Nowadays, you may take batteries for granted, perhaps not thinking twice about just how useful they are, as they’ve always been a part of your life. The evolution of batteries has been monumental. So much so that this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry was jointly awarded to three scientists who invented our modern-day lithium-ion batteries.

However, as time passes, most inventions need to keep up and be updated. The search for the batteries of the future has started.

When the words “renewable energy” are uttered, your mind may automatically jump to solar panels, electric cars, and wind turbines. However, the actual batteries that run and store energy for these electric cars; for example, most likely do not come to mind.

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany is already working hard on discovering new methods for storing energy for future use. Storage plays a massive role in the world of sustainable batteries and their production.

At the moment, sustainable batteries come in the form of lithium-ion batteries, which power many devices, from our mobile phones and laptops to e-bikes. And in order for these types of batteries to function, lithium and cobalt are needed.

However, the day has now come when scientists are questioning the fair production of lithium-ion batteries. Furthermore, their disposal is an issue for many, with higher risks and problems associated with the current methods used.

Ultimately, the questions of how efficient these batteries are, and what new storage methods are being built around them are being posed. Questions that the KIT lecturers and researchers are attempting to answer.

There have already been attempts at creating alternative battery options — for instance, saltwater batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, and post-lithium technologies. But, there’s been little focus on how these future batteries would be efficiently stored.

In August 2019, the Japanese multinational holding firm SoftBank invested $110 million in Swiss company Energy Vault. It was a major boon for the company, which has a somewhat unique take on renewables: It stores potential energy through the use of stacked concrete blocks. Energy Vault will use the investment to build its first two full-scale models in Italy and India.

Energy Vault is only two years old, but has earned its investment through growing interest in energy storage. As renewables rise in use and their prices drop, energy storage is becoming increasingly crucial. Left to their own devices, energy sources like solar panels or wind turbines don’t run forever; solar panels can only produce electricity when the sun’s out, for example, while wind turbines only turn when there’s wind.

Enter storage methods like Energy Vault.

When solar panels in a field in Rome, for example, begin producing energy, they would siphon part of that energy off to a storage facility like Energy Vault. With that energy stored, the company could then run the energy when there was no wind or a cloudy day.

There are many ideas for renewable energy batteries. Energy Vault’s consists of an almost 400-foot tall, six-armed crane with custom-built concrete blocks weighing almost 35 metric tons each. As solar or wind energy is siphoned into an Energy Vault tower, an A.I. directs the concrete blocks to rise up. Then, according to the company’s website, the blocks are “returned to the ground and the kinetic energy generated from the falling brick is turned back into electricity.”

That kinetic energy then turns a motor, which passes through an inverter, sending the energy back into the grid. Energy Vault claims the process had a “round-trip efficiency between 80 to 90 [percent].”

Energy Vault says its tower design means it can scale up or down easily, based on a location’s needs. The company’s website discusses options of 20, 35, and 80 MWh storage capacity as well as anywhere between 4 to 8 MW of continuous power discharge for 8 to 16 hours. What drew investors to the idea in August was its simplicity.

Duke Energy has promised major investment in energy storage for its Carolina territory. It took another step toward substantiating that promise by designing a battery project to back up a South Carolina community center.

The 5-megawatt/5-megawatt-hour project, announced Monday, does not stand out among the much larger projects underway elsewhere in the country. Its significance lies instead in illustrating how a regulated utility builds up proficiency in battery storage. Many utilities now acknowledge storage will provide great value to the grid, but few have built it at scale.

The first step is accepting the body of evidence that quantifies the usefulness of storage for things like renewables integration, deferring wires infrastructure upgrades, delivering peak capacity and rapidly modulating frequency and power quality.

Duke took that step in a big way, deciding in its 15-year resource plan that 300 megawatts of storage, and possibly even more, would benefit customers. The public has little recognition of megawatt capacity, but the company helpfully translated that into a rough estimate of cold, hard cash: $500 million.

That would be quite a jump from the kilowatt-scale test projects Duke has actually completed in its Carolina service territory. But the utility has been pushing forward incrementally, winning regulatory approval for a 4-megawatt battery to power a solar microgrid in the remote western mountains of North Carolina and a 9-megawatt system to improve grid reliability in Asheville.

“We are also strategically making energy storage investments where they can deliver value for grid operations and as backup power for critical services provided in our communities,” Duke Energy spokesperson Ryan Mosier said in an email Monday.

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has begun Public Safety Power Shutdowns, with the first phase affecting just over 500,000 households, the second phase affecting 234,000, and the third phase affecting 4,000. Between 110,000 and 130,000 households have had their power turned back on. The below map, found on this address search website provided by PG&E, shows the regions affected. The company’s Twitter account shows available Community Resource Centers that will remain open during daylight hours with restrooms, bottled water, electronic-device charging, and a/c seating for up to 100.

This article will outline some potential solutions to keep electricity on while Public Safety Power Shutdowns are ongoing.

First, a warning – only a small, single digit percentage of the nation’s over 2 million solar power plants are designed to stay on when the broader power grid shuts down. This feature – called “anti-islanding” – was put in place to protect line workers from electrocution due to solar power systems feeding the grid during power outage events.

AC coupled energy storage

For those of you with a currently installed solar power system of the standard nature, it might be best to consider an AC-coupled energy storage solution. Solutions like this can be found by sonnen, Tesla, Sunrun and others. These solutions, when sized and installed appropriately, can run your home when the grid shuts down.

The sonnenbatterie by Sonnen – probably the most advanced energy storage management solution we have available to residential customers – offers 3 to 8 kW of instant power, and 5 to 15 kWh of energy storage in various products. The hardware has intelligence to predict when power outages might be coming, and manages itself to maximize available electricity. As well, you can program the system to shut down all plugs that aren’t considered mission critical.

The Tesla Powerwall is also in this class of products with its single offering that peaks at 5 kW power output, and 13.5 kWh of energy storage. Tesla recommends two units to meet daily consumption needs. This is because an average American home uses 30 kWh/day – so any of these units will have to be used judiciously. If a homeowner does in fact have solar power (and it isn’t needed for these units to run), then potentially, they can power themselves perpetually.

While the utility has more in store to upgrade the island’s electrical infrastructure, National Grid has started exploring the possibility of using “that battery for something else during the times it’s not used for contingency,” Wynter told Utility Dive.

The utility partnered with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to model and think through other applications for the storage, such as potentially bidding it into the ISO-New England markets. The lab is doing an “extensive amount of research on large scale transmission and battery networks,” Wynter said.

“They model things for us like the battery’s performance on the island … and how well we think we’re going to improve customer uptime because of this battery in place … and how can we model the use of this battery in providing frequency response and other services.”

Tesla declined a request for comment about the long-lasting battery’s applications.

There are two subsea cables bringing power from the mainland to Nantucket. A third cable would have meant close to a $200 million investment, Wynter said, compared to the $81 million hybrid solution.

“It’s not a long run [from mainland Massachusetts to Nantucket] but it is complex doing subsea cable,” Wynter said. “There’s substantial savings for customers.”

National Grid also replaced an older diesel generator on Nantucket with a 15 MW unit for a hybrid resilience solution.

“The whole system can operate almost in tandem,” to extend the eight-hour duration in case of subsea cable failures, Wynter said.

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has begun Public Safety Power Shutdowns, with the first phase affecting just over 500,000 households, the second phase affecting 234,000, and the third phase affecting 4,000. Between 110,000 and 130,000 households have had their power turned back on. The below map, found on this address search website provided by PG&E, shows the regions affected. The company’s Twitter account shows available Community Resource Centers that will remain open during daylight hours with restrooms, bottled water, electronic-device charging, and a/c seating for up to 100.

This article will outline some potential solutions to keep electricity on while Public Safety Power Shutdowns are ongoing.

First, a warning – only a small, single digit percentage of the nation’s over 2 million solar power plants are designed to stay on when the broader power grid shuts down. This feature – called “anti-islanding” – was put in place to protect line workers from electrocution due to solar power systems feeding the grid during power outage events.

AC coupled energy storage

For those of you with a currently installed solar power system of the standard nature, it might be best to consider an AC-coupled energy storage solution. Solutions like this can be found by sonnen, Tesla, Sunrun and others. These solutions, when sized and installed appropriately, can run your home when the grid shuts down.

The sonnenbatterie by Sonnen – probably the most advanced energy storage management solution we have available to residential customers – offers 3 to 8 kW of instant power, and 5 to 15 kWh of energy storage in various products. The hardware has intelligence to predict when power outages might be coming, and manages itself to maximize available electricity. As well, you can program the system to shut down all plugs that aren’t considered mission critical.

The Tesla Powerwall is also in this class of products with its single offering that peaks at 5 kW power output, and 13.5 kWh of energy storage. Tesla recommends two units to meet daily consumption needs. This is because an average American home uses 30 kWh/day – so any of these units will have to be used judiciously. If a homeowner does in fact have solar power (and it isn’t needed for these units to run), then potentially, they can power themselves perpetually.

SimpliPhi offers their battery solutions coupled with inverters from off-grid manufacturers – but these would have to be installed at the time of original install. However, they can be added in relatively simply as they come in a clean package.

The UK government has confirmed that energy storage systems will be eligible under the UK’s newly unveiled successor policy aimed at supporting the deployment of residential solar in the wake of feed-in tariff (FiT) cuts, but only if co-located with a participating renewable energy generator.

Draft guidance on the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG), long-awaited successor to the FiT as a means of paying customers for generating clean electricity, has been published by the regulator, Ofgem. Ofgem’s draft gave requirements for suppliers as well as the information generators will be required to provide in order to receive the SEG payments.

Energy suppliers are tasked with designing tariffs. By point of reference, a supplier that pre-emptively launched an export tariff plan earlier this year, Octopus Energy, has been offering two tariffs; a flat rate offering 5.5p (US$0.069) per kWh of exported electricity and a variable rate dubbed Agile Octopus.

Suppliers must take “all reasonable steps” to ensure information given to generators – that is, those with a solar, wind or hydro asset under 5MW – is accurate, capable of being easily understood, is not misleading and is fair, transparent, appropriate and delivered in “a professional manner”.

Written confirmation must also be provided to generators with details of the export tariff, as soon as reasonably practicable.

Suppliers must communicate the risks to a generator of failing to adhere to any terms of its contract, for example failing to provide the required data in a timely fashion, and as regards suspension or recoupment of SEG payments.

Suppliers must also outline the generator’s obligations for providing information, declarations and evidence to the supplier and authority as well as any consents required and a term requiring the generator to inform the supplier as soon as reasonable possible if there is a change of ownership or any extensions to an installation.

Reports of Eos’ aqueous zinc battery being paired with small modular nuclear reactors (SMNRs) in a joint venture (JV) with Holtec appear to have been greatly exaggerated, according to an Eos representative.

Eos formed the joint venture, called HI-POWER, with Holtec International and officially launched it in September. Using Eos’ proprietary battery manufacturing design automation and leveraging Holtec’s scale and three decades of manufacturing experience, a “state-of-the-art manufacturing facility” has been promised in Pittsburgh. An Eos press release referred to a “multi-gigawatt” JV being created.

As previously reported by Energy-Storage.news, Eos’ novel zinc hybrid cathode battery technology is priced into a system at US$160 per kWh for a 1MW / 4MWh grid-scale modular unit. Various test facilities have been deployed, including a 30kW / 120kWh DC-coupled system at utility Duke Energy’s McAlpine test facility in North Carolina.

“We are very much an energy battery, a longer duration, 4-6 hours is kind of our sweet spot, but we have flexibility to do higher power and we can always derate the power to do longer run-time,” Eos VP of sales, Phillipe Bouchard, told us at Solar Power International / Energy Storage International in Salt Lake City. The company also attracted former First Solar CEO Jim Hughes onto the board of directors in 2016.

“We started this partnership with Holtec over a year ago. We actually manufactured our 2.0 products out of their facility in Camden, New Jersey. So we were taking the dry battery, filling it with electrolyte, integrating it into a system, then shipping it out to our customers.

“With the gen 2.0 design, we deployed nine systems on four continents, anywhere from 1MWh-scale project and in that size range, including one in Brazil with ENGIE, which is a solar-storage-wind project with 1MWh of battery [storage].”

From here on in, Bouchard said, the JV is about “testing the product in our target use cases and in our target markets, generating really valuable data and kind of setting the stage for scale-up into much larger commercial projects.”

National Grid has issued an energy storage solicitation for 10 MW of bulk, front-of-the-meter storage and power marketer services that maximize the value of the storage in key locations in upstate New York.

The request for proposals (RFP) seeks distribution rights to energy storage that enhances grid reliability and resilience and contributes to achieving the state’s distributed, zero-carbon, renewable energy and climate change goals, according to the investor-owned utility.

Projects need to be able to reinforce distribution grid reliability during periods of peak demand. They also must participate in the New York Independent Systems Operator’s (NYISO) wholesale power market, or yield other revenue streams that offset costs. The goal is to reduce customers’ bills.

Four locations within National Grid territory

National Grid seek projects in four locations within the territory served by its subsidiary Niagara Mohawk Power: Old Forge, North Lakeville, Menands and the New York Independent System Operator – Zone F area.

Pre-qualification eligibility documents are due by October 31. Fully completed proposals are due by 5 p.m. December 20 and the projects need to be operational by Dec. 31, 2022.

The utility is carrying out the energy storage solicitation in accordance with the New York Public Service Commission order that requires investor-owned utilities to procure at least 10 MW of energy storage capacity so long as costs don’t exceed a ceiling defined by the utility (PSC Case 18-E-0130).

Winning projects may qualify for financial incentives and support that runs as long as seven years via the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s (NYSERDA) Bulk Storage Rights Contract program. Projects receive a fixed revenue stream, as well NYSERDA’s help maximizing distribution and wholesale system benefits for utility customers.