Is storage the Holy Grail of the energy transition? Maybe. Certainly, a critical missing link in the quest for decarbonization. If intermittent solar and wind generation can be complemented by competitively priced storage, the power sector can rid itself of its dependency on fossil fuels. Investors, among them utilities, oil majors and private equity, have started to place bets on storage technology playing a big part in future energy markets.

How realistic is that vision? Our Global Energy Storage team – Ravi Manghani, (Director, Americas), Rory McCarthy (Senior Analyst, Europe) and Le Xu (Senior Analyst, Asia Pacific) – has just released its Global Energy Storage Outlook. I went to the team for the answer.

What’s the technology?

Batteries, where the technology is evolving rapidly. Storage for power predominantly uses NMC (nickel, manganese and cobalt) batteries, the same chemistry as in most electric vehicles. The attraction is their efficiency – the ability to release power quickly – and falling costs. The big difference between the two is that EVs need lightweight batteries, and NMCs’ high-energy density fits the bill. Weight isn’t an issue for power storage.

How does storage fit into the power system?

The biggest segment is front-of-the-meter (55% of energy storage). Utilities or private investors build storage for frequency response to help short-term system balancing (second-by-second response), to provide energy capacity availability (up to four hours) and to deal with intermittency as more renewables come onto the grid. Residential (23%) has been mainly state-subsidized solar-plus-storage packages. Falling costs should help continue to drive growth as subsidies are phased out. For non-residential (22%), businesses install storage systems to reduce their reliance on high retail prices at peak times and improve power resilience.

It’s not that Invenergy was ever shy about its storage ambitions.

The Chicago-based developer, which has built 22,600 megawatts of wind, solar and natural-gas generation, entered the storage market in a big way back in 2015. It delivered two 31.5-megawatt projects within six months of each other, outranking any other batteries installed in the U.S. that year.

Then the company went quiet — a fittingly massive followup didn’t materialize. Until early this year, when Invenergy revealed that it would supply much of utility Arizona Public Service’s landmark 850-megawatt energy storage procurement, designed to shift its ample solar resource into nighttime capacity.

APS enlisted Invenergy to supply a 50-megawatt system under a power-purchase agreement, and to build and transfer a portfolio of 140 megawatts connected to APS solar plants (more may follow, as the details get ironed out).

These and a few other projects bring Invenergy’s portfolio of operating or contracted storage to 260 megawatts and 700 megawatt-hours. To top it off, the Energy Storage Association awarded Invenergy the Outstanding Industry Achievement Award at this week’s conference in Phoenix, not far from where the big battery will appear.

Greentech Media sat down with Kris Zadlo, Invenergy’s senior vice president in charge of storage development, to hear how the company got to where it is now.

Build and learn
Zadlo’s team began investigating storage in 2011, and installed its first pilot in 2012 — a 2.5-megawatt system in the PJM grid.

The company followed up with the two 31.5-megawatt deployments in 2015, both operating as merchant frequency regulation plays in PJM, the first major utility-scale storage market. One of those, the Grand Ridge Energy Center, won the innovation award from Energy Storage North America.

The New York Power Authority (NYPA) is seeking expressions of interest (RFI) from companies that want to develop energy storage projects. Separately, another state agency, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) took its first step in a $400 million program that aims to grow an energy storage market in the state.

The RFI is designed to help NYPA gauge private sector interest and determine what energy storage opportunities to pursue. The RFI is open to energy storage developers, battery integrators, and others deploying lithium-ion batteries in utility scale applications.

The RFI can be accessed on the NYPA procurement webpage under the name Q19-6681MH Energy Storage Joint Opportunities. Responses are due by May 13.

On Thursday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the first $280 million of the $400 million now available to accelerate the growth of energy storage projects.

The funding opportunity is part of $400 million investment the state is making to achieve its goal of having 3,000 MW of energy storage in place by 2030.

The energy storage goal is part of Cuomo’s Green New Deal that aims to put New York State on a path to a carbon-neutral economy. “While the federal administration denies the devastating reality of climate change, New York continues to invest in its future by building a more efficient clean energy system,” Cuomo said in a statement.

Southern California Edison (SCE) has about-turned on its plans to procure a new 262-megawatt (MW) natural gas peaker plant to supply power to the coastal city of Oxnard, and has opted for a roster of energy storage projects around the city.

The outcome has seen power producer NRG’s proposed gas plant cancelled before the final round of approvals.

If regulators approve the move, Strata Solar will build and own a new 100MW/400MWh system in the city.

The new system is set to tie for the position as the largest lithium-ion battery in the world, and is expected to come online in December 2020. It’s counterpart in size is the AES Alamitos plant, which is expected to be operational at around the same time.

SCE plans to complement the project with a range of smaller 10MW to 40MW units in the immediate area. Developers for these sites include E.ON, Enel, Able Grid, Ormat, Alta Gas, and Swell – the latter aggregates fleets of home batteries into grid assets, and has won a 14MW contract to provide behind-the-meter demand response.

Activists and others opposed the gas plant, which was viewed as an unnecessary blight on the California coastline, and has been seen as a win for clean energy providers.

“The big takeaway is the power of community opposition,” said Earthjustice attorney Matt Vespa. “Puente was viewed as a done deal… It was going to be on the beach, and now we have clean energy investment in that community instead of a gas plant.”

Highview Power recently announced the formation of a joint-venture with TSK, a global leading EPC company for the expansion of its giga-scale cryogenic energy storage systems across Spain, the Middle East and South Africa. The joint-venture is expected to enable the immediate shift from thermal and nuclear power to renewables and is expected to result in ~1 billion EUR over the next three years.

The new JV allows the company to co-develop giga-hour scale, long-duration energy storage systems using Highview Power’s proprietary cryogenic energy storage solution, the only long-duration energy storage solution available today that offers multiple gigawatt hours of storage representing weeks’ worth of storage, not just hours or days. At giga-scale, cryogenic energy storage resources are equivalent in performance to – and could replace – a fossil fuel power station.

REM talked to Highview Power CEO, Javier Cavada, to find out more.

Can you tell me about the two companies that are involved in this project? Highview Power and TSK

Absolutely. Highview Power is a 14-year old company, technology company, headquartered in London. We have expanded now to the US, Middle East and Spain, soon coming to Eastern Europe and South America. Energy storage technology, cryogenic energy storage. The CRYOBattery is our product, our solution is long-duration large-size, always looking for applications to move solar arrays to provide full base-load for the whole day, so four hours, eight hours, ten hours, twenty hours, that’s our sweet spot and wind the same of course. Owning the patent of the technology allows us to have full commercialisation. We have two plants in the UK, a small one and a commercial one on the national grid here in Manchester, and now developing projects in the UK and continental Europe and the US, and next upcoming is the Middle East and we have started to work to penetrate to bring these large long-duration energy storage projects to make sure renewables provide the baseload. That’s Highview Power.

TSK, or TSK Group, it is a company with more than 50 years of history, headquartered in Gijón Spain, in the North of Spain, with offices in in Madrid, and also in Germany. it’s an EPC company, so a construction company with a foundation in electrical equipment, so mainly balance of plants, etc. So it’s becoming a global EPC, it moved heavily into oil and gas and now is doing likewise for renewables and waste treatment plants. it’s a 1.2 billion revenue company, with more than a thousand employees mostly in Spain but I would say 40 percent of the projects are in the Middle East and 40 percent of the projects are in Latin America. They have completed projects in more than 50 countries and more than 30 GW and this alliance is about bringing Highview technology with EPC capabilities to certain regions with a champion company like TSK to deliver projects with quality performance and timing, enabling this technology to expand across Middle East and Latin America, also South Africa with , and of course Spain with TSK’s market now and enable the transition to more renewables.

When Xcel Energy conducted a reverse auction in 2018 to help build out its energy storage systems, it received hundreds of bids. It’s all about integrating energy storage into its wind and solar energy networks to increase reliability.

In a traditional auction, the seller does business with the highest bidder. But in a reverse auction, the buyer will go with the low-cost bidder. And that model has had success in the energy storage market.

“Reverse auctions offer a transparent and cost effective approach for procuring goods and services,” says Maureen Lackner, a policy analyst with the Environmental Defense Fund, in an interview. “These features have made it a popular tool applied to a diverse set of needs, including fulfilling road salt contracts in Pennsylvania and purchasing ethyl alcohol for University of California research centers.”

She adds: “With regards to renewable energy, reverse auctions have also gained traction. It is expected that nearly half of global renewable energy capacity between 2017-22 will come from competitive auctions.”

In the case of Xcel, the median price was $21/MWh for wind plus storage and $36/MWh for solar plus storage. The solar-plus-storage bid fell by 20% from one year to the next. Altogether, energy storage prices have dropped by 74% since 2013, says analytics firm Lazard, although it depends on the application. It expects such prices to fall by 8% a year through 2025.

Ambitious goals open way for reverse auctions
Hawaii Electric has had similar success. The utility may have too much solar and it has to curtail it during times when energy usage is less. Battery storage allows it to harness those electrons and to discharge those devices during peak periods — for four hours at a time, instead of having to run a fossil plant. The power company currently has proposals for seven grid-scale solar-plus-storage projects totaling 262 MW with 1,048 MWh of storage.

A serious incident at an energy storage project that hospitalised four firefighters in Arizona is currently under investigation, with “investigative outcomes” from the utility in question, APS, set to inform the industry’s path forward.

Energy-Storage.news received a statement from the US national Energy Storage Association in response to the fire, which APS tweeted originally had arisen from “equipment failure”, although it is not yet clear what equipment was responsible and how. One firefighter is thought to have suffered particularly serious injuries, with one medical professional quoted by local press as describing ‘complex injuries’ combining chemical burns, trauma and thermal burns.

“Our first and foremost concern is for the health and safety of the first responders. Our thoughts and prayers go out to them and their families. We are comforted to know that APS is working with local officials to ensure safe conditions and to thoroughly investigate the cause of this incident,” the ESA statement reads.

“As the national association leading the conversation and advocacy efforts surrounding energy storage battery safety, investigative outcomes from APS will inform our path forward as we continue to develop health and safety policies and standards.”

Safety should be top of agenda – and will be
The Energy Storage Association, literally one day before the fire happened, sent out communications launching a best practices initiative involving 30 key industry stakeholder companies – with an emphasis on health and fire safety,

Earlier this year, following reports of several large battery fires in South Korea, analyst Julian Jansen at IHS Markit said that health and safety – and fire safety in particular – will be a key focus for the industry in the near term.

“One of my key predictions for 2019 is that across more developed energy storage markets, we will see accelerated development of safety standards and fire regulations,” Jansen said.

Even as its solar business declined in step with its overall earnings, Tesla is bullish on the prospects for the energy side of its business over the course of the year.

The energy business is an unheralded part of Tesla — overshadowed by its headline-grabbing (and much larger) auto exploits — that chief executive Elon Musk thinks will generate an increasing share of revenue for the company over time.

Revenues from its solar power and energy storage business fell by 13 percent from the fourth quarter 2018 and 21 percent from a year ago period, down to $324.7 million from $371.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2018 and $410 million in the year ago quarter.

Solar energy deployments fell from 73 megawatts to 47 megawatts from the fourth to the first quarter, the company said. Those figures were offset by a slight increase in solar deployments.

The company actually introduced a new financing and purchasing model for solar installations in the second quarter — saying in its shareholder letter that residential solar customers can buy directly from the Tesla website, in standardized capacity increments.

“We aim to put customers in a position of cash generation after deployment with only a $99 deposit upfront. That way, there should be no reason for anyone not to have solar generation on their roof,” Musk and chief financial officer Zachary Kirkhorn wrote in the shareholder letter.

Tesla’s battery storage business was hit as the company shifted units from energy storage to installation in its own vehicles.

UK battery project developer Zenobe Energy was the biggest recipient of corporate and venture capital (VC) funding in the energy storage sector in the first quarter of 2019, according to Mercom Capital.

Mercom issues quarterly reports on M&A and other funding activity in the battery storage, smart grid and energy efficiency sectors. The company’s report on Q1 2019 said that overall, investment in the combined sectors was down from the US$472 million raised in Q1 2018, standing at US$210 million in the quarter just gone.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news in February, Zenobe raised £25 million (US$32 million) in investment from Japanese power giants Jera and Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco). The £25 million comes atop £45.5 million of equity already invested into Zenobe over the course of the last 18 months and a further £30 million of senior debt facilities provided by Santander and Generation IM.

That equity injection is not only one of the largest direct investments in a UK energy storage company, but also constituted yet another move from Japan’s energy utilities into the UK power scene, following investment in a number of other providers including home energy storage company Moixa.

Behind Zenobe in the top three for the quarter just gone were Sunfire, a German company focused on hydrogen electrolysis using steam, powered by renewable energy, netting US$29 million, and Ambri, a startup spun out of MIT’s labs – much like 24M – that is developing a liquid metal battery, which received around US$17 million.

Along with TEPCO, Mercom named other major utilities and companies with a background in oil and gas as investors in the battery storage sector during the quarter: Shell Ventures (which has recently acquired Sonnen and a number of other cleantech companies spanning electric vehicles, aggregators and more), Total Energy Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures and Centrica.

The U.S. energy storage market is growing rapidly — expected to double this year after nearly doubling in 2018, according to Speakes-Backman.

The ESA initiative seeks to steer the storage industry from the pitfalls of expanding too quickly without safety standards.

“If you look at the trajectory of some other industries that kind of went gangbusters in growth but didn’t take care of this at the early onset, there were some missteps,” Speakes-Backman told Utility Dive.

Duke is planning to install about 400 MW of battery storage over the next decade based on its various integrated resource plans, spokesperson Randy Wheeless told Utility Dive. Duke also has a commercial arm that launched battery projects in Texas and Ohio.

“I think we can’t do this energy storage widespread deployment without [utilities]. We can’t do it without third parties either,” Speakes-Backman said.

The company’s emerging technology innovation center outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, has been testing storage technology over the past 10 years.

“Over the decade, we’ve probably piloted batteries from every manufacturer out there,” Wheeless said. “Safety is a concern.”

Duke is currently seeking regulatory approval for a solar-plus-battery project outside of Asheville. The Hot Springs Microgrid project will consist of a 2 MW solar facility and a 4 MW lithium-based battery storage facility.

The company also powers a communications tower in the Smoky Mountains with a microgrid. That facility pairs a 10 kW solar array with a 95 kWh zinc-air battery, “which doesn’t have the fire hazard of a lithium-ion,” Wheeless said.