Legislation to help the US economy invest in clean energy jobs and support innovation and industry passed the House of Representatives this week – and Energy Storage Association (ESA) CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman applauded the prominent inclusion of energy storage in the bill.

Next stop for the Clean Economy Jobs and Innovation Act will be the upper house of US Congress, the Senate. The bill includes wide-ranging measures on: energy efficiency, renewable energy, carbon pollution reduction technologies, nuclear energy, the electric grid and cybersecurity, transportation, research and innovation, technology transfer, industrial innovation and competitiveness, critical materials and environmental justice.

Energy storage is mentioned prominently for its role in renewable energy, with the bill calling for consideration of energy storage systems and coordination of programmes in renewables integration, as well as the development of assistance programmes for energy storage and renewable-powered microgrid deployment.

Energy storage is also mentioned in the context of enhancing electric grid reliability and its relevance to the supply chain for critical raw materials – like Europe, the US has put lithium and other materials used in battery making onto a list of such materials.

“Today the U.S. House of Representatives moved definitively to elevate the priority of public innovation investments in energy storage. By passing H.R. 4447, the Clean Economy Jobs and Innovation Act, numerous bipartisan proposals for promoting energy storage are moving forward, including increasing R&D and demonstration investments in energy storage technology, integrating storage across all DOE Energy offices, assisting rural customers with storage for resilience, and incorporating storage into public investments in transportation electrification and workforce development,” Kelly Speakes-Backman of the national ESA said.

“ESA is pleased to support these efforts to ready the electric system for 21st century demands to provide resilient, efficient, sustainable, and affordable electric service. We encourage members of the Senate to swiftly advance their similar legislation this Congress.”

Mitsubishi Power has signed a deal to help decarbonize US utility Entergy’s businesses in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, writes Rod Walton.

A major part of the collaboration will be focused on hydrogen-fueled technologies. Hydrogen does not contain a carbon atom and can be produced via electrolysis fueled by renewable or carbon-free nuclear resources.

“New technologies and innovative solutions to the challenges posed by climate change present opportunities for us to significantly decrease carbon emissions from our generation portfolio while maintaining low rates.

“We are pleased to welcome Mitsubishi Power as a collaborative partner in developing strategies to integrate these new technologies and solutions that support us achieving our environmental and customer commitments.”

Together, Entergy and Mitsubishi Power will focus on developing hydrogen-capable gas turbine combined-cycle facilities, green hydrogen production, storage and transportation; creating nuclear-supplied electrolysis facilities with energy storage; and developing utility-scale battery storage systems.“For two decades, sustainability has been a priority for Entergy,” said Paul Hinnenkamp, Entergy’s chief operating officer and executive vice president. “We have pledged to conduct our business in a manner that is environmentally, socially and economically sustainable that will benefit all our stakeholders.

The electricity grid is undergoing its first evolution since the invention of the power transmission system, and energy storage devices, particularly mechanical energy storage devices, will play a solid role in this evolution.

Decarbonization, renewable energies, and energy storage devices are all factors involved in the current evolution of the electricity grid. In the last decades the integration of renewable energies, pushed by the necessity to decarbonize the electricity sector, led energy storage devices to become increasingly important to stabilize the electricity grid.

The increased adoption of variable renewable energy led the electricity grid operator to adopt energy storage systems to smoothen the variability of renewable sources.

Li-ion batteries, currently dominating the storage sectors in all of its aspects. From portable electronics to MW scale storage systems, Li-ion batteries will struggle in the future to address the MW scale power and daily storage duration, when Mechanical Energy Storage systems will enter the market.

In the brand-new report “Potential Stationary Energy Storage Technologies to Monitor”, IDTechEx has investigated these emerging technologies. With a simple working mechanism, Mechanical Energy Storage systems are addressing the bigger spectrum of the energy storage devices: large power output, and long storage time.

This new class of storage systems include older and newer technologies. It includes elderly technologies like compressed air energy storage, already installed in the 1980s, and some of the younger gravitational energy storage, like in the case of Highview Energy, and Energy Vault recently backed with millions of dollars.

On Tuesday, electric vehicle and battery manufacturer Tesla held its ‘Battery Day’, announcing its intention to halve the price of battery energy storage.

The company, which began in electric vehicle manufacturing, has become a leader in utility-scale energy storage supply. The company announced plans to build a new battery production plant in the US and to scale up cell production to produce 100GWh in 2022.

On an outdoor stage in California, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and senior vice-president of energy engineering Drew Baglino told shareholders about five technology innovations the company has moved into production to halve production costs.

Materials and components in batteries change to allow greater capacity

One of these measures involves the company ending its use of cobalt in batteries. Tesla joined the Fair Cobalt Alliance in September, and Musk said the company has had difficulty in finding ethical and responsible sources for the metal. However, it did not give an estimated timescale for the change.

Cobalt is a suitable metal for stabilising energy flows in mid-tier batteries. However, a paper in the Journal of the Electrochemical Society suggests that cobalt has a negligible effect in higher energy, high-nickel batteries.

Baglino told shareholders: “Using novel coatings and dopants, we can get a 15% reduction in cathode cost per kilowatt-hour. We are also looking at the processing costs for cathodes. About 35% of the cost per unit of storage comes from transforming the battery metals into their final form.

“We’re proposing a process that requires 66% less capital investment and a 76% reduction in processing cost.”

A ‘three-tier system’ for Tesla battery vehicles

Musk continued: “In order to scale, we need to make sure we are not constrained by total nickel availability. I think we need a three-tiered approach to batteries, starting with iron as a medium-range battery, then nickel-manganese above that, then high-nickel for long-range applications.

We take a look at six start-ups creating energy storage technology for a variety of purposes and with the support of a large range of investors.

This week, Tesla’s highly anticipated Battery Day event took place, signalling what the future of mainstream electric vehicle (EV) batteries could look like.

While Tesla is one of the most prominent players in the energy storage sector, there’s an abundance of start-ups out there trying to build the next best technologies for a variety of different applications, from heating homes to powering EVs.

This week, we shine a light on just a small selection of the numerous start-ups developing interesting energy storage solutions.

Advano

Founded in 2014, Advano is a New Orleans-based energy storage start-up that focuses on combining nanotechnology with chemical engineering principles. Since launching six years ago, the company has attracted investment from Y Combinator, DCVC, Future Shape and the Mitsui Kinzoku-SBI Material Innovation Fund.

The firm was co-founded by Alexander Girau and Shiva Adireddy, with the goal of increasing the energy density of lithium-ion batteries by 30-40pc without sacrificing battery life or increasing the cost of batteries. The company’s batteries are designed for use in IoT devices, consumer electronics and EVs.

Advano recognises that EVs have not yet been able to overcome the burden of cost versus range limitations. The start-up believes that a step-up change in performance will be possible thanks to one of the most abundant resources on earth, silicon. With silicon, Advano aims to make batteries with thinner electrodes for higher energy density, in place of graphite.

A team of researchers at the University of Newcastle has come up with a way to keep the lights on at thousands of coal power plants across the globe. Wait, it’s not what you think! They mean keeping the lights on at retired coal power plants. Those old power plants may be dead to coal, but they are still parked on many dollars worth of land, turbine equipment, and grid infrastructure, which means they could make suitable locations for large scale energy storage systems.

This New Energy Storage System Looks Like Bricks, Acts Like High Tech Battery
The Newcastle energy storage system basically consists of bricks that can hold energy in the form of heat, then discharge it to run steam turbines at retired coal power stations. Or, for that matter, at any power station.

The thermal storage approach is a bit different from battery-type systems, which hold an electrical charge. Thermal storage can also involve more simplicity in engineering and a longer span of charge-discharge cycles, which generally translates into lower costs.

If you’re wondering why nobody ever thought of storing thermal energy in bricks before, well, they have. A lot. The issue is efficiency. Until recent years, the state of materials science did not allow for fabricating bricks that can act as highly efficient batteries.

The Newcastle breakthrough involves a new two-component material they call MGA, for Miscibility Gaps Alloy.

Without giving too much away, the head of the research team, Professor Erich Kisi, explains that the team has “sourced abundant and readily available starting ingredients for our block so that it can be produced at a very low cost to accommodate for the scale of energy storage that’s required – they are 10 per cent of the cost of a lithium battery of the same size, yet produce the same amount of energy.”

“It offers near to 100 per cent conversion of electricity to heat and the lowest levelised cost of storing electricity – a measure of the total lifecycle cost of a facility compared to the amount of energy it is capable of storing,” Professor Kisi adds.

To ice the sustainability cake, Newcastle states that the blocks consist of “non-toxic, 100 per cent recyclable material so there is no risk of explosion or combustion in hazardous environments.”