2015 was a dynamic year for energy storage. A proliferation of energy storage deployment, declining costs and Tesla’s Powerwall announcement contributed to a successful year. But the start of 2016 did not begin as auspiciously as the previous year’s headlines might suggest.

There were 18.3 MW (21.2 MWh) of energy storage deployed in the United States in the first quarter of 2016, representing 127% increase from first quarter of 2015, according to a recent energy storage report from GTM Research. But those numbers represent an 84% decline from storage deployments in fourth quarter 2015.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Combining energy storage with renewable resources, especially solar panels, has been touted an inevitable combination or as an alternative to the elimination of incentives such as net metering. A new study by MIT finds that storage can make economic sense in today’s market in some instances, but that the opportunity might not last.

The MIT researchers found that as the cost of wind and solar power systems comes down, the cost of storage systems will need to come down as well or they will no longer be profitable because at some point it would be more profitable to simply add more generating capacity rather than more storage capacity.

Click Here to Read Full Article

As battery costs fall, storage deployments rise. That trend led to a record year for energy storage deployment in 2015, and the trend will continue into the future, according to BNEF’s New Energy Outlook.

“Batteries will get a boost as costs drop and developers see the chance for lucrative new revenue streams,” said Julia Attwood, storage analyst at BNEF.

Click Here to Read Full Article

Energy storage has been hailed as the missing link and even an essential ingredient to higher levels of wind and solar power, but anew paper from Argonne National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology questions that premise.

The authors of the report, “The value of energy storage in decarbonizing the electricity sector,” conclude that the value of shorter-duration storage technologies, up to about two hours, is only justified by generation cost savings under the most stringent carbon emissions limits, and even then, only at low storage penetration levels. Hence, continued innovation and cost declines for lithium-ion batteries and other electrochemical energy storage technologies will be necessary to economically justify large-scale deployment in future low-carbon power systems.

Click Here to Read Full Article

e newest entrant into energy storage market bears a passing resemblance to cutting edge 19th century technology.

It is a rail car with no passengers or freight that goes nowhere. But if the California company working on this technology is right, its rail cars could make big inroads in the energy storage market.

At heart, though, the concept is simple. Electricity powers an electric motor in a locomotive that hauls a heavy load up hill. Sitting at the top of the hill, the rail cars store energy. When the energy is needed, the cars are released to roll down hill and the electric motor runs in reverse to generate electricity.

Click Here to Read Full Article

It’s a common trope in the U.S. power sector to talk about the day that energy storage “went mainstream,” and was introduced to a broader audience beyond energy and technology circles.

Though batteries have been around for decades, that day was about a year ago — April 30, 2015, to be exact. That was the day Tesla Motors introduced its first two energy storage products, the residential Powerwall and the grid-scale Powerpack.

Coming from a household name like Tesla, whose fashionable electric cars are seen as pacesetters in the automotive industry, the batteries sparked new consumer interest in energy storage, and pre-orders for the product soared.

Click Here to Read Full Article