Stem Inc, is the market leader in behind-the-meter energy storage, delivering turnkey solutions to customers as a means of bringing meaningful reductions in demand charges to customers.

CleanTechnica connected with Stem’s SVP of global sales and marketing, Alan Russo, at Solar Power International this year to get the inside scoop on what makes Stem tick today and how that’s changing now that it is folding solar into its catalog of turnkey solutions.

Stem’s bread and butter is bringing its technical expertise to customers being hit with large demand charges, time of use rates, high electric bills, or just looking to save some money month to month on their utility bills. They work with customers to custom design a solution that Stem then brings to the customer to ultimately deliver on the value proposition identified.

Energy storage by itself isn’t that exciting. In fact, just bolting batteries onto an electrical system might not have any noticeable effect. The transformative aspect of any stationary energy storage installation is the intelligence that controls the energy storage system and uses the storage capacity to optimize the overall profile of energy consumption to meet the needs of the consumer.

The prospect of rolling its mastery of C&I energy storage solutions together with solar brought Stem to Solar Power International this year to broaden its reach into the solar industry. The solar industry is well aware of the symbiotic nature of solar and storage.

“They’ve largely determined that to preserve the value of solar, it’s very desirable to attach storage,” Alan said. “The customer saves more money because now they’re able to get more utilization from those free electrons that they produce during the day when it’s no longer valuable to produce cheap electricity during the day and everyone wins as a result.”

Stem Inc, which offers commercial and industrial (C&I) customers battery storage systems to lower their energy costs, has partnered with Canadian state-owned utility Ontario Power Generation to offer Ontario businesses ‘no-money-down’ energy storage solutions.

US-headquartered Stem, which describes itself as an ‘Artificial Intelligence for energy storage company’, has a track record in its home country, particularly in California, of delivering battery and software solutions to C&I customers that reduce the host business’ need to draw energy from the grid at peak times.

The batteries can also be used to provide other services that could accrue revenues or make savings, such as ancillary grid services, or integrating onsite solar self-consumption. Provider and customer effectively ‘share’ the net savings on energy bills that Stem guarantees, enabling the company to offer its solutions on a ‘no-money-down’, long-term contract basis. Essentially, Stem and rivals including Green Charge (now ENGIE Storage) and Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) have made their name through creating a market for ‘energy storage as a service’.

As well as making limited expansion moves into other territories and markets, including a virtual power plant (VPP) project in Japan and a recent launch for a solar-plus-storage offering in Arizona, the company has been active in Ontario for some time. The company has a number of projects executed or in the pipeline in the province and in late July announced it had netted CA$200 million (US$151 million) in project finance from institutional investor group Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

The Canadian province has been identified as a hot market in C&I energy storage, not least because of the Global Adjustment Charge (GAC) policy mechanism, which uses peak electricity pricing tariffs to pay for grid upkeep and clean energy policies, with commercial customers levied the highest rates. Recent developments include a 42MWh deal between developer NRStor – another big recipient of project finance from institutional investors – and solutions provider IHI Inc and a single 48MW / 144MWh energy storage system provided by Fluence to PUC Distribution, a designated electricity distribution provider in the Ontario city of Sault Ste. Marie. The largest single C&I project already up and running in the province is a 10MW / 20MWh battery system installed by Convergent Energy + Power and made by IHI Inc.

The UK’s Capacity Market has been initially suspended after the European Court of Justice annulled the European Commission’s decision not to object to the scheme.

However, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has said it intends to work closely with the European Commission to reinstate the scheme as soon as possible.

The ruling essentially prevents the government from holding future auctions and making payments under existing agreements.

Clean energy technology provider Tempus Energy challenged the decision to grant the UK’s Capacity Market with state aid approval, claiming that its very design unfairly discriminated against clean energy projects, paving the way for the market to be “dominated” by coal, gas and diesel generators.

Tempus claimed that the scheme privileges generation technologies over demand-side response in a “discriminatory and disproportionate manner”, adding that the European Commission could not have concluded that there were no doubts surrounding the scheme on the basis of a preliminary examination.

And today the General Court of the European Union ruled in Tempus’ favour, annulling the European Commission’s decision not to raise objections to the scheme.

The ruling said that the EC should have had doubts over certain aspects of the scheme and initiated a formal investigation to properly assess its compatibility with state aid rules.

The UK now has two months to appeal the ruling before the Court of Justice.

In a statement issued this morning, Tempus Energy chief Sara Bell said that the ruling meant that a “customer revolution is on the cards”.

SALT Energy, a Maryland based developer of renewable energy and microgrid projects, has teamed up with Baker Energy Team of Roseville, Calif., to explore the development of microgrids to serve new businesses in California City, especially cannabis growing operations.

A microgrid project could be in operation as soon as next summer, according to Robert Babcock, president and owner of SALT Energy. Although they are still preliminary, Babcock said he has had discussions with businesses that are either already in California City or are looking to locate there, particularly cannabis grow operations.

California City has a sunny, arid climate well suited for growing cannabis, and the city has a lot of open space.

The city was designed as a model to rival Los Angeles in size. Streets and services were laid out, and the city was incorporated in 1965. But although the lots were sold, the city never reached its planned size. Today there are about 14,000 residents of California City.

At this point, however, an influx of businesses with high electrical demand could strain California City’s grid, which is run by Southern California Edison. A cannabis grow operation can require service of up to 6,000 amps.

Linked microgrids for California City?

Since recreational marijuana became legal in California on January 1, utilities throughout the state have been swamped with service requests from cannabis growers looking to connect or upgrade their electrical service. That has resulted in service fulfillment waits of up to a year or more.

“California City is at the end of the line and the time lines are even longer,” Babcock said. “Cannabis growers want their service requests done yesterday.”

Over the last decade, the renewable energy industry has boomed due to the proliferation of new technology that is reducing the cost of construction and long-term operability. However, one critical problem still remains: storing renewable energy during lulls in wind speed or sun exposure is often prohibitively expensive. In response to this issue, Energy Vault, a subsidiary of California’s IdeaLab, has recently announced a straightforward mechanism for the conservation of renewable sources using kinetic forces.

The mechanism proposed by Energy Vault is a nearly 400-foot tall, six-armed steel crane. Using proprietary software, the towering structure orchestrates the placement of 35-ton blocks of concrete in response to drop-offs in demand and fluctuations in environmental conditions.

How does it work? As power demand decreases, the cranes surround themselves with concentric rings of the concrete bricks lifted by the leftover power from surrounding wind and solar farms. Once demand increases, the cranes begin lowering the bricks, which powers turbines that transform the kinetic energy into electricity that gets pumped back into the grid.

Energy Vault’s team looked toward preexisting renewable energy sources that rely on gravitational forces. According to Energy Vault, the technology was influenced by energy retention strategies of hydroelectric power dams that pump water into a series of cisterns on higher ground that ultimately flow downwards into energy turbines once demand rises.

Unlike conventional resources used for the retention of renewable energy, such as Tesla’s Powerwall and Powerpack lithium-ion stationary batteries, the system developed by Energy Vault does not rely on chemical storage solutions or high-cost materials. Recycled debris from preexisting construction sites can be used for the fabrication of the bricks, which are viable for up to four decades without a decrease in storage capacity.

Currently, Energy Vault is partnering with India’s Tata Power Company Limited to construct an initial 35 MWh system with an expected date of completion in 2019.

Venture capital funding for energy storage, efficiency and smart grid projects rose for the first three quarters of this year, even if overall corporate funding fell by 11 percent, according to Mercom Capital Group’s nine-month market report.

The overall funding—which includes venture capital, public market and debt financing—raised $3.3 billion for battery, smart grid and efficiency deals for the period January through September. This is an 11 percent drop from the $3.7 billion raised in the same period of 2017.

Global venture capital alone, however, topped $1.3 billion. This is close to $100 million higher than for the first nine months last year.

Some publicly announced storage-sector mergers became known just after the fourth quarter began. NantEnergy is buying the energy storage and management solutions business of Sharp Electronics Corp.

In October, energy storage startup Volta announced it was investing in battery developer Solid Power. Duke Energy also revealed plans to invest about $500 million in energy storage projects in the Carolinas.

Energy Storage will be the subject both of sessions upstairs and the Knowledge Hubs on the exhibit floor at POWER-GEN International happening December 4-6 in Orlando. Integrating large-scale battery technology into the electric grid is the subject of at least 12 sessions at POWER-GEN.

Large-scale energy storage used to be part of the future of energy. But it’s here now, and it’s going to become increasingly important in the years to come.

Clean energy researchers at Bloomberg NEF (BNEF) find that more than $1 trillion will be invested in the sector between now and 2040. The group’s latest Long-Term Energy Storage Outlook says that the “tumbling costs of utility-scale lithium-ion battery storage systems will transform the economic case for batteries in both the vehicle and the electricity sector”, predicting that prices will fall by 52% between 2018 and 2030, adding to the steep declines already experienced this decade.

This will lead to $1.2 trillion of investment flowing to the sector in the next 22 years, creating a cumulative capacity of 942GW, BNEF said. In the near term, the market will be dominated by South Korea and the US, but China will be the driving force from the 2020s onward.

Energy storage is key to helping governments decarbonize their economies by using more renewable energy because the dominant sources, wind and solar, are intermittent and do not provide constant power. “ Cheap batteries mean that wind and solar will increasingly be able to run when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining ,” the report says.

Yayoi Sekine, energy storage analyst for BNEF and co-author of the report, said: “We have become much more bullish about storage deployments since our last forecast a year ago. This is partly due to faster-than-expected falls in storage system costs, and partly to a greater focus on two emerging applications for the technology – electric vehicle charging, and energy access in remote regions.”

Logan Goldie-Scot, head of energy storage at BNEF, added: “We see energy storage growing to a point where it is equivalent to 7% of the total installed power capacity globally in 2040. The majority of storage capacity will be utility-scale until the mid-2030s, when behind the meter applications overtake.”

The energy storage industry is all about incremental improvements, so it’s rare to see a product come to market that does something radically different.

That happened last week when the stealthy Swiss/Southern Californian startup Energy Vault went public with an unusually creative grid storage concept. It devised a six-armed crane that stacks concrete blocks with cheap and abundant grid power, and drops them down to retrieve electricity when needed.

The company pitches this as a durable, trustworthy solution for the thorny problem of storing electricity for long periods of time.

The lithium-ion batteries that account for almost all of new grid storage deployments make economic sense for 4-hour duration, even 6-hour, but they get too expensive for super-long durations. Meanwhile, longer-term storage is getting more valuable as cheap but intermittent wind and solar power continue their rise on the grid.

That mismatch has inspired a cohort of lithium-ion challengers taking aim at the dominant technology’s safety concerns, degradation and duration limitations. So far, this wing of the industry has numerous bankruptcies to show for its labor, with a few survivors that could prove durable.

Energy Vault dispensed with the lengthy lab research required to commercialize new battery tech and drew inspiration instead from the granddaddy of grid storage, pumped hydro.

The shifting of water between higher and lower reservoirs still delivers the vast majority of global grid storage capacity. The problem, at least in the U.S., is that the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers have already dammed all the most auspicious sites, and modern regulations to prevent environmental devastation make new siting difficult, if not impossible.

Gravity has many uses, though. Energy Vault elevates giant bricks that eventually come down, releasing potential energy to the grid.

The concept is simple enough, although it depends on intellectual property in materials science, physics and software. The outcome, if it works as described, would be significant.

The system operates at about 90 percent efficiency, and delivers long-duration storage at half the prevailing price on the market today, said CEO and co-founder Robert Piconi.

New York is crafting one of the most ambitious energy storage targets in the nation, but major barriers could make it difficult to meet the target, according to a recent filing with state regulators by storage developer GI Energy.

The affiliate of Shell New Energies US argues that energy storage developers face “massive uncertainty” regarding undefined delivery service rates for energy storage placed in front of the meter. The company made the argument within a docket that the Public Service Commission opened seeking comments on the state’s energy storage roadmap (Case 18-E-0130).

Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Democratic governor, has called for a 1,500 MW energy storage target, but state agencies in June released an energy storage roadmap that cites the potential for as much as 3,000 MW.

The commission, along with other state agencies, is in the process of drawing up the target and the rules that will govern energy storage.

The rates that would apply to those projects, however, remain “to be determined” for most New York utilities, the GI Energy filing states, leading to ambiguity and “costly, protracted debate and negotiation on a case-by-case, territory-by-territory basis, inflating project delivery times, legal fees and related soft costs.”

Uneven playing field

Because third parties are unable to price their projects properly, they face an uneven playing field, GI Energy argues.

And, “perhaps most confounding of all,” GI Energy writes, utilities can deem their own energy storage projects as grid assets subject to no delivery bills while third party projects are treated as new retail accounts that are billed for delivery” — as if they were any other commercial behind the meter service.

As a result, what could be the single biggest operating expense for energy storage developers remains undefined in New York, the filing states.

“Other developers are just becoming more and more aware of this,” said Pete Falcier, vice president of analytics and regulatory affairs at GI Energy.

MidAmerican Energy Company has announced plans to install a utility-scale battery energy storage system, enabling a utility to store electricity for later use. The battery project provides four megawatt-hours of storage capacity and can supply 1 MW of power for up to four hours. One megawatt of electricity is enough to power about 900 average Iowa homes.

Chicago-based Invenergy will install the lithium-iron phosphate battery system, housed in two truck-sized steel containers, at a MidAmerican Energy substation in Knoxville. The new system is expected to begin operating by the end of next month.

“This innovative project will help us learn how best to use an energy storage system, and how it can serve our customers in the future,” Mike Fehr, MidAmerican Energy vice president of resource development, said. “Energy storage has the potential to allow us to retain energy when customer demand is low and release it during peak usage times. That would give us new options to manage peak loads, enhance overall reliability and help keep electric costs low and affordable for our customers.”

Large-scale energy storage has the potential to provide several benefits, including:

• Flattening peaks and valleys of electric generation by enabling energy companies to generate and store electricity at times of low demand and release it when demand is high.
• Reducing the operating time of peaking generators, which generally run only when there is a high demand and are a relatively expensive form of generation.
• Enhancing renewable energy’s reliability by storing energy produced when wind speeds and sun exposure are high and using it later.
• Improving power quality and prolonging transformer life.

“Energy storage is still in the development stages and the economic feasibility on a larger scale is being assessed as well; however, prices are trending downward,” Fehr said. “MidAmerican Energy wants first-hand experience with the technology so we’re positioned t