WESTBOROUGH, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–NEC Energy Solutions announced today the completion of an energy storage system for Consumers Energy.

The NEC energy storage solution, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, includes two independent 280kW/340kWh DSS® energy storage systems and NEC’s proprietary AEROS® controls software. The energy storage system will enable Consumers Energy to investigate how energy storage can be used to avoid further system upgrades, smooth renewable energy production and support load/energy management. The storage system has been designed with the flexibility to increase the energy capacity to 1MWh or more.

The NEC energy storage system is located within Circuit West, a 13-block district on Grand Rapids’ west side where Consumers Energy is installing innovative electricity generation and distribution in a neighborhood with new, energy-efficient building construction.

“Today, there is very little storage on the grid, so electricity is generated just moments before you use it,” said Garrick Rochow, Consumers Energy’s senior vice president of operations. “With large batteries like NEC’s energy storage solution, we will make our grid more efficient, effective and sustainable. It’s a critical part of Michigan’s energy future and it’s happening here at Circuit West.”

“As the market for energy storage continues to grow, more customers are entering the market to test the viability of energy storage in their own applications. We know the many benefits of energy storage having been in the business for more than 12 years but it’s also common for customers new to storage to initially take a pilot approach,” said Steve Fludder, CEO for NEC Energy Solutions. “We are happy to be working with Consumers Energy on test projects like this and we anticipate this will lead to greater deployment of valuable storage across their service territory.”

The DSS® platform is scalable from 85kWh to 600kWh of energy storage capacity and offers from 100kW up to 710kW of power capability. As a standardized, UL safety-certified, AC-ready system including power conversion system, the DSS® product is preconfigured in outdoor-rated enclosures, compliant with all relevant regulatory and environmental requirements and is backed by up to a 10 year product warranty.

Energy democracy includes a vision of individual empowerment, while existing within and being a contributing member of our broader human society. Customer-sited solar electricity and energy storage exactly fits into this philosophy.

The California Solar and Energy Storage Association (CALSSA) released a white paper, Barriers to Maximizing the Value of Behind-the-Meter Distributed Energy Resources (14-page pdf), detailing legislative barriers that prevent customer-sited solar and storage from maximizing its potential as a grid resource. The document suggests solar+storage can provide numerous values to the electric grid – including energy, system capacity, local generation and distribution capacity, voltage support, and other ancillary services.

CALSSA discusses five main barriers in the document:

• Program Participation Exclusions in Utility Solicitations
• Prohibitions on Participating in Multiple Utility Programs
• Dual Participation Limits in Demand Response Programs
• Capacity Credit Limitations and Availability Requirements in Demand Response Programs
• Lack of Clarity in Demonstrating Incrementality vis-à-vis DER Adoption Forecasts

The document then focuses on specific pieces of legislation and procurement processes, and suggests refinements to those laws. For instance, regarding energy storage resources participating in multiple utility programs, CALSSA notes that Resolution E-4889 suggests that the California Public Utilities Commission supports that participation in another program, such as Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP), demand response, or net energy metering should not preclude participation in a distribution services solicitation, as long as the bidder can show that the system will be operated in a way that provides an incremental service. Other laws support this logic also, however, CALSSA notes that solicitations for local capacity continue to include categorical exclusions. CALSSA suggests The CPUC should clarify that the intent of Resolution E-4889 is to allow for participation in other programs and should explicitly extend this provision to cover new resources as well.

Sodium sulfur (NAS) batteries produced by Japan’s NGK Insulators are being put into use on a massive scale in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

The company’s battery systems have been deployed across 10 locations – 15 systems in total – adding up to 108MW / 648MWh in total, with each system able to store energy for six hours. The total undertaking includes 12 x 4MW systems and three 20MW systems. The official government Emirates News Agency described the project as the “world’s largest Virtual Battery Plant” as it opened earlier this month.

A representative at NGK’s power business division told Energy-Storage.news the ‘virtual’ description is correct in the sense that the 15 systems in 10 locations “can be controlled as a single plant. While of course they can still be controlled individually when local support to the grid is needed”.

Critical to this aggregation of the systems is the CISC (Centralised Integrated System Controller) which will be located at a control room in Mussafah, an industrial district in Abu Dhabi’s southwest where some of the battery systems are also located, with the rest in nearby Sila. CISC and the NAS systems are “ready to be operated by the TSO (transmission system operator)”, the NGK representative said.

Operational parameters increased from original scope
Awaidha Al Marar, chairman of Abu Dhabi’s Department of Energy, attended an inauguration event on 17 January, as a number of events including Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week and World Future Energy Summit (WFES) took place in the region.

The NGK CISC 648MWh project will help the city load balance across its networks during the daytime, as well as providing up to six hours backup in the case of grid outages. As with many energy storage system projects, it is primarily about reducing the strain on the grid at times of peak demand.

GE has announced it will integrate its renewables, grid, and energy storage assets into a simplified, single business that nearly doubles the size of its Renewable Energy division, as the company banks on the accelerated uptake of grid-connected renewables worldwide.

The expansion will see GE’s grid solutions, solar solutions, and storage businesses move from GE Power to GE Renewable Energy. The company also said it will regionalize its onshore wind business to simplify and make that business more “local.”

The company’s freshest business reshuffle was announced a day before GE is expected to report its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2018. The industrial conglomerate has suffered a series of financial ups and downs over the past year, owing in part to weaknesses in the power segment.

A Mass Consolidation

The company—long a formidable leader in the gas turbine business—has been struggling since its $10.6 billion acquisition of Alstom’s Power and Grid business in 2015. Last November, GE announced the reorganization of its Power division into two businesses, forming GE Gas Power, comprised of Gas Power Systems and Power Services, and GE Power Portfolio, comprised of the Steam, Grid Solutions, Nuclear, and Power Conversion businesses. In a December interview with POWER, newly appointed GE Gas Power CEO Scott Strazik acknowledged that renewable energy will continue to grow “exponentially,” but he also offered optimism about the growth of the company’s natural gas business.

GE Renewable Energy CEO Jerome Pecresse, who created Alstom’s Renewable Power business—a division that had close to 10,000 employees when it was absorbed into GE—told reporters in a Jan. 30 call that the renewables and grid consolidation would create a $16 billion business with 40,000 employees. GE’s Renewable Energy division now employs about 23,000 workers, he said. As of the end of 2017, GE had a total 313,000 employees, about 83,500 of which were affiliated with the Power division.

It will mean that GE Renewable Energy, which has so far housed the company’s onshore wind, offshore wind, LM Wind Power, and hydro offerings, will now also oversee its grid solutions and hybrid renewables technologies, which were previously part of the Power division. That will leave GE Power’s portfolio with the steam, nuclear, and power conversion businesses. A GE spokesperson told POWER that GE does not plan to dispose of any businesses as a result of this announcement.

The UK government has launched a competition for innovative large-scale energy storage that could provide a market competitive alternative to conventional technologies, such as batteries or pumped hydro.

The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy said a range of storage technologies are within the scope, with a minimum output target of 30MW or minimum capacity of 50 megawatt-hours.

It added that Power-to-X, such as power-to-gas, with a minimum input of 5MW are also in the scope.
Up to £20m will be made available between 2019 and 2021 to support up to three demonstration projects.

The projects would need to be built by March 2021 and have operational testing completed by December 2021.

“Projects should be at a technology readiness level of six or above, which could result in lower capital or operating costs to the traditional storage technologies, or improved capacity, sustainability and response rates at a comparable cost,” BEIS said.

Interested parties have until 26 April to submit a proposal to BEIS, the offices of which are pictured.

Tesla has had a lot of big headlines over its success with its EV business. During Q3 the company turned its first quarterly profit in, well, as long as we’ve been covering the company, and maintained profitability during Q4 on the back of the successful scaling of its Model 3 production.

The company’s success with energy storage is less talked about. Tesla continues to scale its energy storage deployments, but on the solar side the company has clearly ceded SolarCity’s former market leadership to competitors.

During Q4 both of those trends were clear. The company deployed 255 megawatt-hours of energy storage to reach a total of 1,040 megawatt-hours for the full year, including deploying the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in Australia. This is a nearly 3x growth over 2017 levels.

Tesla observed operational success as well, and says that it cut its sales-to-installation time on energy storage systems in half in 2018. And while it is far less than the “mad growth” of 300-400% that Musk predicted for 2019 in August, Tesla still expects to double its 2019 energy storage deployments.

This includes bigger and bigger batteries. Following on the Hornsdale deployment in South Australia, Tesla says that it has received “multiple requests” to build even more massive batteries.

Solar Roof deployment “slow”

But while the battery business grows, solar continues to contract. Tesla reported only 73 MW of retrofit PV systems in Q4, a 21% decrease sequentially. The shareholder letter specifically used the word “retrofit”, and did not state how many of its Solar Roofs it had deployed.

Despite a lot of hype in the rollout, Tesla has been very hard to pin down on what is actually happening with Solar Roof production and deployment. The promises of the future are still there, with Tesla stating that it plans to ramp production of the product with “significantly improved manufacturing capabilities during 2019, based on the design iterations and testing underway”, but notes that installation at present are “slow”.

The 1,800-panel project is relatively small, with both the battery and generation sized at about a half a megawatt. But Consumers’ announcement makes clear the utility will be adding more.

“Today, there is very little storage on the grid, so electricity is generated just moments before you use it,” Garrick Rochow, Consumers Energy’s senior vice president of operations, said in a statement. “With large batteries, we will make our grid more efficient, effective and sustainable.”

Rochow said batteries are “a critical part of Michigan’s energy future.” Consumers is the largest energy provider in the state, serving 6.7 million gas and electric customers.

The Circuit West project is the first solar+storage system in the state, but it is not the first battery on Consumers’ grid. Last fall, the utility installed a 1 MW battery at its Parkview Substation on Western Michigan University’s Kalamazoo campus. Consumers said it will study the performance of both batteries “to determine how to best use and integrate the technology across the electric distribution grid.”

As the cost of batteries has fallen, utilities have begun installing them to improve reliability and to deliver more clean energy. Global Market Insights issued an analysis this month estimating that the lithium-ion battery global market size will exceed $60 billion by 2024. BloombergNEF has said it expects the global energy storage market, which excludes pumped hydro, will grow to a cumulative 942 GW / 2,857 GWh by 2040.