In nearly all regions of the United States, peak annual electricity demand comes in the afternoon on the hottest days of the year, when air conditioners in homes and offices are cranked to the maximum. It’s one of the main technical challenge for utilities and grid operators, which must sign contracts with power plants to ensure that they have sufficient capacity on hand to meet only a few hours of demand, and it can be hard to predict just how much they will need.

In Southern California, one company has come up with a solution to marry peak electric demand with cheap overnight electricity prices. And in an field where interconnected software and high-tech chemical batteries dominate, their solution is both simple and oddly tangible: making ice.

Earlier this month Ice Energy completed the first phase of project to deploy over 1,200 ice-making and cooling machines at businesses and industrial facilities across the territory of utility Southern California Edison (SCE).

And while there have been larger single-site thermal storage projects, such as the molten salt system at the 300 MW Solana Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant in Arizona, Ice Energy says that when complete this will be the largest distributed thermal energy storage system in the nation.

By 2021, almost half (49%) of institutional investors expect to increase their exposure to assets supporting and participating in the energy transition, according a new study by Aquila Capital. This transition involves the progressive replacement of fossil fuels by renewable sources of energy production.

The new research reveals the fast-growing popularity of the energy transition among institutional investors and the most attractive opportunities it currently presents. Nearly two-thirds (63%) cited energy storage (e.g. batteries) as offering the greatest investment potential. This was followed by electricity transmission (45%), which involves building and operating the links from power plants to substations, and the inter-connectors between energy grids (41%).

“These findings underline the growing appeal of the energy transition among institutional investors and the opportunities that they find most appealing,” said Susanne Wermter, Head of Investment Management Energy & Infrastructure EMEA, Aquila Capital. “Indeed, 82% of investors said they would be attracted by a multi-asset class fund mandated to invest in renewable energy generation, storage, and transportation.”

According to Aquila Capital, energy storage is becoming particularly appealing because of the growing role it will play in maintaining the supply of renewable electricity to Europe’s energy mix. Aquila Capital believes that cost reductions, technology development and improving regulations will continue to strengthen the investment case for storage moving forward.

The study identifies several factors that make participating in the energy transition more interesting financially for investors. The most important of these, cited by 68% of investors, is the increasing share of renewable sources in the energy mix, followed by the restructuring and decentralization of energy grids (62%).

India is presenting a potential investment opportunity of $50 billion in battery storage facilities that could help integrate renewable energy into the grid, replace polluting diesel-fueled power and boost electric mobility, the head of American energy firm AES Corp. said.

“We think India is going to be a big market for energy storage,” Chief Executive Officer Andres Gluski said in an interview Tuesday. He spoke after AES completed the country’s first 10-megawatt battery-storage system to support the grid in national capital New Delhi.

Built in partnership with Mitsubishi Corp. for almost $9 million, the project will demonstrate the benefits of energy storage to clients, regulators and the government, Gluski said. AES has built similar pilot projects in many other markets too, he said.

India’s goal to build 175 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2022 is seen as a big opportunity by AES to use battery storage to integrate fluctuating green power into the grid, as well as replacing diesel-fueled power plants.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has approved A$6 million of funding for the country’s first compress air energy storage (CAES) project.

US-firm Hydrostor will convert a disused zinc mine in South Australia into a below-ground air-storage cavern. The 5MW /10MWh demonstration plant will provide load shifting, frequency regulation and grid security. The Angas mine is currently a brownfield site in a state of “care and maintenance”. The company had been looking for a site in Australia since summer 2017.

The latest funds add to A$3 million it has received from the South Australian Government’s Renewable Energy Technology Fund.

“While being a commercial demonstration at this stage, Hydrostor’s innovative way to store energy with air could add to Australia’s grid-scale storage capability, complementing pumped hydro and batteries,” said Darren Miller, CEO, ARENA.

“Compressed air storage has the potential to provide similar benefits to pumped hydro energy storage, however it has the added benefits of being flexible with location and topography, such as utilising a cavern already created at a disused mine site,” added Miller.

South Australia has become a hotbed for emerging energy storage technologies. A major blackout event in the territory in 2016 exposed the grid’s unsuitability for a modern power generation mix. Since then, the Tesla “100 days” battery install, lithium battery trials and the world’s largest virtual power plant have all been deployed.

Puerto Rico is still struggling to recover from the damage caused by Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm that obliterated the island’s aging and poorly maintained electrical grid. Like many islands, Puerto Rico has depended for years on electricity from diesel and coal powered generators. Virtually all of them were located along the southern coast of the island but the majority of the demand was in the north — not only San Juan but the industrial areas around Bayamòn together with the resort communities of Carolina, Rincon, and Fajardo.

PREPA, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, constructed long distance transmission lines that traversed the mountainous area in the middle of the island to connect supply with demand. Maria decimated those transmission lines. Not only did it rip out the wires, it toppled the towers and stanchions that supported them. After the storm was done venting its wrath on Puerto Rico, there was little left of its electrical grid.

Ahead of a formal announcement on February 12, PREPA has released a draft of its plan to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical grid over the next 20 years. According to a report by the Sierra Club, the proposals contained in that draft would divide the country into 8 regional grids that are neither maxi nor mini in size. Let’s call them midi-grids. The regional grids would be interconnected but capable of functioning independently in the event of another storm like Maria. They could be owned by the utility company or private groups.

Taken as a whole, the draft plan calls for the largest build-out of solar and battery storage in the history of the US, according to Solar Industry Magazine. That’s good news for renewable energy advocates. What’s not such good news is the construction of new natural gas powered generating facilities, which will require the creation of three new LNG terminals. Still, natural gas burns cleaner than diesel, especially when it comes to the particulates that contribute to pulmonary and cardiovascular disease that diesel fuels spew into the atmosphere.

“During Hurricane Maria, hundreds of people died simply because they couldn’t keep their insulin refrigerated or their oxygen machines running,” says Adriana Gonzales, environmental justice organizer for Sierra Club de Puerto Rico. “We need the solar and storage in this plan so we can protect health and safety through the next hurricane with distributed, reliable energy infrastructure.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. (CATL) launched in China‘s the largest energy storage system with capacity of 100 MWh, which will complement the world’s first multi-mixed energy power station, which combines into one unified system on the grid several renewable sources:

• wind – 400 MW
• photovoltaic – 200 MW
• concentrated solar power – 50 MW

In terms of capacity, the energy storage system is not far from the world’s largest installation of 129 MWh/100 MW, delivered by Tesla in Australia.

The huge battery at the Luneng Haixi Multi-mixed Energy Demonstration Project in Golmud is required to withstand temperatures from -33.6 to 35.5 degrees Celsius over at least 15 years.

More about the system:

California has cleared another obstacle for energy storage installations to be eligible for access to the state’s net metering programme.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) will continue to break down barriers for energy storage systems. This process ensures on-site renewable energy powers on-site battery systems. Crucially, the CPUC has now said that it is happy with proposals from California Solar and Storage Association (CALSSA).

Solar net metering and storage have not been natural bedfellows thus far with the former nullifying many of the benefits of the battery and contributing to the slow take-up of residential storage systems in the state. The CPUC decision applies to larger systems and is a significant milestone in what has been a lengthy process.

“NEXTracker is overjoyed to see this programme come to fruition and we are so grateful for partners such as the California Solar and Storage Association (CALSSA), the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), and SepiSolar for spearheading on the policy front,” said Alex Au, CTO, NEXTracker.

The company has been working with other to demonstrate how solar plus storage systems can use software and firmware to satisfy the conditions set out by the regulator.

“When we set out to enter the PV plus storage marketplace, we envisioned a holistic, fully integrated power plant from the get-go; not a market where individual components roam free, causing delays, sub-optimal performance, and lost opportunities for revenue generation,” explained Au.

“To kick-off this project, NEXTracker worked closely with PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E on the utility side to integrate meter and NEM policy requirements into software functions native to the equipment which would allow for cost reductions in labour and components, maximize NEM credit accruals, and to simplify the approval process. As a unified front, we then took all requirements from key stakeholders and created tests and proposed standards with Nationally Recognized Test Laboratories (NRTLs) such as UL.”