I’m back with my yearly list of predictions for the rooftop solar industry. I did OK on last year’s predictions, only completely whiffing on two.

This year, I’m combining my solar predictions with storage, since battery storage is rapidly becoming integrated with PV systems.

1. U.S. solar cell manufacturing won’t restart anytime soon

Billions of dollars in long-term investments are required to achieve large-scale production of the next generation of high-efficiency solar cells. With the right solar industrial policies in place, the cell industry can indeed recover, and bring along associated panel and component manufacturing. Unfortunately, implementing policies to support these investments does not seem to be a priority in Washington, D.C.

2. The panel shortage will not mitigate until the end of Q2

The threat of tariffs is already causing a panel shortage. It takes about a month to finalize and ship orders to a port, and another month to ship containers from overseas — assuming panels are in stock. Without solar panels there can be no completed systems, so there will be a commensurate decline in revenue among all system components.

3. Wires will disappear from solar system monitoring 

Cellular cloud-based solutions will prove to be more cost effective for monitoring. Experienced contractors are realizing that spending a few hundred dollars more on cellular monitoring is much cheaper than Ethernet-WiFi-ZigBee fiddling, and the inevitable customer callbacks as a result of home network failures.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Italy could be poised to overtake Germany as Europe’s top energystoragemarket after the turn of the decade, a new report predicts. 

The European Market Monitor on Energy Storage, compiled by Delta-ee on behalf of the European Association for Storage of Energy (EASE), forecasts Italian behind-the-meter installations could soar after 2021.

The market will be driven by local subsidies, coupled with a strong solar market, said report author Valts Grintals, product manager for the energy storage research service at Delta-ee.

Unlike previous reports, which tended of focus on single European energy storage markets, this market monitor has a pan-European scope, covering Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Iberia, the Nordics, Central and Eastern Europe, and the rest of the continent. 

It shows, for example, that the Nordic countries could see strong demand for commercial and industrial energy storage systems, coupled to the growth of data centers in the region. The research also allows for comparisons between subsidy- and non-subsidy-driven markets.  

Germany and Italy are good examples subsidy-driven markets. Alternatively, the U.K. has scaled purely on the back of decreasing costs for energy storage and market signals, just as solar feed-in tariffs are phased out.

In the U.K., behind-the-meter storage still does not really make much economic sense. But the market is starting to take off regardless, in part thanks to off-the-shelf solar-plus-storage offerings such the one launched by Ikea in August.

Ikea estimates the systems will save homeowners up to £560 ($741) per year, or about 67 percent more than the savings from solar panels alone, allowing for a 12-year payback for a typical customer, or a 6 percent annual return on investment.

The growth in behind-the-meter storage in Britain reflects a predicted decline in the importance of front-of-meter installations across Europe.

Click Here to Read Full Article

The colonization of American grid innovation by European utilities has advanced with remarkable speed.

A promising U.S. energy startup, tackling such problems as energystorage EV charging or demand response, is more likely to find its way into the hands of Enel, Engie, Innogy or E.ON than their U.S. counterparts. This allows the Europeans to test out future business models far from their home markets, with negligible risk of cannibalizing their own core businesses.

Groupe EDF, which runs the electricity system in France and develops renewables around the world, has taken an inquisitive but less acquisitive approach to mining the U.S. energy sector.

It bought Maryland-based* groSolar in 2016 and turned that into the New World distributed development arm of its Renewable Energy practice. This past year it expanded that team with a new Distributed Energy and Storage unit, making use of the Store & Forecast software developed in France.

As a result, the company responsible for massive grid storage to balance France’s nuclear fleet has moved into distributed, behind-the-meter storage in the U.S.

Earlier this month, EDF won a 10-megawatt/40-megawatt-hour contract with Pacific Gas & Electric. If approved by regulators, EDF will tap a group of commercial customers to host batteries to fulfill the utility’s resource adequacy obligation, while generating savings for the customers.

This was not an obvious or guaranteed chain of events, but EDF determined that there’s a market for distributed storage that it cannot afford to ignore.

“Jumping over the fence and getting behind the meter comes from solar,” said Raphael Declercq, vice president of portfolio strategy at EDF Renewable Energy. “It was really a realization that customers were interested in this and there could be a very substantial reduction in their energy costs in some places.”

Click Here to Read Full Article

California has already postponed and even canceled plans to build new natural-gas-fired power plants in favor of distributed energy. But it hasn’t proposed to replace an existing power plant with them — until now.

Early this month, the California Public Utilities Commission issued a resolution that would direct utility Pacific Gas & Electric to open competitive solicitations for DERs — energystorage mostly, but with room for other carbon-neutral “preferred resources” like demand response — to cover the grid capacity and voltage needs now being served by three Northern California natural-gas-fired power plants. 

Choosing which power plants are vital to keep the transmission grid running is the domain of the California Independent System Operator, not the CPUC. And the grid operator has designated the 580-megawatt Metcalf Energy Center south of San Jose, as well as the 47.6-megawatt Yuba River and Feather River generators as reliability must-run (RMR) resources. 

These RMR contracts come with secure, high payments for running relatively few hours per year — mainly during hot summer afternoons when air conditioning loads surge, demand spikes, and CAISO struggles to maintain the reserves to cover potential emergencies. Calpine, the owner of the plants, said they aren’t cost-competitive without RMR, and intends to seek that status with federal regulators, having passed over opportunities to bid their energy or capacity into resource adequacy or bilateral agreements. 

But California regulators argue that these must-run contracts are too expensive, and that distributed resources can replace them at lower cost to ratepayers. It also states that Calpine’s contracts failed to go through CAISO’s procurement process for flexible capacity, which could “lead to market distortions and unjust rates for power” in years to come.

That, the CPUC contends, gives it broad authority to allow solicitation of resources that can “fill local deficiencies.”

While the resolution doesn’t set a specific megawatt-hour target on what PG&E should procure, it does set some clear deadlines. If the resolution is passed, PG&E will have no more than 30 days to issue its first solicitations. Any resources the utility does procure will have to prove they’ll be ready in time to assure the RMR contracts won’t be renewed in 2019.

Click Here to Read Full Article

New York is the birthplace of our modern electrical grid. It’s a point of pride, but also a source of pain for New Yorkers since it means that we have the oldest and most outdated system in the nation. The inefficiencies and periodic failures of our electric grid cost New York businesses and citizens billions of dollars every year.

Entrepreneurs and investors are ready to deploy more advanced, cleaner technologies and services that will reduce the vulnerability of our grid to natural disasters (like Hurricanes Sandy and Irene) and terrorist threats. They’re ready to deploy solutions that will benefit both urban and rural communities.

There’s one problem: They’re prevented by outdated electricity sector regulations. 

In an effort to address the outmoded rules and regulations that prevent innovation in our electrical system, New York state has been working for three and a half years on the Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) process. The purpose is to enable the transition to a modern, distributed and clean electrical grid that includes critical energystoragetechnologies.

Much emphasis has been put on solar power and other renewables, but there are still no clear market guidelines for energy storage — meaning that many of the critical technologies needed to modernize and harden our grid to both natural and manmade disasters cannot be deployed at meaningful scale in the Empire State.

This inability of the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) to successfully implement REV has forced the legislature to take action. In June legislators unanimously passed an energy storage bill (A.6571 in the Assembly and S.5190 in the Senate). Thankfully, Governor Cuomo signed it into law at the beginning of December.

Click Here to Read Full Article

This year brought numerous record-breaking battery projects, dozens of acquisitions and partnerships, and over a dozen utility integrated resource plans that factor in storage. Within a decade, the U.S. storage market could be 25 times bigger than it is today — swamping natural-gas peaker plants and enabling a vast array of new grid applications.

In this week’s episode, we open up our vault of data and describe the state of storage in America: which sectors are dominating, how utilities are thinking about the technology, where the economics stand, and what to look for in 2018.

Plus, we’ll have a conversation with Green Mountain Power CEO Mary Powell about how customer-sited battery storage fits into the utility’s broad culture and tech shift.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Energy storage proved itself in 2017.

The industry stepped up with two major high-speed deployments to resolve grid emergencies. Utility-scale projects got bigger and longer-lasting. Major international conglomerates bought up storage startups. And all the major solar developers started getting into the game.

Much of the action remained at the pilot stage. But some projects showed that storage economics already make sense without subsidies, grants or other interventions — in the right circumstances, of course.

GTM will be diving deep on these themes at the Energy Storage Summit in San Francisco December 12-13. In the meantime, here’s a roundup of the key developments from 2017.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Tesla built the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery ahead of schedule. It’s an important milestone for the technology, and for Tesla itself. 

But is it coming at a cost to smaller players in the industry?

This week on The Interchange, we’ll talk about how Tesla’s battery supply constraints are hitting downstream installers and developers. We’ll bring GTM Staff Writer Julian Spector on the show to discuss his recent reporting on Tesla’s delivery delays.

Then, we’ll cover some of Spector’s other big stories this year, including howstorageis suddenly challenging natural-gas peaker plants around the world, and why New York is struggling to put a cohesive energy storage framework in place. (Note: This podcast was recorded on Monday. On Thursday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the state’s energy storage target into law.)

Click Here to Read Full Article

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill Nov. 29 to create a statewide energystoragetarget, more than five months after it unanimously passed the legislature.

Depending on how it’s executed, the target could reduce regulatory barriers to storage development and spur adoption of this technology, which stands to help New York’s effort to increase clean energy and efficient grid usage.

“It really creates an important market,” said William Acker, executive director of the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium. “It lets industry know that New York State is serious about opening and creating a market for energy storage in the state.”

The law calls on the Public Service Commission to investigate and set a target for 2030. The original text called for a determination of the target by January 1, 2018, but that timeline is expected to be pushed back to allow more deliberation. 

Once set, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the Long Island Power Authority will run a deployment program to meet the goal. The program must consider both customer-sited and front-of-the-meter storage, evaluating its use for transmission upgrade deferral and peak load reduction in constrained areas.

NYSERDA has been working on a storage roadmap study that will form the analytical basis for the target.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Tesla built the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery ahead of schedule. It’s an important milestone for the technology, and Tesla itself. 

But is it coming at a cost to smaller players in the industry?

This week on The Interchange, we’ll talk about how Tesla’s battery supply constraints are hitting downstream installers and developers. We’ll bring GTM Staff Writer Julian Spector on the show to discuss his recent reporting on Tesla’s delivery delays.

Then, we’ll cover some of Spector’s other big stories this year: howstorageis suddenly challenging natural gas peaker plants around the world; and why New York is struggling to put a cohesive energy storage framework in place. (Note: This podcast was recorded on Monday. On Thursday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the state’s energy storage target into law.)

Click Here to Read Full Article