New York’s vision for cleaner a more distributed utility grid will rely heavily on energy storage, and last week regulators took two steps to help grow the resource.

The commission in a statement explained that the new rules for Con Edison “significantly increase” energy storage technologies’ ability to export power to the utility’s primary and secondary voltage distribution systems. According to PSC Chairman John Rhodes, the new rules crafted a more straightforward process to allow private energy storage systems to export electricity to ConEd’s distribution system.

In the commission’s second decision, regulators increased the maximum-rated capacity for storage projects from 2 MW to 5 MW. The change boasted support from several stakeholders including the Natural Resources Defense Fund, Pace Energy and Climate Center, Solar Energy Industries Association and Vote Solar.

The decision comes as Cuomo is targeting 1.5 GW of storage by 2025. But observers say the final number could be even higher, and will likely use 2030 as a target year to remain aligned with the 50% renewables goal set in its the state’s Clean Energy Standard.

To achieve the storage goal, the PSC and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority are developing an Energy Storage Roadmap. Commission staff are expected to release the report for comment in the second quarter.

Researchers have claimed a breakthrough in energy storage technology that could enable electric cars to be driven as far as petrol and diesel vehicles, and recharge in minutes rather than hours.

Teams from Bristol University and Surrey University developed a next-generation material for supercapacitors, which store electric charge and can be replenished faster than normal batteries.

This could allow cars to recharge in 10 minutes, rather than the eight hours it can take to replenish the lithium-ion batteries in current electric vehicles.

The technology has sufficient energy density to comfortably surpass the 200 to 350-mile ranges of leading battery-powered cars such as Teslas, according to its backers.

Dr Donald Highgate, the director of research at Superdielectrics – a company that worked with the universities on the research, said: “It could have a seismic effect on energy, but it’s not a done deal.”

Supercapacitors have existed for decades and can store and release power rapidly. Tesla’s Elon Musk has said a breakthrough in transportation is more likely to come from supercaps than batteries.

Superdielectrics was originally developing a polymer that could be transparent and hold electronic circuits for potential use in Google Glass-style applications.

But after realising the energy storage capabilities of the material, it changed tack in 2014 and has produced 10cm² demonstrations that can power a tiny fan or LED bulb.

There are drawbacks to the technology, however. If you left a supercap car for a month at an airport car park, it would have lost much of its charge by the time you returned, the researchers admitted. For this reason, they expect the first such cars to also have a small conventional battery.

The Bristol-Surrey teams believe the polymer they are using could be more energy-dense than lithium ion, holding 180 watt-hours per kilogram compared with 100W⋅h/kg-120W⋅h/kg for commercial lithium ion.

LONDON, Feb. 26, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Frost & Sullivan’s latest analysis, European DC Power Distribution Market, Forecast to 2025, finds the market is expected to reach $40.1 million in 2025 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31.2% over the forecast period 2017-2025, driven by the increasing integration of solar photovoltaic system (PV) and energy storage in residential and commercial buildings. Despite combined savings opportunities from direct current (DC)-powered LED lighting and energy efficiency regulations and targets, the market is challenged by strong barriers such as existing AC infrastructures and lack of DC-ready end-user products.

“The United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Nordic countries will witness faster growth than other countries due to energy efficiency renovations and successful pilot project implementations,” said Anirudh Bhaskaran, Energy & Environment Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “Office, retail, and industrial warehouses will be immediate targets with LED lighting serving as the gateway for participants to enter the DC power distribution market.”

The analysis provides an assessment of disruptive trends and technologies, drivers and restraints, market share, and competitive analysis of significant players such as Siemens, Schneider Electric, ABB, Bosch, and Legrand. Revenue forecast by country and end-user vertical are also provided.

Strategic imperatives for success and growth include:

• DC-powered LED lighting and USB-C complied electronic products are critical for successful implementation of DC power distribution in homes and commercial buildings;
• Distributed energy sources and LED lighting are key growth opportunities for participants to create additional revenue in this highly emerging market;
• Using LED lighting as a test bed for implementing DC power distribution in buildings due to its scalability and economic feasibility;
• Focusing on buildings installed with solar PV and battery energy storage to convert full AC into hybrid AC-DC infrastructures;
• Partnerships between end-use product manufacturers and DC infrastructure suppliers for the adoption of DC power distribution; and
• Collaboration between governments, industry associations, and manufacturers to promote and accelerate DC power distribution in buildings.

If New Jersey is going to achieve the Murphy administration’s ambitious clean-energy goals, storing the energy created by renewable power sources such as solar and wind will be crucial.

To that end, a controversial nuclear subsidy bill up for consideration today in committees and posted for a vote on Monday in the state Senate also sets goals of 600 megawatts of energy storage by 2021, and 2,000 megawatts by 2030.

Few are asking whether the energy-storage targets are achievable, even though the industry is just starting to deploy the technology, or what the costs could be, which are almost certain to be partly borne by utility customers.

But there is widespread consensus that energy storage not only makes intermittent sources of power like solar and wind more reliable — the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow — but also offers other benefits to ratepayers in the long run.

Meeting peak demand

With extensive commercial energy storage available, the power grid will no longer need large reserve margins of power ready to provide when electric needs peak, nor will there be as much need for expensive “peaker” plants, according to Paul Patterson, an energy analyst with Glenrock Associates.

That means cheaper costs to electric customers, predicted Doug O’Malley, director of Environment New Jersey, who calls energy storage the forgotten child of the clean-energy revolution. “It will benefit ratepayers in the long term.”

But only if policymakers work out kinks in the regulatory system here in New Jersey that have frustrated state efforts to move the technology, which uses batteries to store energy produced by a wide array of sources, forward.

Three years ago, the state Board of Public Utilities gave out $3 million in grants to 13 projects to build energy storage alongside renewable energy facilities. None moved forward, caught up in a regulatory barrier imposed by PJM Interconnection, the operator of the regional power grid, according to Peter Peretzman, a spokesman for the state agency.

If storage is the Swiss army knife of the electric grid, then U.S. energy regulators are breaking out their tool belts.

Last week brought a historic ruling at FERC. Commissioners told regional grid operators to create rules valuing the grid services of energy storage. Will it screw natural gas peakers — or maybe cut, saw, file, prune, hook or crimp them?

Later in the podcast, infrastructure redux. The White House’s infrastructure plan is out. When it comes to energy, the Trump administration is making pipelines a priority, and largely bypassing clean energy.

We’re heading down to Mexico for our final segment. GTM was there for our solar summit last week, and we’ll share a bit of insight into the forces behind one of the hottest — and cheapest — solar markets in the world.

The InterSolar North American exhibit kicks off in San Francisco on July 10 this year. InterSolar is the global organization that brings everyone interested in solar power together to network and learn about the latest trends in the industry.

This year, a lot of the exhibitors and attendees will be talking about energy storage technology. According to GTM Research’s Energy Storage Monitor report for the fourth quarter of 2017, storage is the fastest growing segment of the solar market.

There are two basic types of energy storage – front of the meter, commonly known as grid-scale storage, and behind the meter, in which individual property owners and businesses make use of storage options installed on their own premises to better manage onsite solar systems and take advantage of lower utility rates available when demand for electricity is low. GTM reports that many more utility companies are beginning to include energy storage in their long-term planning.

All across America, states are making integrated resource planning a requirement for utility companies, or the companies themselves are including energy storage options in the rate proposals they are submitting to state regulatory agencies.

Looking down the road, GTM Research sees battery storage growing nearly tenfold in the next 5 years, from 295 megawatts in 2017 to 2.5 gigawatts in 2022, of which almost half is projected to be “behind the meter.”

Grid-scale energy storage allows utility companies to even out the flow of electricity sloshing around the utility grid. It will be a vital part of converting the utility industry from one in which a few large generating stations supply power to millions of customers spread over hundred of miles into one that features thousand of power producers who share their electricity locally.

That shift will usher in the era of many smaller microgrids linked by a few long-distance interconnecting transmission lines, which will reduce the cost of building and maintaining such a large energy grid with its many substations and transformers.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last week unanimously approved an order that could prove to be a landmark in the development of energy storage.

FERC’s order “opens the floodgates for storage participation” in wholesale power markets, Ravi Manghani, director of energy storage at GTM Research, said.

Order 841 directs operators of wholesale markets — Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) and Independent System Operators (ISOs) — to come up with market rules for energy storage to participate in the wholesale energy, capacity and ancillary services markets that recognize the physical and operational characteristics of the resource.

A level playing field

“The rules will codify mechanisms that will establish a level playing field that, ideally, is relatively comparable across regions,” Daniel Finn-Foley, senior energy storage analyst at GTM Research, told Utility Dive.

FERC specifies that those rules must:

• Ensure that a storage resource can provide all the services it is technically capable of providing,
• Ensure that an energy storage resource can be dispatched and can set market clearing prices as both a buyer and a seller,
• Account for the physical and operational characteristics of storage resources through bidding parameters or other means,
• Establish a minimum size for participation in RTO/ISO markets that does not exceed 100 kW, and
• Specify that the sale of electricity from the RTO/ISO markets to a storage resource that the resource resells must be at the wholesale locational marginal price.

FERC gave RTOs and ISOs nine months to file tariffs that comply with the order and another year to implement those tariff provisions.

Finn-Foley called the FERC rules “a starting point” for the development of energy storage projects in wholesale markets. “It is as if the industry has had one hand tied behind its back,” Finn-Foley said.

The government of Jordan has given parties interested in delivering a 30MW energy storage system in the Kingdom six months to come up with technical and financial offers.

Following a July 2017 Request for Submissions of Interest (REOI), issued by the country’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (MEMR) on which it was advised by Fichtner, in late December the ministry qualified 23 interested parties to submit further details of their proposals, from a field of 41 interested companies.

The REOI called for the development of energy storage projects in two phases, with the first to be a 30MW / 60MWh electricity storage plant, at a substation in Ma’an currently used to integrate the output of several PV plants onto the grid. The second phase’s scope and size is to be determined.

The phase one plant would be used for ramp-rate control of PV and wind power generators in the local area, to reduce the amount of thermal generation required for spinning reserve and to shift renewable energy generated off-peak to times of peak demand, limiting the amount of grid curtailment required.

Jordan’s National Electric Power Company (NEPC) would be in charge of dispatching power from the plant based on the grid’s requirements while the project company would be operating the plant for 15 years. Phase one is pencilled for completion by April 2019.

National newspaper Jordan Times reported that it had spoken this week with MEMR minister Saleh Kharabsheh, who confirmed that a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed with the 23 bidding companies for implementing the project, which it is estimated will cost US$40 million.

Last week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved a rule to foster the development of energy storage, a vastly improved form of generation we think will be fundamental in supporting a grid congested with variable power supplies.

FERC Order 841 will “enhance competition and promote greater efficiency in the nation’s electric wholesale markets, and will help support the resilience of the bulk power system,” the commission said.

The order enables energy storage resources to compete in wholesale power markets and levels the playing field with conventional sources of generation. It removes barriers to participate in capacity, energy, and ancillary services markets administered by Regional Transmission Organizations (RTO) and Independent System Operators (ISO) by recognizing the “physical and operational characteristics” of the resource.

The order comes more than a year after FERC concluded the rules governing the wholesale purchase of conventional sources of generation barred energy storage from participating in the markets offered by RTOs and ISOs.

This may be the beginning of a boon in the development of utility-scale storage in the U.S., and will thus lead to greater efficiency. That’s because energy storage can absorb and store electricity produced by wind and solar power projects for later use when demand is higher. What’s more, further decline in the cost of energy storage is highly likely as development accelerates.

The new order, however, does not include aggregated distributed energy resources (DER), despite demands to give DERs the ability to participate in wholesale markets. FERC said it wanted to gather more information before eliminating the barriers preventing DERs from competing in wholesale markets.

A Public Necessity

Energy storage projects using rechargeable batteries will give grid managers the solutions they need to fill production gaps created by sharp fluctuations in wind and solar power. The ability to supply utility-scale power on demand will be key to ensuring reliability and achieving integration amid this renewable revolution.

A little over a month ago, we reported that Cuberg was a potential candidate for Boeing’s HorizonX Venture project in order to further its electric airplanes (e-plane) ambitions. The company announced it had agreed to purchase the Californian-based energy solution maker.

Boeing understands all too well that it needs to kickstart its battery development into high gear if it wants to cement its presence as one of the electric aerospace giants of the future. In order to prove it was serious about e-planes, it announced its first investment of the energy storage company Cuberg.

Spun off from a Stanford University research project and backed by several financing rounds and grant funding, the Berkeley startup was aiming at the next-generation battery technology for potential aerospace and industrial applications three years ago. The company focused its efforts on developing advanced battery cell designs that could generate high-energy density with a lithium metal anode, high-voltage cathode, and a proprietary electrolyte. All of this is forced through a high-voltage cathode for high energy density and resilient thermal qualities. Cuberg now hopes to use this as a drop-in solution to existing large-scale battery manufacturing processes.

And speaking of Boeing, guess what this ties into?

According to Steve Nordlund, vice president of Boeing HorizonX: “Cuberg’s battery technology has some of the highest energy density we’ve seen in the marketplace, and its unique chemistries could prove to be a safe, stable solution for future electric air transportation.” That means the previous Boeing investment in the Zunum Aero project we wrote about before means using an electric aircraft is closer than we expect.

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