Now in its fourth year, the Energy Storage Summit has been supporting the deployment of this world-changing set of technologies in the UK and beyond since it began and it returns in just a few weeks’ time for the 2019 edition.

The 2018 event saw the industry come together in London and our editorial team was able to report a huge amount of exclusive news and commentary that emerged. That’ll happen again this year, but if you really want to hear the latest insights first-hand and meet many of the names and faces behind the stories and projects that make the news, the only way to do that will be by attending the show.

It takes place on 26 and 27 February 2019, once again at Victoria Park Plaza in the centre of England’s capital. We expect a similar number of attendees to last year, when more than 350 delegates were welcomed over two days.

It’s fair to say the scope of the event is changing each year, as the market itself changes. The Energy Storage Summit programme is designed to both respond to the market’s dynamics as well as itself helping set the agenda with forward-thinking technology sessions and case studies.

There’s been a growth in importance of behind-the-meter energy storage, not just in the UK but in many parts of the developed world. That is to say, there’s been widespread recognition that there’s a lot more potential in energy storage systems deployed to benefit individual households or businesses than we often recognise. Companies working to deploy and connect these systems, or to aggregate them together to unleash their full capabilities such as Kiwi Power and Pivot Power will be on-hand to talk about these topics.

There’s also been a wave of finance activity – although in all honesty there remains a lot of work to be done to get the finance community on-board and au fait with energy storage. Again, the likes of Wermuth Asset Management, Ingenious Capital and First Imagine will be representing that community. There’s no doubt there’ll be a lively two-way flow of information and views with the energy storage industry there.

A local authority in England has unveiled two landmark solar-plus-storage projects on existing landfill sites which aim to be the first of their kind in the UK.

Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC), which has been a prominent proponent of renewables, last week unveiled plans to develop the energy projects on landfill sites in Woodston and Stanground, both near Peterborough.

The Stanground site is proposed to be the largest, combining a 2.25MW ground-mount solar array with a 10MW battery storage system, while the Woodston project will use a 3MW battery. Both battery systems are expected to have a 2C charge-discharge rate.

Minutes from a CCC committee meeting dated to 14 September 2018 said that, with demand response and balancing capacity services sold to National Grid expected to form the bulk of those revenues, Stanground could raise £1.4 million (US$1.82 million) in its first year of operation and Woodston £380,000. The council noted that “grid services are an evolving market with uncertain revenue streams”.

“However, market reports confirm that with a growing proportion of renewable energy on the grid, the necessity for a response to balance periods of high demand or high penetration of renewables is increasing,” the document continues, adding that there is a “high degree of confidence” that the need for grid services will grow in the longer term.

Crucially, revenue generated from the services is to be used to help fund the county council’s frontline services, with previously-stated revenue generation estimates placing the sites’ combined contribution at almost £46 million over 25 years.

CCC’s energy investment team has worked with frequent partner Bouygues E & S for the sites’ design.

CCC’s experience with solar has been long standing and the council remains one of the most vocal supporters of the technology. In late 2016 CCC confirmed the completion of the 10MW, council-owned Triangle Solar Farm in Soham, the second utility-scale solar project to be completed under the Contracts for Difference mechanism.

For decades, the North Sea has been delivering much of the oil and gas to the world’s global supply of fossil fuels.

As technologies advanced and climate change concerns increased, the North Sea also became a leader in offshore wind capacity installation and innovation.

For the countries on the North Sea, and for all renewable projects around the world for that matter, the key challenge in boosting the share of renewables in the power mix is a way to find a reliable cost-efficient way to store the energy produced so it can be released when needed.

A new study by a team of scientists from the University of Edinburgh suggests that porous rocks on the North Sea bed could act as energy storage facilities.

Julien Mouli-Castillo of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences and his team suggest in an article in Nature Energy that the so-called compressed-air energy storage (CAES) technology could be applied in those porous rocks to store energy for a few months, for example to have it readily available during peak electricity winter demand in the UK.

CAES could use electricity from renewables to power a motor that generates compressed air. This compressed air would then be stored at high pressure in the porous rock, through a deep well drilled into the rock. When electricity demand is high, the compressed air would be released from the well and power a turbine to generate electricity to send to the power grid.

The scientists suggest that the CAES approach could be used in porous rocks where seismic exploration data for oil and gas is available, if those rocks are close to renewable energy sources. The UK meets those two criteria—the UK North Sea is well explored. The North Sea and the nearby Atlantic Ocean are also home to 90 percent of global installed offshore wind capacity, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

Mouli-Castillo and team have designed a modeling approach to predict the potential of North Sea porous rocks to store energy.

Automotive giant Toyota and electronics firm Panasonic have announced a joint venture which will look to lead the field in EV battery technology.

Initially rumoured over the weekend, the two Japanese companies confirmed this week their intent to form a joint venture (JV) under a business-integration contract.

The JV, to be established by the end of next year pending regulatory approvals, will be 51% owned by Toyota and 49% by Panasonic.

The scope of the JV is to cover R&D, production engineering, manufacturing, procurement and a host of other business activities related to lithium-ion, solid-state and next generation batteries, outlining the duo’s commitment to leading the field in battery technology.

The JV is expected to house up to 3,500 employees, with Toyota committed to transferring equipment and personnel in battery cell-related fields while Panasonic will transfer equipment, personnel and other assets related to the automotive prismatic battery business.

And while Toyota will hold a majority stake in the JV, Panasonic will be free to sell batteries to other automakers in principle.

The duo said that the automotive sector faced growing calls to find solutions to issues including global warming and energy, with battery solutions quickly becoming the most important element in the electrification of vehicles.

But while this is the case, numerous challenges require solving. Energy density, charging time and safety were listed alongside stable supply chains and effective recycling structures.

Toyota and Panasonic said that independent efforts from battery and automotive manufacturers alone are not enough to solve those issues, prompting a more conclusive agreement between the two.

More than 700 MW of utility-scale battery capacity has been installed in the United States, 80% of which is based on Lithium-ion chemistry. For lithium-ion batteries to secure their place as a global energy infrastructure staple, there is a real and growing need for a robust supply chain that includes end-of-life processing that is both efficient and cost-effective.

The rise of Li-ion battery formats rich in cobalt for applications in the vehicle and stationary power storage markets has caused periodic commodity price spikes that are a major cause of anxiety for OEMs who are unable to pass along the added costs. Battery recycling presents an opportunity to hedge against commodity fluctuations by tapping into existing material stockpiles in the form of end-of-life batteries and manufacturing scrap. 

China has emerged as a leading nation in the rollout of renewable technology, becoming the largest market for renewable generation, electric vehicles, and Li-ion batteries. Hungry for resources to fuel its economic and infrastructure expansion, China has been investing to secure mineral resources across the world and has made Li-ion battery recycling mandatory. With more than $10,000 of material value in every ton of Li-ion batteries, it is no wonder that many companies have been investing heavily in recycling technologies and it seems only a matter of time before Li-ion batteries recycling is mandatory in the United States.

However, batteries have compact and complex architectures, layering high-grade materials in thin layers encased in much lower value commodity components such as aluminum, copper, and plastic films making them difficult to process efficiently. Also, rapid innovation in the battery industry means that for a recycling process to be scalable, it must be able to handle a broad range of physical formats and evolutions in composition. 

One of the most widely deployed methods of Li-ion battery recycling is pyrometallurgical, where Li-ion batteries are incinerated in a blast furnace to recover the nickel and cobalt as an alloy. Recently some practitioners have reported being able to recover lithium from the resultant slag. The companies deploying this technique typically have a large book of assets and experience in operating these systems and are able to efficiently transition these high cap-ex assets to capture some of the metal value from these Li-ion battery material streams.  While this technique can accept most any Li-ion battery format and has little preprocessing required, it releases one ton of CO2 for every ton of batteries processed and fails to capture a significant fraction of the economic value.

Rocks in the seabed off the UK coast could provide long-term storage locations for renewable energy production, according to new research.

Engineers and geoscientists from the Universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde used mathematical models to assess the potential of compressed air energy storage (CAES).

The researchers found that porous rocks on the seabed could store about one and a half times the UK’s typical electricity demand for January and February months.
CAES-based techniques could use electricity generated by renewables to power a motor that generates compressed air.

This air could potentially be stored at high pressure in the pores found in sandstone, using a deep well drilled into the rock.

The pressurised air could later be released to drive a turbine to generate large amounts of electricity, at times when energy supplies are shorter.

The approach could help deliver steady and reliable supplies of energy from renewable sources – such as wind and tidal turbines.

However, the amount of energy produced by many renewable technologies varies depending on weather conditions.

There is a need for new processes that can store energy cheaply and reliably for months at a time, the researchers said.

A similar process storing air in deep salt caverns has been used at sites in Germany and the US.

The market for energy storage in Texas is in limbo, in part because key issues regarding utility ownership of energy storage have yet to be resolved.

The issue arose a year ago when the PUCT dismissed a request by AEP Texas, a unit of American Electric Power, to install two battery storage projects because the regulators said they lacked sufficient information.

Instead, the PUCT in February opened a docket (#48023) on the issue to “develop facts necessary to establish a regulatory framework” that would allow energy storage and other technologies to operate within the confines of Texas’ Public Utility Regulatory Act (PURA).

The docket, or “project” as the PUCT calls it, exposed the deep divide between utility and non-utility stakeholders in Texas’ competitive wholesale market, which does not allow transmission and distribution utilities (TDUs) to own generation assets.

Texas law classifies energy storage as generation, but TDUs argue that they are within their rights owning energy storage facilities for use on their distribution systems because they do not intend to use them as generation.

Texas competitive generators, along with competitive service providers and other parties, however, argued that utility-owned storage devices would be generation and would inevitably affect wholesale power markets and wholesale power prices.

The TDUs counter that even though the storage device might affect the wholesale market, they would be indistinguishable from any of the actions a TDU might take that could affect the wholesale market, such as the construction of new transmission line.

In its report to the legislature, the PUCT shows that PURA provides conflicting definitions of “generator” with respect to the ownership of energy storage devices. One section makes intent to sell to the wholesale market key. Another section appears to make an exception for self-use of power from a storage device.

I started covering the solar energy industry seriously in 2009. It seemed like a hopping, exciting time in the industry — growth was exploding. I remember one early story in which readers admonished me a little because I put “Solar Power Exploding” in a headline, and they thought I was referring to genuine explosions. In 2019, 2009 and 2010 progress looks like anthills.

Scrolling back through our What Changed archives, below is a lengthy rundown of notable changes within the solar energy and energy storage industries in 2018. I’m sure I missed some of them — drop a note in the comments if you have a favorite I skipped. I’m also sure this post is far too long for the casual reader — do your best. Additionally, stay tuned for record-breaking progress in 2019.

Nevada raised its renewable electricity standard (requirement) from 15% by 2025 to 50% by 2030.

California approved new standards requiring that solar panels be installed on the roofs of nearly all new homes, condos, and apartment buildings by 2020.

California approved the “Million Solar Roofs of Energy Storage” bill.

California passed a law requiring 100% clean energy by 2045.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) kicked off a $1 billion Solar on Multifamily Affordable Housing (SOMAH) program — $100 million a year for solar power on multifamily housing buildings.

Illinois Governor Rauner signed two bills to support solar development conditions for Illinois farmers and rural areas, bills projected to generate $250–350 million in tax revenue.

New York started becoming much more of a solar power player in the United States, with 26 new large-scale solar power plants approved for development, a community solar push, and broader efforts to stimulate the industry.

Commercial solar battery cost fell significantly in 2018 and are set for further falls in 2019, according to S&P Global.

The financial analyst giant reported a drop of 40 per cent in the cost of installed battery storage between 2017 and 2018.

The world also doubled its energy storage capacity between 2017 and 2018 to 9 GWh. A further surge of close to 80 per cent is expected by the end of 2019.

Falling costs boost Australian battery storage industry

According to S&P Global, analysts are now predicting a “new era” of energy storage in 2019. This is due to the dramatic reduction in cost.

Energy prices from large-scale battery storage in southwest US are less than AUD$42 per MWh, based on Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) figures.

BNEF is predicting exponential growth in global energy storage. Current prices will subsequently be more than halved by 2030.

Solar battery cost far lower than gas backup

The cost of a solar storage power plant is up to half that a new gas peaker, according to US solar power developer 8minutenergy.

A gas peaker is a  gas-fired generator that supplies power to the national grid at times of peak demand.

8minutenergy CEO Tom Buttgenbach says a solar battery plant is “a factor of two cheaper” than a gas peaker.

Electric vehicles powering global battery boom

Electric vehicles (EVs) still make up most battery demand. Global EV sales passed four million in mid-2018 according to BNEF. They should reach five million during the first quarter of 2019.

Commercial and home energy storage has also made big strides. Large-scale batteries like Tesla Powerpack are now storing energy in wind and solar farms across Australia.

Australian states’ home battery rebate schemes

Meanwhile, several Australian states are running solar battery rebate schemes. The South Australian Marshall Government is offering rebates up to $6,000 for 40,000 home-owners.

In addition, the Queensland Government will help 1,500 households and small businesses access batteries like Tesla Powerwall 2.

The Andrews Government in Victoria is providing half-price solar batteries for 10,000 households.

Meanwhile, a 2018 report by Alternative Technology Australia found new homes with solar panels could save owners up to $18,000 over ten years compared to those powered by non-solar electricity and gas.