Massachusetts’ Baker-Polito administration hasawarded $20 million in grants to 26 energy storage projects in the state.

Recognizing the benefits energy storage holds for the commonwealth, as well as the strength of the submitted projects, the administration says it doubled the available funding from the initial $10 million commitment. The awarded projects will benefit 25 communities and draw in $32 million in matching funds, helping to grow the state’s energy storage economy.

The grants were awarded as part of the Baker-Polito administration’s Energy Storage Initiative (ESI) Advancing Commonwealth Energy Storage (ACES) program, funded by the Department of Energy Resources (DOER) through Alternative Compliance Payments (ACP) and administered by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

The awardees are EnerNOC; UMass-Amherst; Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Co. (two projects); UMass-Boston; GE; Boston Medical Center; Borrego Solar Systems (two projects); Advanced Microgrid Solutions; Greenlots; Martha’s Vineyard Transit Authority; Tesla (two projects); Solect Energy; NuGen Capital; UMass Memorial-Marlborough Hospital; Reading Municipal Light Department; NextEra Energy; National Grid; Ameresco; Taunton Municipal Light Plant; Sunrun; Constellation; WH Bennett; and West Boylston Municipal Light Plant.

The announcement was made by Gov. Charlie Baker, R-Mass., during an event at UMass Memorial – Marlborough Hospital. The critical-care facility will use funding received under the grant program to integrate a 400 kW solar canopy and energy storage system.

“The development and deployment of energy storage projects will be vital to the commonwealth’s ability to continue leading the nation in energy efficiency,” says Baker. “Funding these storage projects is an investment in our energy portfolio that will reduce costs for ratepayers and help create a clean and resilient energy future.”

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Every year, the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) crowns the top U.S. utilities for solar, and with the release of its 10th annual utility market survey, the group has now launched additional rankings for the utilities leading on energy storage.

“One of the reasons we started the utility solar top 10 lists back in 2007 was to highlight the key, but often unrecognized, role utilities were taking in putting new solar on the grid,” explains SEPA President and CEO Julia Hamm. “With utility-scale solar now well established as a mainstream power source, we wanted to similarly recognize utilities’ leadership in realizing the full potential of storage to drive critical system changes that will benefit customers and the grid.”

SEPA explains the top 10 lists are based on data provided by 412 utilities, which together serve more than 90 million customers across the country, and the lists rank the leading U.S. utilities of 2016.

In terms of the most new megawatts of solar added in 2016, Southern California Edison (SCE) ranked No. 1 and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) ranked No. 2 – the same spots the two California utilities had on the first top 10 list in 2007, SEPA notes. However, the group points out that the number of megawatts each added has changed dramatically: SCE jumped from 409 MW in 2007 to 1,648 MW in 2016, while PG&E grew from 144.5 MW to 773 MW.

According to SEPA, the figures needed to make the top 10 list for new solar watts added per customer have also shot up. The City of Palo Alto Utilities ranked No. 5 in 2007 with 20.4 watts per customer; this year, it earned the No. 1 spot with 2,753 watts.

As for energy storage, Imperial Irrigation District (IID), a public power and water utility in Southern California, took the No. 1 spot on the top 10 list of new storage megawatts installed, adding 30 MW of storage in 2016. The Sterling Municipal Light Department, the municipal utility for the small town of Sterling, Mass., led the top 10 energy storage list for new watts per customer, with 533 watts added per customer.

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Jobs in New York’s energy storage sector have grown to approximately 3,900 – a 30% increase from 2012 through 2015, according to a new report from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).

The agency says New York’s commitment to clean energy helped spur this strong growth, and storage will advance the state’s  50% by 2030 clean energy standard, as storage technology can save power generated from solar, wind, and combined heat and power (CHP) systems for later use.

The report projects that by 2030, New York’s energy storage industry could realize annual global revenues between $5.6 billion and $8.7 billion. In addition, jobs could reach between 17,300 to 26,800 employees (a consistent growth scenario versus a delayed market adoption scenario).

“New York State has become a hub for energy storage technologies – creating new, skilled technology jobs and meeting the needs of utilities, building owners, manufacturers and other large power users,” says John B. Rhodes, president and CEO of NYSERDA. “Under Gov. Cuomo’s Reforming the Energy Vision to create an energy system that is cleaner, more affordable and more resilient, strong growth continues for storage technology and investments.”

NYSERDA says it has invested in more than 50 energy storage technology development projects across the state. It is also working to reduce soft costs associated with distributed energy storage systems by 33% in five years.

In December, NYSERDA hosted a two-day, on-site power conference and expo, which brought together stakeholders in solar, energy storage and CHP to facilitate discussions about when and how the technologies can work together to help New York meet its clean energy goals.

Along with several partners, NYSERDA established the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST) in 2010 to help advance the state’s energy storage industry. The consortium now includes Fortune 500 companies, startups, universities, national research centers and laboratories spanning all facets of the energy sector, NYSERDA says.

“NY-BEST is pleased that our efforts to grow the energy storage industry in New York State are producing positive results,” says Dr. William Acker, executive director of NY-BEST. “Thanks to the state’s clean energy policies and strategic investments, New York State has created an unmatched ecosystem for energy storage companies seeking to grow their businesses, and we look forward to continuing to help foster the growth of this industry in New York.”

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The war between solar homeowners and utility companies has been an ongoing, fierce fight. Homeowners with rooftop solar want to be compensated at retail rates for the energy they feed back into the grid. Meanwhile, utilities want to maintain lower rates and keep control over the centralized grid. Residential energy storage could help solve these issues.

Through a collaborative and cooperative effort, utilities and residential solar storage owners could build a stronger, more reliable distributed electrical grid. To move forward, it’s necessary to take advantage of new technology, open up communication and give up control. The technology is here, and costs are down, making a battery-based distributed grid more possible now than ever. With a distributed grid, everyone wins.

Using advanced tech and communication

The growth and advancement of technology, especially in the solar and energy storage sector, has been on an upswing in the last decade. The electrical grid infrastructure, however, remains largely unchanged. Systemic change on the utility side will inevitably be slow, but it’s time for utilities to catch up with the growth of energy technology. The companies that do this will be able to do their jobs better – namely, continue to reliably meet energy demand.

Solar photovoltaic installations are on the rise, and more and more solar homeowners are looking for a way to store the energy generated by their panels. As a result, the battery business is booming, with many big brands unable to meet the growing demand. This means that residential energy storage capacity, especially in locations like Southern California, is rising, even though that storage capacity isn’t owned by utilities.

But just because utilities don’t own it, that doesn’t mean they can’t or shouldn’t use it. Another area of major technological advancement is the progress of communication. It’s time for utilities to start using that, too.

In a world of lightning-fast information exchange, it’s surprising how little utilities and customers are communicating. There have been many compromises proposed to wage peace between solar homeowners and power companies, but there hasn’t been a lot of talk of the free-flowing information. Communication, itself, could be the compromise everyone is looking for.

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Borrego Solar Systems Inc., a provider of large-scale solar development, design, financing, construction, and operations and maintenance, has announced its entry into energy storage solutions with the launch of a new division. This marks the company’s first-ever formal expansion into energy services beyond solar PV. The company will be offering both stand-alone energy storage solutions and storage integrated with solar PV.

“We’re excited to launch this new chapter, as a way to further our mission of accelerating the adoption of renewable energy,” said Borrego Solar CEO Mike Hall. “Energy storage – and, in particular, the long-duration energy storage on which we’ll be focusing our efforts – is an important piece of what we need to effectively integrate more and more renewable energy into our electricity system, and it’s something that our customers, electricity regulators and policymakers are asking for.”

The energy storage division will be based in Massachusetts and will serve customers nationally. Borrego Solar’s executive vice president of strategy and business development, Dan Berwick, will lead the new division.

“We’re realizing that all across our customer base – from cities, school districts and public agencies to businesses, manufacturers and electric utilities – it is more frequently making economic sense to evaluate energy storage in conjunction with solar,” said Berwick. “We knew that this technology shift was around the corner given the changes happening to the grid as we add more wind and solar power to it. As climate change becomes an increasingly present danger, and the need to decarbonize our electricity system more immediate, the distributed energy marketplace will demand greater amounts of flexible energy storage. We’re now prepared to meet that need.”

Over the coming year, Borrego Solar’s energy storage division will focus on supporting utilities across the U.S. in the development and installation of megawatt-scale energy storage systems for integration with renewables and peak-load management. The team will also offer energy storage solutions to its existing solar PV portfolio, totaling more than 400 MW, and to new solar customers, which are primarily large-scale electricity users in its core state markets of California, New York and Massachusetts.

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As the energy storage market rose and as prices for storage continued to fall, more than 900 MW of energy storage grid-tied inverters were shipped globally in 2015, according to IHS Markit. The research firm forecasts global energy storage inverter shipments will surge at a compound annual growth rate of 38% to 4.5 GW in 2020. Furthermore, prices for energy storage inverters will continue to fall an average of 13% per year from 2016 to 2020.

“The energy storage market hinges on cost-efficient and flexible inverters,” said Isabella Ni, senior analyst at IHS Markit. “Recent inverter launches have the ability to distribute power flows between the network, the batteries, the load centers and generation assets.”

According to IHS Markit, products with a power rating less than 1 MW will capture 70% of cumulative grid-tied energy storage inverter shipments between 2016 and 2020. In particular, nearly 40% of inverter shipments during the forecast period will have a power rating between 100 kW and 999 kW, as these products are utilized extensively in the utility-scale market, as well as playing a growing role in the commercial segment where average system sizes are quickly increasing.

According to IHS, Parker Hannifin and BYD led the market, supported by shipments to utility-scale projects. SMA topped the providers of the sub-100 kW energy storage inverters segment.

“The sub-100 kW inverters segment is highly competitive; about half of the shipments came from companies with a global market share of less than 5 percent,” Ni said. “The large-scale energy storage inverter market, by comparison, is much more concentrated, with three manufacturers – BYD, Parker Hannifin and Woojin Industrials – representing half of the market.”

More information on the report is available here.

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Hawaiian Electric Co. has placed into service its first utility-scale battery energy storage system (BESS), a 1 MW battery located at the Campbell Industrial Park generating station on Oahu.

The BESS is a joint demonstration project by the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii and Hawaiian Electric. It also includes funding from the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

The demo will continue for two years – with a possible extension – to determine the battery’s safety, operating characteristics and effectiveness in helping to integrate more renewable energy on a circuit that already has a high level of solar, the utility says.

“To achieve our 100 percent renewable energy goal, we need to be able to smooth power flowing to the grid from variable renewable generation like wind and solar, as well as shift electricity generated when the sun is shining to when people use the most electricity in the evening,” said Shelee Kimura, Hawaiian Electric’s vice president for corporate planning and business development. “We are working on these capabilities both with larger, utility-scale systems like the BESS units and with ‘behind-the-meter’ batteries at business and residential customer sites – all working in unison to make clean power work.”

The centerpiece of the BESS project is an Altairnano 1 MW/250 kWh BESS, which is housed in a large shipping container. The BESS comprises batteries that store 250 kWh of energy and a corresponding inverter that changes DC to AC electricity so that the battery can export up to 1 MW of power to the grid.

The utility says the quickly responding battery can go from zero to full power output in a fraction of a second, as well as provide 250 kW of power for one hour or 1 MW of power for 15 minutes.

Also being tested are control algorithms that may be used in even larger batteries for power smoothing, voltage regulation and frequency.

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Powin Energy, a manufacturer and developer of scalable energy storage systems for commercial and utility customers, has been chosen by Southern California Edison to build a 2 MW/8 MWh energy storage system in Irvine, Calif.

According to Powin, the selection is a result of the California Public Utilities Commission’s Aliso Canyon Energy Storage request for energy storage projects that could be operational by the beginning of 2017.

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On Monday, Gov. Charlie Baker, R-Mass., signed into law a bill to further diversify Massachusetts’ power mix with clean energy resources. Although it focuses mainly on large procurements of offshore wind and hydropower, the legislation also includes a significant provision authorizing an energy storage procurement goal.

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Amid falling profits and long-term questions, global oil “supermajors” need to follow in the footsteps of France-based Total – which recently bought energy storage company Saft for $1 billion – and explore opportunities not only in batteries, but also in solar and distributed generation, according to a new report from Lux Research.

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