It’s great in the lab, but will it actually work? That’s the million-dollar question perpetually leveled at engineering researchers. For a family of layered nanomaterials, developed and studied at Drexel University — and heralded as the future of energy storage — that answer is now, yes.

For some time, researchers have been working on using two-dimensional materials, atomically thin nanomaterials, as components for faster-charging, longer-lasting batteries and supercapacitors. But the problem with the existing techniques for doing so are that when the thickness of the material layer is increased to about 100 microns — roughly the width of a human hair, which is the industry standard for energy storage devices — the materials lose their functionality.

Recently published research from Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania, shows a new technique for manipulating two-dimensional materials that allows them to be shaped into films of a practically usable thickness, while maintaining the properties that make them exceptional candidates for use in supercapacitor electrodes.

The study, published in the journal Nature, focuses on using soft materials — similar to those in the liquid crystal displays of phones and televisions — as a guide for self-assembly of MXene sheets. MXenes, are a class of nanomaterials discovered at Drexel in 2011, that are particularly well-suited for energy storage.

“Our method relies on a marriage between soft material assembly and functional 2-D nanomaterials,” said Yury Gogotsi, PhD, Distinguished University and Bach professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering, who was a co-author of the research. “The resulting electrode films show rapid ion transport, outstanding rate handling, and charge storage equal to or exceeding commercial carbon electrodes.”

WASHINGTON (May 16, 2018)—Today, the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations passed legislation that would cut Energy Department funding. Renewable energy and energy efficiency programs would sustain a $243 million dollar cut, while ARPA-E, a program key to advancing clean energy technology creation and development, would be slashed by about $28 million. The White House had proposed eliminating ARPA-E in their budget proposal for fiscal year 2019. The legislation would, however, also increase funding for federal energy storage programs.

Below is a statement by Rob Cowin, director of climate and energy government affairs at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“This committee continues to miss opportunities to speed up the country’s transition to clean energy. The bill cuts the nation’s flagship clean energy research and development program, ARPA-E, which helps develop game-changing energy technologies and fills a critical gap in private sector investments.

“By reducing support for these kinds of programs, the U.S. is ceding leadership on clean energy and technological innovation to countries like China, which is investing in these technologies. You would think U.S. lawmakers would want to promote economic growth by capitalizing on the expanding global market for clean energy technologies.

“This legislation also exposes tensions in ideologies between Congress and the White House. The appropriators increased support for federal energy storage research, approving nearly $10 million in additional funding over the level set in the fiscal year 2018 omnibus bill. Energy storage systems can enable excess wind and solar energy to be stored for later use at times when the sun is not shining, and the wind is not blowing—making them more competitive with fossil fuel-based energy sources.

Vivint Solar (NYSE:VSLR) has spent the past year cleaning up its house in residential solar after the company’s sale to SunEdison fell through. Now, operations are steadily improving. Vivint has also been one of the beneficiaries of Tesla‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) decision to shrink its solar business, and it has made a relatively quick transition to selling solar systems rather than financing them and then leasing to customers. That’s the good news.

What hasn’t been going so well for the company is its launch of energy-storage products. A partnership with Mercedes-Benz recently went up in smoke after the automaker decided to focus its efforts on large-scale installations, and its effort to go head to head against Tesla’s Powerwall apparently hasn’t been as successful as the company had expected. This leaves Vivint Solar without its key energy storage partner, and with no obvious path to becoming a leader in the rapidly growing energy-storage market. 

Mercedes-Benz abandons Vivint Solar

In May 2017, Vivint Solar and Mercedes-Benz forged an alliance to bring energy storage to the residential solar market. Mercedes-Benz’ supplied the battery units; each one had a 2.5 kW-hr capacity, and up to eight could be strung together in a storage system, enough to power the average U.S. home for about 16 hours. 

Now, the two companies are going their separate ways. Vivint Solar has already replaced Mercedes-Benz’ batteries with LG Chem batteries on its website, but Greentech Media is reporting that LG batteries are only available in Utah, and won’t be rolled out to larger markets like California until later this year. 

It’s likely that more than one fatal flaw contributed to the partnership’s collapse. The requirements an automaker has for an electric vehicle battery don’t entirely translate to what’s needed for one being installed in the home, so there could have been some issues with fit. Also, its batteries individually had far less capacity than Tesla’s 14 kW-hr Powerwall 2. Finally, Vivint Solar was relatively opaque on pricing, but Electrek has reported that the cost of a Mercedes-Benz energy storage system was between $5,000 and $13,000, which may not have been a compelling deal compared to the Powerwall, priced at $5,900 plus installation.

Replacing Mercedes-Benz batteries with LG Chem should help lower costs and bring a company more focused on what the home market needs in energy storage, so there are some positives to bringing LG Chem onboard and it’s probably the right move short-term. But it doesn’t help at all with differentiating Vivint Solar’s product in the marketplace. LG Chem is also partnering with the biggest residential solar installer in the U.S., Sunrun (NASDAQ:RUN), meaning Vivint Solar is only catching up to, not surpassing, the competition.

Lockheed Martin has signed an agreement to supply a GridStar Lithium energy storage system to ComEd, Illinois’ largest electric utility and a unit of Exelon. The 2 MWh system will be integrated into ComEd’s Bronzeville community microgrid project in Chicago.

As explained by Lockheed Martin, a microgrid is a small power grid with defined boundaries that can operate when connected to the larger electrical grid and as an “island” when there’s an interruption on the main grid. It draws on distributed energy resources, like solar power, to serve customers within the microgrid footprint. Lockheed Martin’s GridStar Lithium storage system will help ComEd integrate and use multiple energy resources to provide electricity to critical facilities in an emergency, when the microgrid is not connected to the main electric grid.

“Lockheed Martin is excited to work with ComEd on this innovative project,” comments Frank Armijo, vice president of Lockheed Martin Energy. “Improving grid resiliency and reliability is crucial to the future of secure, efficient energy supply, and Lockheed Martin is looking forward to collaborating with ComEd to reach this goal.”

ComEd’s Bronzeville microgrid will include battery storage and solar power. It will be connected to a microgrid on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), creating the first utility-operated microgrid cluster in the nation, claims Lockheed Martin. ComEd’s microgrid is expected to serve more than 1,000 customers, including critical service providers such as the Chicago Police Department. In an emergency, the microgrid will enable services to continue and demonstrate the capability of solar photovoltaics and energy storage within a microgrid.

“The use of solar PV and battery energy storage are critical features of the Bronzeville microgrid, and Lockheed Martin’s expertise in the integration of renewable energy resources will help ensure this project benefits the community and produces learnings that will inform the evolution of the system serving northern Illinois,” notes Michelle Blaise, senior vice president of technical services at ComEd.

The energy industry is being reshaped by major forces, including decentralization, digitization, shifting demand and prices and greater sustainability as a public policy issue. As the risks shift, so too do the opportunities. In March in Dubai, Christoph Frei, secretary general of the World Energy Council, spoke at Marsh’s Energy Industry Conference. Brock Meeks caught up with Frei after the conference.

Tom Carver: First of all, what risks to innovation do you see in the energy sector?

Christoph Frei: There are several key risk areas regarding innovation in the energy industry.

One of the main ones is decarbonization. If you look back over the past 45 years, we’ve managed to decarbonize gross domestic product by, on average, 1 percent per annum. If we want to achieve a change of 2 degrees Celsius, we must accelerate this from 1 percent to 6 percent per annum. The challenge of decarbonization is massive. We have a factor of 2.8 times more CO2 in our resources — coal, oil, gas — than we are allowed to emit.

Another challenge is innovation around electrification, decentralization and digitization. The one thing above everything else that is keeping energy leaders awake at night is the impact of digitization on the future of the energy system. New business models and digitization will define momentum on a path of innovation, which will change the way we produce and use energy in industrialized and developing worlds.

Carver: What is the industry saying about its key risk concerns?

Frei: We have an issues map where we look at about 40 risk issues in the energy sector through interviews with 300 energy leaders in more than 90 countries. Over the past five years, this has shown us a very dynamic market. The risks that have heightened in importance most dramatically are decentralized systems, digitization, electric storage, market design and renewable energies.

Issues such as carbon capture and storage have been cooling down — people just do not believe they will deliver on its promise. Unconventional, or renewable, energy is seen as less of a risk for the industry. Consider that 18 months ago, solar was being sold in Chile for 2.9 cents per megawatt. I recently spoke to several sources who said that this year they were probably looking at 2 cents per megawatt. That tells a story of continued crashing of prices.

The global grid-connected battery energy storage systems (BESS) market witnessed a market volume of 3.8 gigawatts (GW) for projects installed up to 2017, which is expected to reach 23.4GW for projects installed up to 2022. According to GlobalData’s latest report Grid-Connected Battery Energy Storage Systems, Update 2018 – Global Market Size, Competitive Landscape, Key Country Analysis, and Forecast to 2022, the top five countries in the global market were the US, South Korea, China, Japan, and Australia for projects commissioned up to 2017, with the US having a 28% market share and leading the global BESS market.

The top five countries represented over 80% of the global market in terms of cumulative installed capacity in 2017. In 2017, the Asia-Pacific region led the global market by holding a 54.1% market share, followed by the Americas with 32.8%, and Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) with 13.1% for installations up to 2017. With respect to technology, lithium-ion has been the preferred choice to date and shared approximately over 75% of the global market with respect to BESS installations up to 2017. It is expected that lithium-ion will be the key technology throughout the study period.

In the Asia-Pacific region, South Korea led the regional market with a share of 31.3% with respect to projects installed up to 2017. South Korea is expected to show promising growth in the forecast period. This is because the South Korean government has earmarked KRW40 trillion ($35.7 billion) for the renewable energy sector over the next five years, as it unveiled a plan to reward solar plant operators for installing energy storage facilities. The country is attempting to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels. It plans to shut down 10 obsolete coal-powered plants in the country during the period, and supplement their closures by delivering 6% of total power from green energy sources by 2020. The Korean Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) is working already with Korean battery provider Kokam to provide more than 500 megawatts (MW) of battery storage for frequency regulation.

The US led the Americas region with a regional market share of 87.4% with respect to projects installed up to 2017. Among the regional markets in the US, California had the largest deployment of energy storage capacity. The Aliso Canyon gas leak pushed California toward the construction of energy storage pipeline projects and development of new projects, representing an installed capacity of over 200MW in 2016. In terms of applications, ancillary services remained the leading application sector for energy storage in the US.

The collaboration between Cleanergy and Masen in Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) and Thermal Energy Storage (TES) solutions is taking a big step towards commercialization. Through the agreement, Masen will take a place in Cleanergy’s board of directors and fund a substantial part of the company’s Thermal Energy Storage R&D, industrialisation and business development.

Masen adds valuable knowledge of the solar market to Cleanergy’s strategy, but also grants access to a vast network of established partners and stakeholders in the CSP industry, as well as to new suppliers for local sourcing and production. Masen’s R&D Platform in Ouarzazate, one of the biggest worldwide, will help test the solutions in optimal solar conditions.

Masen’s team of engineers will contribute to the evaluation and design of the TES system, land and grid connection for complete system testing in Morocco, as well as introduction and demonstration for prospective customers on the African continent.

“Masen has a strong R&D strategy, which actively evaluates and promotes disruptive and competitive technologies. The co-development of innovative TES systems is an important step forward for CSP technologies. Cleanergy’s storage demonstrator will be installed on our R&D Platform in Ouarzazate, which will help accelerate its commercialization.“, says Mr Bakkoury, the President of Masen.

“Collaborating with Masen has been very positive for our development and having them onboard means we can now work even closer together. With their incomparable experience of renewable energy and solar power we get access to a network of knowledge, resources and prospective customers. Masen will also be a key partner in verifying the technology before launching to the market”, says Jonas Eklind, CEO of Cleanergy.

A demonstrator of Cleanergy’s Thermal Energy Storage system will be presented in June 2018.

In a perfect world, grid-connected energy storage plants would never be needed. The diversity and inherent flexibility of thousands of generators and loads in a large power system would provide all the flexibility that we could need to continuously match supply and demand at a very low cost, even with variable renewables dominating our generation resources.

But the world is far from perfect. In the real world, there are numerous inefficiencies that restrict resources from offering their full capabilities, limit access by new resources, impact compensation for providing services, and make the interconnection and participation process very difficult. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a standardized way to offer a broad suite of energy, ancillary services and reliability services to the system operator that made this easier?

There might be. As I discussed in a companion blog post, FERC Order 841 requires electricity markets to create an energy storage participation model that allows storage to provide its full capabilities to the wholesale energy markets. But FERC could have gone further by using storage as the example for a general participation model to be used by all resources, simplifying the process for innovative resources to participate in the market in the future.

At first glance, Order 841 is a boon for storage but just an incremental step for other inverter-based or distributed energy resources to participate in wholesale energy markets. In practice, this new participation model for storage may help many other kinds of resources, even without moving toward a universal participation model. By embracing the participation of storage, which has capabilities far beyond conventional generation, FERC may have unintentionally created a new participation model for creative combinations of storage with high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission, wind, solar and conventional generation.

Thinking beyond storage in Order 841

FERC defines an energy storage resource as “a resource capable of receiving electric energy from the grid and storing it for later injection of electric energy back to the grid… regardless of [its] storage medium.” Though battery storage systems are the predominant type of energy storage resource contemplated by Order 841, the order does not say that allof the energy must come from the grid and be returned back to that same grid. An energy storage resource, or something that looks similar to one, could be used as a standardized way to interconnect and participate in the ISO/RTO markets.