Minnesota housing development to include community energy storage

on October 28, 2017

A new housing development in suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul will use grid-interactive electric thermal water heaters to enable the Midwest’s first community energy storage project.

Country Joe Homes’ Legacy 2 development in Lakeville is building 79 homes over the next two years. Each home will have 80-gallon water heaters manufactured by Steffes Corp.

The sophisticated water heaters will allow Great River Energy (GRE) and Dakota Electric Association — the cooperative providing electricity to the development — to use them as community storage capable of integrating the state’s growing wind and solar resources.

“The water heaters behave as a battery and absorb energy, mainly at night, but they can be turned on and off in a moment’s notice,” said Gary Connett, Great River Energy’s director of member services.

“The game-changer for us is this variable generation in our future and here today. Renewables and more photovoltaics means all of a sudden we need something more dynamic than the water heater of the past,” he said. “This is where this grid-interactive water heater has benefits.”

While the utility’s current water heater program offers customers two options to charge water heaters in return for better rates on their bills, the Legacy 2 development’s water heaters allow real-time charging and energy storage, Connett said.

Water heaters can represent as much as 40 percent of a household’s energy use. Being able to nimbly control water heaters will allow Great River Energy to offer sophisticated energy services to the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, the regional grid operator.

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Midwest Energy NewsMinnesota housing development to include community energy storage

Minnesota conference explores how the Midwest can expand energy storage

on September 14, 2017

Midwest-Energy-NewsWhile states like California and Hawaii lead the growing market for energy storage, the potential in the Midwest is growing.

Minnesota is seeing a small but growing number of lithium ion battery storage projects that will be discussed along with other battery-related topics at the Midwest Energy Storage Summit in Minneapolis Sept. 15.

Sponsored by the the Energy Transition Lab at the University of Minnesota, the event features speakers such as Mary Powell, CEO and president of Green Mountain Power; Christopher Clark, president of Xcel Energy for Minnesota and the Dakotas; George Crabtree of Argonne National Laboratory and Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of the Energy Storage Association.

The transition lab’s initial conference, two years ago, was the first time in Minnesota experts and industry officials came together to discuss storage, according to Barbara Jacobs, energy storage project manager. One result of the conference was the creation of the Minnesota Energy Storage Alliance to share knowledge and promote battery storage.

“There seems to be a lot of interest and excitement about storage across the board right now,” Jacobs said.

So what’s the difference between storage between now and two years ago? One is clearly dropping prices and increased production of lithium ion batteries, accompanied by products from Tesla, Panasonic, LG and many others.

Secondly, utilities are taking greater interest, with 80 percent nationwide considering storage projects, according to a recent survey.

Minnesota utilities are stepping up with projects and proposals. Xcel Energy proposed a solar storage battery project that regulators failed to approve while allowing the utility another chance to submit it after making changes.  

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Midwest Energy NewsMinnesota conference explores how the Midwest can expand energy storage

Minnesota co-op plans state’s biggest energy storage project

on July 31, 2017

Midwest-Energy-NewsMinnesota’s largest retail electric cooperative is in negotiation with vendors to build the largest storage energy project in the state alongside three solar installations.

Connexus Energy plans to install storage capable of storing 20 megawatts, the equivalent of 40 MW hours of energy, according to Brian Burandt, vice president of power supply and business development.

“I believe it’s the largest project being contemplated at this time,” he said. “There are larger projects in the country at this time but this is the largest we know about in Minnesota.”

The storage would be sited at three proposed solar installations that Connexus plans to build likely next summer. The collective output of the solar project would be 10 MW.

The battery storage installations would be co-located at the solar sites, Burandt said. The co-op is “still in negotiation” about the solar projects.

Connexus, the largest customer-owned utility in Minnesota, serves 130,000 homes in the suburbs of the Twin Cities.

Ellen Anderson, executive director of the University of Minnesota’s Energy Transition Lab, applauded Connexus for embarking on the project.

Her lab recently issued a report on energy storage and is among the sponsors of a conference on the same topic in September. It also convenes the Minnesota Energy Storage Alliance.

“It’s really is going to be an extremely influential example” in Minnesota and the Midwest in showcasing how “energy storage is an opportunity right now for utilities looking to combine customer benefits and cost savings and renewable energy goals.”

The project may resonate beyond the region because a cooperative is embarking upon the energy storage-solar concept, Anderson said.

“Co-ops see an opportunity they may have not considered before,” she said. It’s safe to say Connexus sees this as a first step to storage improving their system and helping customers. They’re being real innovators here.”

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Midwest Energy NewsMinnesota co-op plans state’s biggest energy storage project

Illinois researchers explore ‘self-healing’ for energy storage batteries

on June 15, 2017

Batteries — whether they’re powering a smartphone or storing energy on the grid — take a beating.

Repeated charging and discharging causes all kinds of wear and tear on the devices we increasingly rely on to keep our gadgets, cars and renewable energy sources running. But what if batteries could repair themselves automatically and fix on-the-fly the cracks that lead to dead laptop batteries, the limited range of electric carsand other modern woes?

That’s the idea behind the work of a team led by two professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). They’re taking self-healing materials research and applying it to a novel subject area: energy storage. The hope is that a better understanding of how nanoparticles bind and come undone will lead to more reliable, longer-lasting and higher-capacity batteries.

“The idea was to try to take some of the self-healing work we’ve done in plastics and bring it into the battery world, because batteries do have all these reliability issues,” says Nancy Sottos, a professor of materials science and engineering, and one of the lead researchers on the project. “There’s a lot of cracking and chemical changes that go on in the battery that are, in general, undesirable. And of course what you see in your devices is basically they’re just not charging anymore.”

A breakthrough in battery technology is a sort of Holy Grail in today’s era of mobile communications and distributed energy. Consumers demand more and more from their portable devices, and energy storage is seen as a key ingredient for widespread renewable energy deployment. In short, better batteries would make it easier for utilities and grid operators to manage the variable flows of power from intermittent wind and solar energy sources.

The UIUC team — led by Sottos and Scott White, a professor of aerospace engineering — introduces a unique nanoparticle composite material into a key part of lithium-ion batteries, the energy-storage technology that dominates personal electronics and plays an increasing role in transportation and electricity.

In May, the team published a study in the journal Advanced Energy Materials, finding that their experimental technology mitigated a lithium-ion battery’s typical deterioration, retaining 80 percent of its initial capacity after cycling through its charge 400 times.

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Midwest Energy NewsIllinois researchers explore ‘self-healing’ for energy storage batteries

ComEd project targets energy storage at the neighborhood level

on April 12, 2017

Midwest-Energy-NewsA new pilot project from Illinois’ largest utility is bringing energy storage out from behind the substation and into the neighborhood.

Last month, ComEd deployed a 25-kilowatt-hour, lithium-ion battery in Beecher, Illinois, about 40 miles south of Chicago. In the event of a power outage, the battery can supply about an hour of backup power to three houses selected for the project.

It’s part of a broader experiment in Community Energy Storage (CES), or the deployment of medium-sized batteries in between those found in utility-scale applications and the kind of personal, home-battery systems offered by Tesla and others. Taken together, distributed CES units can start to match the scale of larger, more centralized energy-storage systems.

ComEd says the Beecher pilot will run for a year, and that similar pilot projects are in the works. The Beecher CES system is aimed primarily at mitigating reliability issues — the area experiences an unusually high amount of outages due to challenges with a nearby medium voltage line that serves it, according to Manuel Avendano, manager of emerging technology in ComEd’s distribution planning and smart grid group.

Down the road, CES could provide other benefits, such as the integration of more solar energy and reductions in the peak demand periods that strain the grid, Avendano says.

“Through grid modernization and smart grid investments, our reliability performance has been best on record for five years running, and we’re committed to continuous improvement,” Michelle Blaise, ComEd’s senior vice president of technical Services, said in a statement. “We want all ComEd customers to experience great reliability and that’s why we’re innovating and piloting emerging technologies such as energy storage to bring new value to communities and help improve service for our customers.”

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Midwest Energy NewsComEd project targets energy storage at the neighborhood level

Q&A: An energy storage solution may already be in your basement

on May 3, 2016

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The much publicized Telsa Powerwall battery offers a way for homeowners with solar panels to store their energy for use at night as well as help utilities manage the grid.

Yet a decidedly less flashy piece of equipment residing in basements and closets of homeowners holds much greater potential as a residential battery – electric water heaters.

For the past 30 years Great River Energy (GRE) has deployed electric water heaters in homes to manage loads. Today more than 110,000 homes – around 20 percent of its to customer base – have water heaters that collectively, according to the utility, amount to a gigawatt of storage.

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Midwest Energy NewsQ&A: An energy storage solution may already be in your basement