The UK’s Valuation Office Agency (VOA) is calling on the sector to engage with the development of business rates that will be applied to energy storage projects in 2022, including those attached to subsidy-free solar farms.

Business rates are a form of occupation tax levied on almost all non-domestic properties in Britain. The VOA, a division of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC), is currently investigating how to apply new rates to the revenues accrued by energy storage technologies, including standalone and co-located projects with all generation technologies, our UK sister site Solar Power Portal has learned.

Following last year’s widely reported and controversial review, which saw a ‘solar tax hike’ of six to eight times the previous levels applied to existing solar installations, the VOA is now casting its eye towards energy storage, which currently are not included in the business rating list at all.

The new rates to be applied to storage for the first time are likely to impact subsidy-free solar farms currently being developed.

Historically, business rates have been applied to the subsidy payments made to solar projects under the Renewable Obligation and feed-in tariff schemes. However, with the UK moving to a subsidy-free environment, these are likely to be applied only to the generation capacity of the solar park that it exports to national or distribution grids.

With many of these projects planning to use battery storage to build a subsidy-free business case, the VOA is seeking out where new battery projects are being planned or built and if they are co-located with solar farms.

Using technology and revenue values in 2020, two years before the next review as set in legislation, rateable values could be applied in two ways to these projects. The VOA is considering the use of a capital expenditure or contractors’ revaluation, taking into account a range of initial project costs to form an annual equivalent of business rates applied to revenues.

March 8, 2018 – “GE’s Reservoir delivers the new type of energy system that customers are looking for to help manage electricity’s next chapter,” said Russell Stokes of GE Power, speaking of the new energy storage platform.

“It can fit into most any setting, from centralized grid systems to the most remote villages and communities,” added GE Power’s Eric Gebhardt.

The Reservoir is a flexible, compact energy storage solution for AC or DC coupled systems. The 1.2 MW, 4 MWh Reservoir storage unit is the fundamental building block of the platform; it’s a modular solution that integrates GE’s Battery Blade (module stack) design. GE says its proprietary Blade Protection Unit (BPU) actively balances the safety, life and production of each battery blade, extending battery life by up to 15% and reducing fault currents by up to 5X.

The modular system has multiple installation and cabling options, including pad or pier, and is designed to minimize operation and maintenance (O&M) expenses over the life of the project with an all-weather design and high-efficiency cooling system. It is factory-built and -tested to reduce project installation time and costs.

The Reservoir platform also leverages Predix and Edge controls technologies to provide “data-driven insights that help energy operators enhance their systems”.

The sharing economy is growing feverishly worldwide. Whether ride-sharing, tool-sharing or home-sharing, there are new value streams and new benefits to participants never before envisioned. Energy markets are no exception and are experiencing similar community-oriented revolutions.

Over a decade ago, the first community renewable energy (aka shared renewable energy) programs emerged, enabling multiple energy customers to participate in and share the economic benefits of a wind or solar energy system. Today, more than 14 states have enabled shared renewable energy programs, and hundreds of utilities offer some form of community or shared renewable energy program to their customers. More recently, “community choice aggregation” has sprung to life as a compelling alternative for communities looking to drive more renewable and clean energy development.

The latest community energy model to make waves: community storage. What is it? Where is it? To what extent is it, or could it be, “shared?” And, what can we expect from this new brand of community energy in the future? In this article, we explore the concept of community storage, provide an overview of projects and programs across the country, and offer some important insights on the challenges and opportunities for this novel concept.

What does community storage mean?

Community energy storage is currently a concept without a precise definition. It could be said that an energy storage system is community storage if it is (1) located within a community with defined boundaries, (2) serves such a community or (3) both of these things. This definition will tend to exclude bulk or utility-scale energy storage serving the utility and/or ratepayers as a whole, and singular, behind-the-meter (BTM) storage systems that primarily serve the building or home to which they are connected. In theory, anything between these two use cases could be community storage.

(Reuters) – U.S. deployments of energy storage systems will nearly triple this year thanks to sharply lower costs and state policies that support the case for installing batteries in homes, businesses and along the power grid.

That forecasted growth of 186 percent to 1,233 megawatt-hours of storage from 431 MWh compares with the 27 percent increase in 2017, according to a report by GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association trade group published on Tuesday.

That’s in part because some large projects that had been expected for 2017 were pushed into the early months of 2018, but also because the market for batteries in homes and businesses is finally taking off, according to GTM analyst Ravi Manghani, who said that part of the market logged growth of 79 percent last year.

The growth in the use of batteries for electricity storage has been a boon to manufacturers such as Tesla Inc (TSLA.O), LG Corp (003550.KS) and others.

Storage system costs have fallen by roughly two thirds in the last five years, Manghani said. In addition, more states are mandating utilities procure storage systems.

The market for energy storage is still small, generating just $300 million in value last year, the report said. But batteries have long held the promise of solving the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, so their development is closely watched by investors, regulators and power companies. The market is expected to exceed $1 billion in 2019, the report said.

Energy storage is finally becoming a legitimate option for utilities, commercial-building owners, and homeowners across the country. The biggest opportunity in 2018 may be in the commercial market, where the combination of solar and storage can create a cost-savings combo that gives building operators a lot of flexibility to control their energy costs.

Commercial solar projects alone have always struggled to be justifiable financially, because commercial customers’ bills typically include a payment for the energy they consume (consumption charge) and another portion based on their peak demand (demand charge). Traditional solar net metering may only reduce half of a customer’s bill, but combining solar with energy storage can reduce the cost of both components on utility bills and makes a valuable combo for the renewable-energy industry.

A leader emerges in commercial solar-plus-storage solutions

Most commercial energy-storage projects in the U.S. have used stand-alone systems like Stem to provide energy-storage solutions. Tesla‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Powerpack was another popular product, but it wasn’t paired with SolarCity’s commercial solar product in a turnkey solution.

SunPower (NASDAQ:SPWR) is trying its hand at providing a one-stop-shop solution for commercial solar and energy storage, and has a good shot at leading the market. It has long been a leader in commercial solar: It has installed about 1.7 gigawatts of commercial projects around the world and claims the No. 1 market-share position in the U.S.

The turnkey Helix commercial solar solution is now being combined with a product called Helix Storage to make a full solution for customers. SunPower will sell the system as a turnkey solution to installers, and develop some systems itself with large corporate customers. Then SunPower will use its own software and monitoring to control the energy-storage system to generate value.

When installed, Helix Storage will reduce demand charges for customers and even store cheap solar energy for consumption when electricity prices are highest. SunPower says it can leverage the data it’s gathered from monitoring 1.7 GW of commercial solar installations to maximize the benefits of solar plus storage in a way competitors will have a hard time matching.

Bringing the solution under one roof will also help with financing. Until now, most commercial solar projects had to be financed separately from energy storage, making both tricky for developers. Bringing them together should make financing and financial justification easier.

The U.S. energy storage market is no longer in its infancy. According to GTM Research and the Energy Storage Association’s newly released U.S. Energy Storage Monitor 2017 Year in Review, 100 megawatt-hours of grid-connected energy storage were deployed in the fourth quarter of the year, marking 1,080 cumulative megawatt-hours deployed between 2013 and 2017.

Even more impressive, GTM Research expects that the U.S. market will almost double this total in 2018 alone, with more than 1,000 megawatt-hours of energy storage forecast to be deployed this year.

“We’re going to have to strike the word ‘nascent’ from our vocabularies when describing the U.S. energy storage market,” said Ravi Manghani, GTM Research’s director of energy storage. “Falling costs and favorable policies will be among the core drivers of the market’s breakout 2018. It’s not hard to imagine that every solar RFP by the end of the year will include storage.” ​

“The recent unanimous landmark decision issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is expected to lay the groundwork for the integration of energy storage technologies into the U.S. wholesale markets in a manner that compensates storage for the full range of value it is already capable of providing to the grid and end users,” said Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of ESA. “Policies and regulatory frameworks that level the playing field will further encourage energy storage deployment throughout 2018 and beyond as the industry builds toward a goal of realizing 35 GW by 2025.”

The U.S. energy storage market grew 27 percent in 2017, with 431 megawatt-hours deployed on the year. While the front-of-meter market made up the largest share of deployments, it was the behind-the-meter market that stole the show this year, growing 79 percent year-over-year with record deployments in both the residential and non-residential segments.