“Much of this growth can be attributed to a shift from short-duration projects to medium- and long-duration projects in the utility-scale market, along with a surge of deployments geared to offset the Aliso Canyon natural gas leak,” said Ravi Manghani, GTM Research’s director of energy storage. “Still, the industry shouldn’t get too comfortable — there aren’t that many 10+ megawatt-hour projects in the 2017 pipeline, indicating that the first quarter may be the largest quarter this year.”

In all, front-of-meter energy storage represented 91 percent of all deployments for the quarter.

The behind-the-meter market segment, which is made up of residential and commercial energy storage deployments, declined 27 percent year-over-year in megawatt-hour terms. The report attributes the slowdown to a pause in California’s Self-Generation Incentive Program.

California will remain the undisputed king of the U.S. storage market over the next five years. Arizona, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York and Texas will all battle for second place, with each market forming a significant chunk of deployments through 2022. At that point, GTM Research forecasts the U.S. annual market to reach 2.6 gigawatts and 7.2 gigawatt-hours.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Nevada jumped to the vanguard of energy storage policy after passing a revision to its state renewable energy targets.

In the past week, state legislators deputized the Public Utilities Commission to investigate whether it is in the public interest to require an energy storage procurement by utilities. The PUC has until October 1, 2018 to make that decision, based on a wide variety of criteria. That makes it the fourth state to set in motion a storage target, a policy that contributed significantly to the growth of the technology in California.

Nevada tucked even more goodies into a bill updating the state renewable portfolio standard. If Governor Brian Sandoval signs AB 206, it will raise the state’s RPS from 25 percent renewables by 2025 to 40 percent by 2030. And storage will play a role that no state has thus far attempted.

Each kilowatt-hour of energy delivered by a qualified energy storage device will count double for the purposes of meeting the RPS requirement. There are two ways for a storage system to qualify: if it charges from renewable generation and discharges during a peak load period, or if it performs ancillary grid services that help integrate renewable generation.

“I am astounded at the amount of progress that Nevada legislators have made in such a short amount of time to catapult their state into the leadership of storage policy in the United States,” said Jason Burwen, policy and advocacy director at the Energy Storage Association industry group.

The new policies leap-frog Nevada into the ranks of important storage markets like Arizona, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York and Washington, behind the national leader, California, said Ravi Manghani, energy storage director at GTM Research.

Several of those states have passed storage targets, but the RPS bill takes storage policy in a whole new direction.

It casts storage devices as renewable energy assets that can deliver energy, along with solar, wind and geothermal.

It also incentivizes storage specifically for peak capacity, so that systems will be inclined to discharge their energy at the time of greatest grid need. Alternatively, it rewards systems that provide valuable grid services like frequency regulation and voltage control, which keep the grid running smoothly as renewable penetration increases.

Click Here to Read Full Article

With duck curves on the prowl and curtailment on the rise, there are dangers stalking utility-scale solar’s natural habitat.

Solar developer 8minutenergy wants to ward off these threats with large-scale energy storage. The company spent the past year quietly picking up staff with years of experience developing storage at California utilities, and recently revealed the new practice, with a pipeline of 1 gigawatt already in place. That quantity, though not yet finalized, dwarfs the 221 megawatts deployed across the U.S. last year.

8minutenergy worked its way up to 10th place on GTM Research’s list of U.S. utility-scale solar developers. Now the team wants to incorporate storage into its expertise with wrangling land rights, interconnection and utility offtakers. Initial geographical targets include California, the Southwest, ERCOT and the Southeast.

“It’s really kind of an ideal storm with much lower prices, so these systems are much more cost-effective,” said Steve McKenery, vice president of storage solutions. “We can do a solar-plus-storage project now at less than the cost of a new combustion gas turbine. That was not the case a few years ago.”

The company likes to focus on solar projects with 100 megawatts or more, to capture economies of scale. Going forward, a typical 100-megawatt PV project might come with 100 megawatts/400 megawatt-hours of storage.

In fact, for the last year or so, all 8minutenergy developments have been designed to incorporate storage if desired; having land rights and interconnection already taken care of can speed up the storage deployment process.

The primary market will be pairing storage alongside new solar projects. This captures the ITC for the storage, and makes the solar generation dispatchable. That serves the offtaker by guaranteeing clean power for several hours of peak demand, but it also serves to future-proof 8minutenergy’s core product against increasing curtailment rates in California.

If the company can deliver on that gas turbine-beating promise, it could open up lucrative capacity market revenue. There’s also value to offer utilities in offsetting gas consumption for spinning reserves, said Carl Stills, vice president for storage integration.

In a previous job working on storage at the Imperial Irrigation District, he saw how utilities spend thousands of dollars a day on gas to maintain spinning reserves. Storage can remain ready for instantaneous response without burning fuel.

Storage on a major solar farm also serves a utility by increasing utilization of transmission infrastructure.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Guy Sella, CEO of SolarEdge: “In a quarter where the PV market is exhibiting decline in the United States, we have increased our revenues, profitability and cash flow generation quarter-over-quarter. Much of this is attributed to increased sales in Europe and our growing worldwide geographic spread.” He added, “We are confident that with our financial strength, cash balance and substantial R&D capabilities, we are well positioned to continue to increase revenues in existing markets and new markets as we see fit.”

Paul Nahi, CEO of Enphase, was less sanguine: “The first quarter of 2017 turned out to be more challenging than expected, and we were certainly disappointed with our financial results.”

During the first quarter of 2017, Enphase sold approximately 138 megawatts (AC), amounting to approximately 573,000 microinverters, a decrease in megawatts of 30 percent sequentially and 6 percent on a year-over-year basis. SolarEdge shipped 455 megawatts (AC) of inverters in the quarter, up from 413 megawatts (AC) of inverters shipped in the previous quarter.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Batteries are helping the grid everywhere from Aliso Canyon to South Australia. But some are concerned that battery-based storage might not be the universal panacea that evangelists believe.

Launching the Tesla Powerwall in 2015, for example, Elon Musk claimed: “The size of the batteries needed to transition all of the United States to being solar with batteries…is a very tiny amount.”

Musk seemed to indicate that batteries can take care of all the world’s renewable energy intermittency needs — a view that was reinforced by Tesla and others’ successful bids for battery storage plants to make up for lost gas generation in California and Australia. 

However, this view ignores the fact that batteries are poorly designed for cheaply storing the vast amounts of energy needed for communities and industries to ride through long-term lulls in renewable generation.

“The challenge is how to replicate the low-cost service that fossil fuels provide, but in a decarbonized system,” said Richard Heap, executive analyst at the Energy Research Partnership, a U.K. government and industry advisory body.

Other researchers, such as Dr. Björn Peters, head of energy policy at the German employers’ association Deutscher Arbeitgeber Verband, claim the cost of battery storage needed to deal with once- or twice-yearly anticyclones is prohibitive. 

Writing on his blog, Peters said: “If a homeowner wanted to be independent from the electricity network all year round, a storage system with several thousands of kilowatt-hours in capacity would be necessary, pricing itself out of range for most of the population.” 

Focusing too heavily on battery storage may risk sidelining more effective and cost-efficient ways of dealing with grid challenges, according to Heap. 

“A system approach that considers the role of all decarbonized energy vectors may come up with a much cheaper way of addressing the rare event, that may also overcome the local grid issues,” he said.

Click Here to Read Full Article

For months, the energy storage market has lived in very few places, making it hard to get too excited about updates to the market leaderboard. But that’s starting to change.

In rankings calculated by GTM Research for its cumulative 2016 edition of the Energy Storage Monitor, several states that are not California have broken onto the scene. California doesn’t have to worry about losing the throne any time soon, but the stronger showing from relative newcomers heralds the onset of a more geographically diverse industry.

For a while now, the top three markets for the various storage segments have shuffled between California, the PJM Interconnection (minus New Jersey, which is counted separately), and the catchall term “All Others,” while Hawaii has made a strong mark in residential.

Hawaii still holds the No. 3 slot for cumulative residential power capacity, but Arizona unseated it for deployments in 2016. With 633 kilowatts, Arizona put up essentially half as much home storage as California last year.

That’s an impressive performance from Arizona given the relative generosity of storage policy incentives between the two. Overall, Arizona controls 9 percent of the residential storage market and Hawaii has 18 percent. That’ll be the matchup to watch going forward to understand the non-California centers of gravity for home battery buyers.

Meanwhile, New York has gained ground in the commercial and industrial space. The Empire State’s 2.3 megawatts earned it third place for cumulative megawatts deployed, unseating PJM, which held the spot with 2.2 megawatts last quarter.

Again, California still has a potentially insurmountable lead with 66.5 megawatts. As GTM Research’s behind-the-meter storage expert Brett Simon put it, “I don’t think we’ll see California lose its grip on the nonresidential market, but we’ll start to see its market share erode a little bit as states like New York and Hawaii claw their way up in the storage market.”

The new numbers show that New York isn’t waiting for its comprehensive Reforming the Energy Vision policy effort to wrap up before moving ahead with storage deployments. We can expect the pace of deployment to accelerate further as more fully formed market-based grid reform policies come into effect.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Energy storage is no longer confined to a handful of U.S. states. GTM Research is tracking 2.5 gigawatts of front-of-meter energy storage projects outside of California. Texas, Hawaii, Ohio and Illinois round out the top five.

According to the Energy Storage Data Hub, states across the nation now have a combined 140 policies and regulations pending or in place concerning front-of-meter energy storage, many of which are driving this geographic expansion. For instance, Utah’s state legislature recently passed a bill pertaining to utility investments in energy storage projects; Oregon and Massachusetts are the second and third states to introduce storage mandates, respectively; and New York City became the first municipality to set a storage target.

“Front-of-meter energy storage markets are advancing at a feverish pace, enabled by an intricate set of drivers across states and wholesale markets,” said Ravi Manghani, GTM Research’s director of energy storage. “Declining costs coupled with maturing regulations have led to storage deployments of 10 megawatts or more in 14 states.” While the industry has largely concentrated on California in the recent months, GTM Research has tracked over 120 policies and regulations that impact markets outside of California.

Click Here to Read Full Article