New battery technologies and innovations are paving the way.
The phrases “turning winds” and a “a new sun rising” are often used to describe change, and these metaphors could not be more appropriate in describing our energy system today, as the wind and sun themselves are driving the transformation. Even the casual energy observer has noticed that the Texas wind rush is on. Texas by far has the most wind capacity installed than any other state and solar is gearing up for a red hot run in the coming years.

Wind and solar are powerful forces in their own right, mainly given their ever lower costs and their rare ability to provide some long-term stability in a turbulent world. The U.S., including Texas, has deployed large numbers of wind turbines and solar panels and deployment will continue to grow. But once another emerging technology — cheap energy storage — shows up, they might very well explode onto the landscape. That is on the verge of happening.

You can’t make the sun shine at will or the wind blow when it doesn’t want to. Thus, in that regard, these technologies have earned some fair skepticism. The past and current strategy has generally been to use other dispatchable power plants and flexible demand to help respond to variability in wind and solar output when balancing supply and demand on the grid.

This strategy has largely worked because there have been plenty of dispatchable power plants available and the Texas electricity market — the best, most competitive and efficient in the world — makes sure they are compensated fairly for their services. Today, we are much better at predicting changes in wind and solar output and thus are in a much better position to manage them. Wind and solar deliver energy at some of the lowest costs of any source and new technologies keep making them cheaper and easier.

Cheap energy storage is often seen as the “holy grail” technology that forms, along with solar and wind, an “energy trinity” that ushers us into the promised land of clean, cheap, and abundant resources. None of these technologies are particularly new. The energy in wind has been harvested to grind grain or lift water for hundreds of years the first U.S. patent on a device to generate electricity from the sun was awarded in the late 1800s, and the first rechargeable battery was developed even before that.

A US utility is to trial a new battery storage technology that promises to deliver the holy grail of a grid based around wind and solar – ultra long storage of up to 150 hours that could revolutionise the way the storage technology is used and deployed.

Great River Energy – a major non-for-profit energy co-operative based in Minnesota – is teaming with Form Energy, a battery storage technology developer backed by Bill Gates, Australia’s Macquarie Capital, and others, to install a first-of-its-kind demonstration of Form’s unique “aqueous air flow” battery with ultra long storage.

The battery pilot will be a 1MW/150MWh, grid-connected storage system capable of delivering its rated power of one megawatt continuously for 150 hours, part of a broader plan to retire Great River’s main generator, a 1,151MW coal unit, and replace it with wind and ultimately battery storage and make 95 per cent of its power emissions free.

And while the battery component of this Great River Energy plan is relatively minor, if the pilot proves successful at delivering super-long duration and low cost storage, the implications for the electricity industry will be enormous.

Most big batteries currently in use in Australia and across the world are based on lithium-ion technologies, and often have very short storage time frames because they are used primarily to deliver super-fast, accurate and flexible grid services such as frequency control and inertia.

Even when used for storing wind and solar, the storage times are usually no more than four hours, beyond which it is presumed that pumped hydro has the cost advantage.

Form Energy was created three years ago by a group comprising a team from MIT, former Tesla battery leader Mateo Jaramillo, and Ted Wiley, a co-founder of Aquion. Its goal is build “ultra low cost” batteries with super long storage durations that would allow grid operators to store energy for seasonal storage, rather than just minutes and hours.

Last week, Tina Casey wrote about the agreement between Form Energy and Great River Energy that will see a 1 MW/150 MWh aqueous air battery installed and operational sometime in 2023. What is an aqueous air battery? No one knows much about the technology and the company is being very tight-lipped about it.

The question is whether it will supplant lithium-ion storage batteries from Tesla and others for grid-scale energy storage. Tesla has been very active in providing lithium-ion battery storage systems to utility companies. From Kauai to Samoa and South Australia, its battery installations have proven cost effective and reliable, often paying for themselves more quickly than anyone thought possible.

Tesla has also pioneered virtual power plants in Vermont and South Australia that network hundreds or even thousands of home storage batteries so they can provide backup electricity to home owners while simultaneously helping to stabilize the local grid. Recently, Tesla signaled its intent to expand its energy business by applying for a license to become a recognized generator of electricity in the UK.

But so far, most lithium-ion grid-scale storage facilities are not able to supply electricity to the grid for more than 2 to 4 hours. The Form Energy system promises energy storage that lasts days. It also appears to be significantly cheaper than conventional lithium-ion batteries.

What Is Form Energy?
Form Energy is a tech startup founded by Mateo Jaramillo, who used to work at Tesla Energy. He is joined by Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science at MIT; Ted Wiley, who co-founded the salt water battery company Aquion; Billy Woodford, formerly of 24M; and Marco Ferarra, who holds a Ph.D from MIT.

The company has raised over $50 million in funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the clean energy incubator backed by Bill Gates; Eni Next, the corporate venture capital arm of the Italian energy firm Eni Spa; and The Engine, MIT’s investment program. It has been operating in stealth mode until now.

What Is An Aqueous Air Battery?
We know CleanTechnica readers, being unusually well informed and technically sophisticated, will demand to know the technical details of the aqueous air battery. Unfortunately, almost nothing is known about it at this time. As PV Magazine observes, “The term, ‘aqueous air battery system’ leaves us little more informed about the startup’s technology than when it was stealthed.” Aqueous is defined as “of or containing water, typically as a solvent or medium,” which brings to mind the salt water battery technology once touted by Aquion.

The Energy Storage Digital Series, an online-only conference and webinar series, produced and hosted by the events division of our publisher Solar Media kicked off yesterday. Here are some highlights and key quotes from opening panel discussion: Predicting the energy storage tech of the future.

You can still sign up to join the rest of the sessions – free of charge – and you can also watch sessions from previous days on demand.

Predicting the energy storage tech of the future

A panel moderated by Clean Horizon head of market analysis Corentin Baschet featured Dr Billy Wu, energy technologies and systems expert and senior lecturer at Imperial College, a London University, alongside Matt Allen, CEO and co-founder of UK-based project developer Pivot Power and Jim Stover, who is chief marketing officer at VRB Energy, a vanadium flow battery manufacturer based in North America with a subsidiary company in China.

While a poll found that the event’s viewers believe that lithium-ion will continue to be the technology that dominates the industry still in three to five years’ time – a finding that came as no surprise to any of the panellists – there’s still a lot of scope for other technologies to complement lithium in today’s market and the future may see other options coming to the fore.

Imperial College’s Billy Wu said that hydrogen is finally starting to be seen as a potential mainstream contender, partly due to its versatility in being applicable for heat when added to the gas grid and for producing electricity through fuel cells. Wu said that every year felt like it got closer to the year that hydrogen can break through. There could also be a knock-on beneficial impact for flow batteries in terms of cost reduction if this became the case, Wu said, as electrolysers and flow batteries are likely to share many of the same components.

All of the above, but in intelligently designed proportions
While lithium-ion has obviously enjoyed the ongoing effect of scaled-up manufacturing through its use in consumer electronics and more recently electric vehicles, VRB Energy’s Jim Stover argued that the cost reduction curve of vanadium flow batteries has really only begun. VRB believes it can achieve cost reductions of around 10% to 15% with each doubling of manufacturing capacity, Stover said. Stover also played up the possible non-financial advantages of vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs): they are non-flammable and, partly due to the fact they use liquid electrolyte storing the power in tanks separate from the battery cell stack where power is generated, are not expected to suffer the same problem of cell degradation as is seen in lithium-ion energy storage.

The nation’s sprawling network of rural electric cooperatives has become a hotbed of clean tech innovation, and the latest example is a doozy. The Minnesota-based co-op Great River Energy is teaming with the somewhat mysterious Bill Gates-backed energy storage startup Form Energy to build a new battery that can discharge for 150 hours. That beats conventional batteries by a mile and it practically guarantees that wind and solar will dominate the US energy landscape in a few short years. The big question is, how does it work?

Energy Storage For Rural Electric Cooperatives…Socialism!
For those of you new to the topic, rural electric cooperatives were established as not-for-profit entities under federal law in 1933 to electrify rural America, at a time when 90% of rural homes still had no electricity. The unique status of rural co-ops enables them to experiment with new technology to a degree that would be impractical for conventional utilities.

So, now they are on a mission to bring wind power, solar power, and advanced energy storage to their service territories.

Great River Energy is a case in point. The co-op is already engaged in several clean tech initiatives including a “virtual thermal battery” that networks thousands of individual hot water heaters. The new Form Energy battery rockets their efforts into a whole new level.

A hint as to how the new energy storage system will impact Great River’s portfolio popped up just yesterday, when the co-op announced that it is slamming the door on its massive coal power plant in North Dakota in about two years and replacing it with new wind farms.

As for influence, Great River is the umbrella for 28 other co-ops that serve 700,000 households, farms, and businesses. That’s peanuts compared to the combined might of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. The organization counts about 900 electric co-ops on its membership rolls, serving 42 million people in a combined service territory that accounts for more than half of the nation’s land mass.

Not only that, but NRECA is a founding member of this thing called NRTC, which is bringing the renewable energy revolution to the rural telecommunications field.

Form Energy, a secretive, long-duration energy storage startup funded by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and other investors is unstealthing — sort of.

The company has revealed that its fundamental energy storage technology is an “aqueous air battery system” that “leverages some of the safest, cheapest, most abundant materials on the planet” in order to commercially deploy a 1 MW/150 MWh long-duration storage solution.

Typical lithium ion battery storage systems provide four hours of storage compared to Form’s remarkable of 150 hours of storage. It’s not exactly the “seasonal” storage that Mateo Jaramillo, CEO of Form Energy, had spoken of in the past — but it’s a few orders of magnitude better than what can be done today.

(Although the term, “aqueous air battery system,” leaves us little more informed about the startup’s technology than when it was stealthed.)

The CEO, an energy storage veteran, has referred to the company’s product as a “bi-directional power plant” and claims that this level of duration allows for “a fundamentally new reliability function to be provided to the grid from storage, one historically only available from thermal generation resources.”

The first project

Form Energy’s first commercial project is a 1 MW, grid-connected storage system capable of delivering its rated power continuously for 150 hours with Minnesota-based utility Great River Energy.

Great River Energy is a not-for-profit wholesale electric power cooperative that provides electricity to 28 member-owner distribution cooperatives, serving 700,000 families, farms and businesses. It’s Minnesota’s second-largest electric utility.

“Commercially viable long-duration storage could increase reliability by ensuring that the power generated by renewable energy is available at all hours to serve our membership. Such storage could be particularly important during extreme weather conditions that last several days. Long-duration storage also provides an excellent hedge against volatile energy prices,” said Great River Energy VP Jon Brekke, in a release.

Form Energy, which is developing what it calls ultra-low-cost, long-duration energy storage for the grid, has signed a contract with the Minnesota-based Great River Energy to develop a 1 megawatt, 150 megawatt hour pilot project.

The second-largest electric utility in the U.S., Great River Energy’s installation in Cambridge, Minn. will be the first commercial deployment of the venture-backed battery technology developer’s long-duration energy storage technology.

From Energy’s battery system is significant for its ability to deliver 1 megawatt of power for 150 hours — a huge leap over the lithium ion batteries currently in use for most grid-scale storage projects. Those battery systems can last for two- to four-hours.

The step change in the duration of energy delivery should allow energy storage projects to replace the peaking power plants that rely on coal and natural gas to smooth demand on the grid.

“Long duration energy storage solutions will play an entirely different role in a clean electricity system than the conventional battery storage systems being deployed at scale today,” said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University who studies low-carbon energy systems engineering, in a statement. “Lithium-ion batteries are well suited to fast bursts of energy production, but they run out of energy after just a few hours. A true low-cost, long-duration energy storage solution that can sustain output for days, would fill gaps in wind and solar energy production that would otherwise require firing up a fossil-fueled power plant. A technology like that could make a reliable, affordable 100% renewable electricity system a real possibility,”

Backed with over $49 million in venture financing from investors including MIT’s The Engine investment vehicle; Eni Next, the corporate venture capital arm of the Italian energy firm Eni Spa, and the Bill Gates-backed sustainability focused investment firm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Form Energy has developed a new storage technology called an “aqueous air” battery system.

“Our vision at Form Energy is to unlock the power of renewable energy to transform the grid with our proprietary long-duration storage. This project represents a bold step toward proving that vision of an affordable, renewable future is possible without sacrificing reliability,” said Mateo Jaramillo, the chief executive of Form Energy, in a statement.

Integrated solar solutions company Q CELLS has officially launched a home solution that promises a “100% sustainable power supply,” through combining solar and battery storage to meet the majority of demand and a digital cloud solution to cover the rest.

Now available in Germany and expected to be “shortly” rolled out into other markets, the Q CELLS Q.HOME Cloud can either be added to new solar PV systems or retrofitted to existing systems. Customers can basically use the Cloud to connect to renewable energy generation in Germany and Austria and use it to source the remaining portion of energy that their solar-plus-battery system is unable to provide. The company says it adjusts the available and expected quota of energy to meet the size and location installation of each solar system and storage unit, claiming in a release sent today that “every customer receives a tailor-made, transparent and fair cloud solution”.

The early days of solar energy becoming a popular choice for homeowners in Germany and much of the rest of the world saw PV systems feed energy directly into the grid and the homeowner paid for the electricity in the form of feed-in tariffs (FiTs). Increasingly, feed-in tariff policies are ending or the sums paid are falling in price as governments phase FiTs out, making the self-consumption of solar energy the logical choice, partly enabled by the falling cost of home battery storage.

While residential solar and storage purchases are often an environmental decision or a decision made of the desire for energy dependence, in parts of the world where electricity is expensive, self-consumption can offer an opportunity to get system payback over time.

In some parts of the world including Germany, system owners can still receive some FiTs – albeit at reduced prices than before – for feeding surplus energy into the grid once their battery is full. In Japan, for example, new rules expected to come into effect in the next few years will stipulate that self-consumption must be achieved and only the surplus after demand is met can receive the feed-in tariff.

Beside a sprawling solar panel factory in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou stands a drab two-storey building that few people ever enter. Inside, stark rows of batteries store cheap electricity while the city sleeps each night. In the morning, when energy use and prices go up, the batteries release their power to the factory next door, reducing its electricity bill.

When this demonstration project started operating in 2017, it was a proof of concept for energy storage, an industry that was about to receive explicit support from the national government and which seemed sure to grow alongside renewable energy for decades to come.

Two-and-a-half years later, stalling reform, shifting policy and a slowing economy had put the sector in crisis even before the coronavirus pandemic struck. “It’s gotten very difficult to do energy storage,” says Paul Man, general manager of Anxin, an energy storage company, which is part of the Golden Concord energy conglomerate that owns the Suzhou solar panel factory. “If government policy doesn’t change, energy storage won’t be doable in China.”

According to industry group China Energy Storage Alliance (CNESA), newly installed battery-powered storage capacity shrank by nearly a quarter year-on-year in 2019. Companies whose sole business is energy storage “are under enormous pressure to survive, regardless of the epidemic,” says Wang Si, senior policy research manager at CNESA. “Some smaller companies will go bankrupt.”

Energy storage is, in theory, an attractive proposition. It can help keep down the energy costs of businesses and improve an electricity grid’s stability and flexibility. On a larger scale, energy storage will be crucial in moving countries from predictable but polluting fuels like coal to fickle but climate-friendly alternatives. In times with little wind or sunshine, giant batteries can keep the lights on. The Suzhou facility, at 10 megawatt-hours, has the capacity to power 1,600 homes for a day.

After the Chinese government gave official support in October 2017 by releasing its first national policy document on energy storage, newly installed electrochemical – battery-powered – energy storage capacity surged from 120.9 megawatts in 2017 to 682.9 megawatts in 2018, according to figures from CNESA. (There are various other storage technologies, but batteries receive the most interest for their flexibility in scale and location.)