for ‘urgent’ challenges in energy storage.

The Supergen Energy Storage Network+ 2019 will be led by the Birmingham Centre for Energy Storage (BCES). It aims to support collaborations and innovative research, whilst connecting researchers from diverse disciplines.

The network will primarily focus on creating an accessible map and directory of energy storage expertise to allow for greater collaboration in the industry. It will also look at mentoring early career researchers, improving diversity and inclusion and facilitating stakeholder engagement and knowledge transfer across discipline and sector. Feasibility studies will also be funded by the network.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has provided £1 million in funding for the network, which includes a partnership of 19 investigators from 12 UK institutions. A further 60 organisations both from the UK and abroad are also supporting the network.

Professor Yulong Ding, BCES director and principal investigator of the network, said: “Our aim is to create a dynamic, strategic and sustainable platform, which connects and serves people from diverse backgrounds across the whole ES value chain.

“Our aim is to create a dynamic, strategic and sustainable platform, which connects and serves people from diverse backgrounds across the whole ES value chain,” Ding added.

Navigant Research has published a new report discussing how energy storage value-added services (VASs) have evolved and contributed to the growth of the energy storage market and towards the reduced customer risks.

VASs enable energy storage projects to be bankable as consumers and investors are generally unfamiliar with the technology.

According to the study, VASs remain an important component of new energy storage projects and present opportunities for innovative companies to establish a leadership position.

In order to stay competitive, Navigant Research recommends energy storage system providers to continue to innovate on their existing VASs and maintain flexibility in their offerings to design a VAS programme to suit the needs of their customers.

Vendors of emerging technology (such as flow batteries) need to offer VASs that can reduce the perceived risk to customers by taking on the performance risk themselves.

Alex Eller, senior research analyst at Navigant Research, said: “VASs include operations and maintenance (O&M), warranties, and performance guarantees, which are collectively fundamental components of any project proposal.

“Energy storage VASs have played a fundamental role in the growth of the energy storage industry over the past decade and will remain an important component of new projects.”

For more information about the report, visit Energy Storage Value-Added Services Reduce Risk and Unlock Growth Opportunities.

BERLIN (AP) — Amid the hum and heat of Berlin’s Reuter thermal power station stands a shining contraption that looks out of place in the decades-old machine hall.

Its silver pipes and vats contain a substance that Vattenfall, the plant’s operator, says could become a key ingredient for a fossil fuel-free future.

The energy company, together with a Swedish start-up, is testing the use of salt — though not quite the common table variety — to store heat, which accounts for more than half the power consumed in Germany.

If it works well, the system could help solve a problem posed by renewable energy sources like wind and solar the world over: they are unreliable, meaning they sometimes generate too much, and sometimes too little power.

“Germany currently has enough installed renewable energy capacity to produce twice as much as it needs, it’s just not constant,” says Hendrik Roeglin, who oversees the salt storage project for Vattenfall. Rival utility E.ON recently calculated that solar and wind power generated up to 52 gigawatt hours of electricity during peak daylight hours on Easter Monday. Germany’s energy consumption at the time was just 49.5 gigawatt hours.

“With many facilities like this one, in theory you wouldn’t need gas or other fossil fuel backups,” said Roeglin.

Phasing out nuclear, coal and gas is an ambitious undertaking for a heavily industrialized country such as Germany. The government has set a deadline to shutter all the country’s nuclear plants by 2022 and stop burning coal for electricity by 2038; gas will be a stop-gap technology until a way is found to rely wholly on renewable technology sometime around the middle of the century.

The plan, known as the Energiewende, or energy transition, is being closely watched by other countries trying to figure out how to curb greenhouse gas emissions and meet the Paris climate accord that aims to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).

Experts agree that a range of technological solutions will be necessary to replace fossil fuels, some already existing and some still at the experimental phase. California-based automaker Tesla has already shown in Australia that it can provide large lithium-ion battery systems to stabilize electricity grids.

In December 2018, the Union of Concerned Scientists convened a diverse group of stakeholders to discuss the equitable deployment of energy storage. The group—which included environmental justice and grassroots organizations, policy experts, industry, labor, consumer advocates, faith groups, and renewable energy advocates—collectively developed a set of consensus principles for equitable storage deployment.

The principles—which have been signed by 26 participating organizations—are intended to help state policymakers promote energy storage, address the needs of disadvantaged communities, and avoid inadvertent harm. The stakeholders grappled with the following questions:

How can storage be deployed to reduce emissions and improve air quality?
How can storage make communities and residents more resilient to disasters and power outages?
How can storage promote local economic development and job growth?
How can storage help accelerate greater levels of renewable energy on the grid?
How can storage help reduce electricity bills?
How can policymakers ensure that communities have a seat at the table?

Download the consensus principles >

En español: Principios para un diseño equitativo de políticas públicas sobre almacenamiento de energía

The Union of Concerned Scientists convened a group of diverse stakeholders, including environmental justice and grassroots organizations, policy experts, industry, labor, consumer advocates, faith groups, and renewable energy advocates, in December 2018 in Chicago, Illinois, focused on the equitable deployment of energy storage. Energy storage is poised to expand dramatically, transforming the way we produce and use electricity. It is critical that this expansion and the transition to a clean energy economy address the needs of vulnerable residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods and frontline communities without inadvertently causing harm.

The participants developed a set of consensus principles for storage deployment that elevate the critical importance of community-led clean energy solutions. Together, these principles can help state policymakers focus on solutions that ensure that the growth of energy storage improves all communities, including environmental justice communities, communities of color, low income residents, tribal communities, and historically disadvantaged communities. Importantly, these principles are not meant to constrain organizations taking stronger positions on particular policies, regulatory proceedings, or project proposals.