Plans hinge on Question 3 legislation

Battery technologies are all the craze these days as everyone is racing to find the perfect solution to energy storage for the growing share of solar and wind power in the grid.

But energy storage solutions are also making forays into the railways industry where batteries can help stabilize the railway electricity grid.

One new battery storage solution, developed by Italy-based power group Enel, will be tested and installed on the network of the Russian Railways.

“This is the first time this type of battery technology is used in the railway sector,” Enel, which has a very strong international renewables business, said upon announcing that it would test the “first-of-its-kind innovative storage system on Russia’s railway network.”

Enel and Russian Railways will team up to develop the energy storage solution in the hopes that it could help stabilize the Russian railway electricity grid, improve train operations, and avoid expensive grid upgrades that might otherwise be required.

While Enel was scarce on details in the announcement, CleanTechnica obtained more information from the Italian company about what this “first-of-its-kind” innovative storage system is.

The batteries will be lithium, with a minimum capacity of 10 MWh, Enel told CleanTechnica. At times of peak demand, the batteries can be automatically activated through an Enel in-house software to help respond to the growing energy demand of the railways system. Once installed on certain railway sections, the batteries could help make the train service faster, Enel says.Related: Why U.S. Oil Exports Are Only Heading Higher

The power company plans to couple the energy storage system with regenerative braking technology. This regenerative braking tech uses the energy that the train generates when it brakes to charge the batteries. The energy will be stored in the batteries for later use, which could help the railway network to reduce its overall energy consumption.

However, the Enel technology is still in a development and test phase—it’s not ready to be installed on the network of the Russian Railways yet.

The partnership with Russian Railways will entail a testing phase of up to three months, which is expected to begin by the end of 2018, Enel told CleanTechnica. During the test phase, Enel will install a single battery in a laboratory at Russian Railways, where the energy storage technology can be tested for performance in a controlled environment.

Swedish energy giant Vattenfall has found a way to further cut the cost of grid-scale energy storage: share the infrastructure with a wind farm.

The company has announced the commissioning of what it said was “the largest co-located battery installed in the United Kingdom” — a 22-megawatt plant, which shares electrical plans with the Pen y CyMoedd wind farm in Wales.

Developers of many current and upcoming wind projects are studying energy storage as a way of earning extra revenues from arbitrage, by storing power until it can be sold for a higher price. But in Vattenfall’s case, the wind and battery plants will operate independently.

The 76-turbine wind farm, which is Vattenfall’s largest onshore project and also the biggest in England and Wales, was opened for business in September 2017 and delivers up to 228 megawatts of power direct to the U.K. grid.

Pen y Cymoedd is capable of meeting the equivalent electricity needs of more than 13 percent of households in Wales and displaces an average of around 331,000 tons of carbon dioxide from fossil-fueled generation every year, said Vattenfall in a press release.

The GBP £400 million ($532 million) project was officially opened in September 2017.

The battery system, meanwhile, shares electrical infrastructure with the wind farm but earns its keep by delivering ancillary services, and specifically enhanced frequency response, to electricity network operator National Grid.

The battery system is made up of six shipping container-sized units, five of which house 500 i3 BMW-manufactured battery packs. Each of the new BMW lithium-ion batteries has a capacity of 33 kilowatt hours and is adapted for stationary storage applications, Vattenfall said.

In March last year, Vattenfall inked a deal with BMW Group for a supply of batteries originally destined for the i3 electric vehicle series. The energy company committed to buy 1,000 of the lithium-ion batteries.

Tesla is apparently significantly ramping up its effort to help rebuild the power grid in Puerto Rico after it was destroyed by hurricanes last year.

After having completed hundreds of energy storage project on the islands in the last few months, Tesla CEO Elon Musk now says that they have ‘about 11,000’ energy storage projects underway in Puerto Rico, which means something big is in the work.

Last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the company installed batteries at 662 locations in Puerto Rico.

We reported that they focused on critical services. For example, Tesla deployed a series of Powerpack systems on the Puerto Rican islands of Vieques and Culebra for a sanitary sewer treatment plant, the Arcadia water pumping station, the Ciudad Dorada elderly community, the Susan Centeno hospital, and the Boys and Girls Club of Vieques.

The automaker’s energy division also deployed a solar+battery system at a hospital in Puerto Rico.

While it’s one of the biggest examples of Tesla deploying energy storage systems in a single market, it now sounds like it’s only the beginning as Musk says that there are about 20 times more projects underway in Puerto Rico:

At the very minimum, it would be one Powerwall per project, which would add up to a deployment of at least ~150 MWh of energy capacity.

But that’s just the bare minimum since as we have recently seen, most projects include more than one Powerwall.

For example, we recently reported on a homeowner in Puerto Rico who received a 3-Powerwall installation that helped keep the lights on during the last power outage:

DNV GL, an Oslo, Norway-headquartered global quality assurance and risk management company that also acts as a certification body, handed the certificate to the Spanish conglomerate at WINDPOWER 2018 in Chicago this May. DNV GL’s certificate demonstrates the safety, performance, and reliability of ACCIONA’s hybrid plant for storing electricity in batteries as part of a grid-connected wind farm at Barásoain in Navarra, northern Spain.

The Barásoain plant has a storage system that consists of two batteries that are located in separate containers. One is a fast-response battery of 1 MW/0.39 MWh, which is capable of maintaining 1 MW of power for 20 minutes, and the other is a slower-response battery, though it has “greater autonomy” of 0.7 MW/0.7 MWh, maintaining 0.7 MW for 1 hour, said ACCIONA. Both employ Samsung SDI lithium-ion technology. The energy storage technology is connected to a single 3-MW AW116/300 wind turbine that uses ACCIONA Windpower (Nordex Group) technology. According to ACCIONA, the wind turbine is one of five that make up the Experimental Wind Farm at Barásoain, which it has operated since 2013. ACCIONA manages the entire system using control software it developed in-house. The system is monitored in real-time by the company’s Renewable Energies Control Center (Figure 4).

The certification milestone is important because while energy storage technologies are increasingly being deployed along with renewable projects at a grid-scale, a comprehensive standard that guarantees their safety and reliability is rare. The certification is designed to provide more certainty to industry, including technology designers and manufacturers, as well as auxiliary backers like investors, insurers, and government authorities, which often seek information about risk mitigation and cost controls, particularly for fledgling energy storage projects.

“Certifying new systems like ACCIONA’s grid-scale storage plant demonstrates that pioneering projects like this are meeting the required safety, performance and reliability standards and providing the industry with confidence in the quality of emerging new technologies,” said Kim Mørk, executive vice president, Renewables Certification at DNV GL.

According to Carlos Albero, global finance segment leader of DNV GL’s energy division, as well as providing a quality benchmark, the certification verifies ways a hybrid renewables-storage project can make money. “We’re not speaking about the batteries themselves,” he explained to POWER. “You are integrating the wind turbines with the storage platform, and at the end of the day, they have to work together.” Hybrid projects have the benefit of providing revenue streams from grid-related services, such as from frequency and voltage regulation. “So, these are the kinds of revenue considerations that will need to support storage projects in the future,” he said.

Residential solar Tesla‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Powerwall is the best-known energy storage device, but Sunrun (NASDAQ:RUN), SunPower(NASDAQ:SPWR), and Vivint Solar (NYSE:VSLR) are entering the market as well, and they’re seeing some signs of success early in 2018.

What’s great about energy storage for solar installers is that it’s incremental revenue that leverages existing marketing and sales expenses. And it could help make solar more attractive to customers in states that have made it more difficult to justify solar economically.

The solar industry’s next growth product

Sunrun has given the most information about how many energy storage systems it’s selling with residential solar systems in the U.S., and the early numbers are impressive. During the company’s first-quarter 2018 conference call, CEO Lynn Jurich said, “We launched Brightbox in Massachusetts less than three months ago, and already nearly 10% of the time customers we sell to directly are opting to add a battery.”

Sunrun doesn’t disclose the revenue or margin per energy storage system, but according to EnergySage, there’s at least $5,000 of incremental revenue per energy storage system and sometimes over $10,000 of added revenue.

Since Sunrun built solar systems for 45,000 customers in past year, that’s a potential for $225 million of additional revenue each year. It’s unlikely the solar industry will ever reach 100% energy storage penetration, but even 10% to 50% of the market adopting energy storage could have a big impact on financials.

Sunrun isn’t alone in energy storage

Tesla was once the leader in solar energy storage, but its solar business is shrinking, and storage projects have been shifted to the utility-scale market. If you want to invest in a stock with residential energy storage growth, it sounds crazy to say it, but Tesla isn’t the right pick.

SunPower says it is now including energy storage with about 30% of commercial solar installations and expects to use the same strategy in residential energy storage products as they roll out later this year. The hope is that being a leader in commercial storage will give the company a leg up in residential energy storage, although it’s only in early stages of launching the product right now.

Vivint Solar is at least a few months behind Sunrun and SunPower after losing its battery partner Mercedes-Benz, which dropped out of residential energy storage earlier this year. The company is now selling the same LG Chem batteries that Sunrun installs, but isn’t yet selling in most markets and doesn’t have the same experience in energy storage controllers, which is ultimately what creates value for customers. Vivint has upside in residential energy storage, but Sunrun and SunPower are the two leaders right now.

NV Energy announced Thursday it has contracted for more than 1 gigawatt of new solar energy and 100 megawatts of battery energy capacity, in a resource plan that’s still subject to regulatory approval and hinges on the outcome of a high-profile ballot measure.

The utility signed power purchase agreements for six new solar energy projects and three related battery storage projects, selected through a competitive solicitation initiated in January of this year. All projects are expected to be complete and serving customers by the end of 2021 – if the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada approves the plan.

“The six new projects position NV Energy to keep its commitment to double renewable energy by 2023 and, importantly, by diversifying our state’s electricity generation portfolio, will reduce the costs to serve customers,” said CEO Paul Caudill, in a statement.

The clean energy expansion plan also represents a step forward in the company’s long-term goal of serving Nevada customers with 100 percent renewable energy, he said. NV Energy claims the direct investment in Nevada’s economy will be greater than $2 billion, and will create 1,7000 construction jobs and 80 permanent, long-term jobs.

Work on the resource planning effort began shortly after Nevada’s 2017 state legislative session ended, “and demonstrates that we are navigating the uncertainties in the current market, given Question 3 on the statewide ballot,” Caudill added.

Question 3, also known as the Energy Choice Initiative, would require the Nevada State Legislature to establish “an open, competitive retail electric energy market that prohibits the granting of monopolies and exclusive franchises for the generation of electricity.”

The Energy Choice Initiative first appeared on the November 2016 ballot as an initiated constitutional amendment, and was approved. In Nevada, constitutional amendments must be approved in two even-numbered election years in order to take effect. Mounting support for clean energy in the state has put enormous pressure on NV Energy to take action.

The third longest railway system in the world could be on the verge of an energy storage makeover. That would be Russian Railways, which sprawls over 85.5 thousand kilometers. A little over half that length is electrified, and if all goes well with a new R&D project, the little could turn into a lot.

That’s not necessarily a gigantic win for climate action, considering that Russia hasn’t exactly been leading the vanguard on renewable energy. However, more and better railway electrification at least opens the door for more renewables, so let’s take a closer look and see what’s going on.

The new energy storage project is a joint venture between Russian Railways (RZhD) and the aggressively renewable energy company Enel Group.

As described by Enel, the partnership will focus on a first-of-its-kind use for energy storage in railway systems. The aim is to develop a relatively low cost strategy for improving system operations without getting into more expensive grid upgrades.

So, what does this mean? Something exotic, like flow batteries? Power-to-gas (aka hydrogen)? How about the concentrating solar + hydrogen combo?

What Kind Of Energy Storage?

So many questions! For an answer CleanTechnica reached out to Enel, which provided this backgrounder (breaks added for readability):

The partnership will start off with a testing phase, which will run for up to three months and is expected to begin by the end of the year, involving the installation of a single battery in RZhD’s laboratory where the technology can perform in a controlled environment.

The lithium batteries, with a minimum capacity of 10 MWh, can be activated automatically through Enel X’s software during times of peak demand with the aim to help respond to the growing energy demand of railway systems whose faster, more powerful and larger trains could be slowed in some instances to avoid putting strain on power grids.