Among innovative technology providers developing a thermal energy storage system, Norway-based cleantech company EnergyNest is currently one of the partners selected by multinational energy provider Enel for the analysis of the benefits and impacts of the integration of its technology in one of Enel’s numerous power generation assets. According to EnergyNest, impressive economic and climate-relevant figures could be achieved by the company’s latest thermal energy storage technology when integrated in full-scale: annual CO₂reduction of up to 45,000 tons, 14 million liters of fuel oil saved per year and project payback in less than three years.

The collaboration launched with EnergyNest gives Enel the chance to evaluate EnergyNest’s Thermal Energy Battery solution in real-life conditions and identify full-scale business-applications for the technology integrated into thermal power plants. The objective of the innovative project is to demonstrate how waste heat recovery in Thermal Energy Storage can increase flexibility and sustainability of thermal power plants. This activity will allow Enel to assess technology robustness, its potential contribution to increasing efficiency and its positive environmental impact.

Last week, EnergyNest officially unveiled its first Thermal Battery Module, produced in its new manufacturing hub in Europoort, Rotterdam, on the site of partner Mebin. Manufacturing for two commercial projects is now expected to start at the end of the year. EnergyNest’s innovative battery modules consist of locally-sourced, recyclable materials – framed steel pipes set with Heatcrete, a high-performance thermal-energy-storing concrete developed in partnership with HeidelbergCement, Germany’s multinational buildings material company.

San Diego Zoo Global has chosen a unit of EDF Renewables North America to provide a 1 MW/4 MWh energy storage system that is designed to reduce energy costs while limiting emissions at the zoo.

The zoo will use the storage project to smooth spikes in energy usage, thereby, lowering demand charges. The system will also minimize energy costs by recharging the battery when wholesale electricity prices are low and discharging power to the zoo when costs are high.

EDF Renewables North America Distributed Solutions structured the 12-year contract for the energy storage system as a shared savings agreement.

“We operate the battery and split the savings achieved based on performance,” said Michael Robinson, senior business development manager at EDF Renewables.

EDF also financed and installed the storage project.

The zoo used a $1 million rebate from the Center for Sustainable Energy to help cover project costs. Savings achieved from the system will pay for the project on an ongoing basis, said Adam Ringler, director of performance improvement at San Diego Zoo Global.

The zoo is a direct access customer, which means it buys its power at wholesale rates directly from the California Independent System Operator. The only rates it pays to the utility are demand charges. The energy storage system, which is expected to enter service in May or July 2019, avoids demand charges by cutting the zoo’s energy use during periods of peak demand. The storage system will also be used for some energy arbitrage by taking advantage of wholesale power price volatility.

The energy storage project is one of the larger investments in the zoo’s sustainability program and its “first foray into potential new technology we might deploy going forward,” Ringler said. “We have to see what the results are.”

Australia is to trial using solar and wind power to produce hydrogen via electrolysis, with the hydrogen then being used for long-term energy storage in the Sydney gas network.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has committed AU$7.5 million (US$5.3 million) in funding for Australian energy firm Jemena to build a demonstration scale 500kW electrolyser, known as Project H2GO, at its facility in western Sydney.

The AU$15 million, two-year trial project will connect to Jemena’s existing gas network, which delivers gas to 1.3 million customers in New South Wales. In a release, ARENA noted that hydrogen can be safely added to the natural gas mains at concentrations of up to 10% without affecting pipelines, appliances or regulations.

Most of the hydrogen produced will be injected into the local gas network for domestic use and will go towards demonstrating the potential for renewable hydrogen storage in Australia’s gas networks.

Jemena MD Frank Tudor said: “In the future Australians will need to decide what to do with excess renewable energy on very windy or very sunny days. Jemena’s Project H2GO will demonstrate how existing gas pipeline technology can store excess renewable energy for weeks and months, making it more efficient than batteries which can only store excess renewable energy for minutes or hours.”

Some of the hydrogen will be used in a gas engine generator for electricity generation back into the grid with the remaining stored for use in an onsite Hydrogen Refuelling Station for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

ARENA CEO Darren Miller said: “As Australia transitions to renewable energy, hydrogen could play an important role as energy storage and also has the effect of decarbonising the gas network with ‘green’ gas. There is significant potential in the power-to-gas value chain including the ability to stabilise the grid as well as pairing renewable energy with electrolysers to soak up and store surplus electricity.”

In the longer term, hydrogen also has the potential to be a major Australian export opportunity. Earlier this month, ARENA announced AU$22 million in R&D funding into exporting hydrogen, supporting 16 research projects across nine Australian universities and research organisations, as hydrogen is seen as potentially a major export opportunity.

All over California, school districts are beginning to install energy storage. Mountain View Los Altos (MVLA) High School District was the first district in the state to combine energy storage with solar power generation and electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. At ENGIE Storage, we have years of experience helping K-12 school districts generate cost savings and improve the economics of sustainability measures with our GridSynergy® energy storage systems and software platform. We recently sat down with Mike Mathiesen, associate superintendent of business services at MVLA, to talk about how school districts can benefit from energy storage.

Q: The MVLA school district is located in the heart of Silicon Valley. What makes it unique in terms of the community’s willingness to embrace new technologies for a more sustainable future?

A: Our community expects sustainability measures. Students and parents advocate for it. At our campuses we see electric vehicles, recycling, rainwater harvesting, and other green initiatives, so there is a lot of support for anything we do to supplement those efforts. The community really pays attention to how we’re using our resources, and we try to make those choices wisely and responsibly.

Q: How did you find out about energy storage, and how did the project start?

A: Sybil Cramer, a community advocate and member of MVLA’s Go Green Sustainability Committee, found ENGIE Storage through the Green California Schools Summit when she was researching EV charging. At the time, they were known as Green Charge. They held a workshop that showed us the basics of energy storage and how it mitigates the demand charge impact of EV charging. They also helped us acquire funding to install charging stations coupled with energy storage at both our campuses at no cost to the district.

Q: Why did you decide to couple the energy storage with EV charging and solar power generation?

A: Once we started to understand the mechanics of energy storage, we realized it was a great fit for supporting green initiatives. We already had solar panels installed, and energy storage was a way to pull everything together. By storing energy from the grid at night, when energy is less expensive, and when solar panels are productive during the day, and then discharging it from the GridSynergy system during peak demand times, we reduce demand charges and lower our bill from Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) without adjusting our usage patterns. It’s also more sustainable, because we reduce the amount of energy drawn from the grid during peak times when less clean sources of energy are in use.

It’s likely a strong indication of the way the world is adopting renewable energy rapidly that just under a month ago, one of the best-established trade shows for solar in the US featured what seemed like almost as much space dedicated to national and international energy storage companies and technologies, as it did for solar.

Solar Power International, which was held this year in Anaheim, California, is co-located with Energy Storage International, but you could almost say that the show as a whole is almost like a solar-plus-storage show in many ways. Sure, the module manufacturers you read about on PV Tech were there, and there’s still clearly markets for ‘standalone solar’ all over the US. But it has become so inevitable that storage – mainly in the form of batteries – will play a huge role coupled with renewables that several conference speakers and sources I spoke to said that it could even be just a handful of years before we no longer talk of solar without storage at all in the US, perhaps excepting a few specific applications or business cases.

“Storage has always been on the horizon for the solar industry but today with time-of-use shifts, the movement of the more valuable electricity to later in the day, makes storage able to provide a uniquely attractive value proposition to the solar industry, to the solar customer, now,” Alan Russo of Stem Inc says.

One of the leaders in providing smart storage systems to commercial and industrial (C&I) operations that want to lower their peak energy costs, Stem has made its first-ever foray into adding solar to its offerings in a rare example of storage industry folk coming to solar rather than the other way around. Russo said Stem believes the combined offering can provide value in several directions too.

“The solar only marketplace is becoming more competitive, the value of solar is dropping as rates are shifting to later in the day,” Russo says.

“When you add storage you increase the gross margin for the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) partner, you increase customer returns and then you provide utilities with the value they’re seeking by shifting those rates. Rate shifts are designed to change consumer behaviour, [but] we allow customers to operate how they want to, and everyone benefits from the improved economics.”

California recently joined other leading states, provinces, cities, and corporations around the world by setting an ambitious 100 percent carbon-free electricity target

. It’s a landmark, not because California was the first, but because it is the biggest. The state ranks as the fifth-largest economy in the world.

Achieving 100 percent carbon-free electricity means lots of wind and solar. Alongside more-flexible demand, balancing such renewable energy will involve bringing more energy storage onto California’s grid, to store surplus clean generation, which is where the state’s Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) comes in.

SGIP has spurred record-breaking levels of energy storage, all intended to lower California’s overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But is it working? It turns out: not so well.

Last month, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) released an answer in the form of its 2017 SGIP Advanced Energy Storage Impact Evaluation, and the results were sobering.

The 2017 edition of the report, like the 2016 edition, found that energy storage systems in California are actually increasing emissions across residential and non-residential projects alike. This is not just a California problem. It adds to the growing consensus that, as of today, the operation of energy storage increases emissions.

For Energy Storage Emissions, The Devil Is in the Charge / Discharge Details

The 2017 SGIP impact evaluation evaluated GHG impacts using marginal emissions for each hour of the year. That’s because each time batteries charge, they’re increasing the total amount of demand on the grid; each time they discharge, they’re decreasing overall grid demand.

October 18 (Renewables Now) – In a drive to reduce its energy costs, the San Diego Zoo has awarded EDF Renewables North America Distributed Solutions an energy storage services contract supported by a 1 MW/4 MWh battery.

The contract is in line with San Diego Zoo Global’s fiscal and sustainability planning, says the joint press release Wednesday.

With energy storage, the zoo will be mitigating spikes in usage, thus lowering demand charges. The organisation plans to minimise energy costs by recharging the battery when electricity rates are low, and discharging that power when costs are high.

The EDF Renewables contract is performance-based as the company is only paid for the actual utility bill savings realised by the zoo, as a result of the battery operation. There will be no fixed payments and no performance risk for the zoo, San Diego Zoo Global noted.

The French Energy Regulation Commission (CRE) has selected a pair of battery storage projects by Voltalia that will benefit the function of the Guianese electrical network.

The “Mana Storage” project from Voltalia consists of two battery storage units for an installed capacity totaling 10 MW, and is the main project selected by the CRE in French Guiana and will benefit from a 10-year remuneration contract.

That contract will begin at the commissioning of the project, which is slated for the end of 2019. This battery storage project stands as the first of its kind in Guiana.

Sébastien Clerc, CEO of Voltalia, said: “We are proud to use once again our knowledge of isolated networks and our know-how in terms of storage to better serve the inhabitants of French Guiana. They will benefit from cheaper electricity during peak periods and from a more stable electricity network. In addition, this new storage project is located in the same area as Voltalia’s very first power plant.”

Lithium-ion batteries will be equipped at the project, which stands as the second storage project initiated in French Guiana after the Savane des Pères project (4MW PV and 2MW of storage).

The first unit (5MW)  ill be used for daily arbitrage, storing cheap electricity produced in the middle of the day and releasing it during peak consumption in the evening, while the 5MW second unit will be used to regulate the frequency of the network by discharging stored electricity on the network when there is a drop in frequency due to lower production.

Sometime in the next month or two, the first investment in what will be a significant new stage in the transition to a renewable energy dominated grid in Australia will be made.

It will be confirmation of the world’s first investment in a project that co-locates, for the first time, large-scale solar with a large-scale pumped hydro storage facility – and the first example in Australia of a storage facility with vastly more storage capacity than the renewable energy source it is paired with.

Storage is a new phenomenon in Australia – even though there are a handful of pumped hydro plants scattered around the main grid, from Wivenhoe in the north, to Shoalhaven and Tumut in NSW.

There has been extraordinary interest in the performance of the country’s first large-scale battery, the so-called Tesla big battery at Hornsdale, which is also the world’s biggest lithium-ion installation.

This, and the Newman battery in the Pilbara, have stunned observers with the speed, accuracy and flexibility, challenging the primacy of the fossil fuel industry in providing both frequency and inertia, and defying the assumption that you need fossil fuels to keep the grid intact.

One expects as much excitement and scrutiny of the Genex project at Kidston, although that won’t be the only project that is due to get an investment nod around that time. Snowy Hydro is also working feverishly on its own grand plans to recreate the splendor of the original hydro scheme and add a $6 billion plus project to be known as Snowy 2..0

It is not entirely clear, however, that the investment decision to be taken by early December will be a commitment to the whole project, the 2,000MW facility with 175 hours of storage, or to fund extensive tunnelling that will then form the basis of further investment.

Whatever the case, these are not the only pumped hydro schemes that are being looked at in detail.

Everyone agrees that Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Order 841, and its commandment to create participation models for energy storage across the country, is going to be a big deal.

Brattle Group estimates there are about 7,000 megawatts, or more than 20,000 megawatt-hours, of cost-competitive energy storage potential to be unlocked by Order 841’s implementation across the capacity, energy and ancillary services markets run by the country’s independent system operators (ISOs) and regional transmission organizations (RTOs).

But behind these grand-scale projections, there are dozens of key details being worked out that will affect how much of that energy storage potential is unlocked, at what pace, and at what cost. Order 841 implementation is now in the hands of the ISOs and RTOs. And while many of its key provisions are set in stone, many more are left up to the grid operators and various stakeholders to work out in ways that best suit their particular needs.

These are the details that are keeping the energy storage industry, as well as state regulators and public and private utilities, finely tuned for each new Order 841 implementation plan, known as a “straw proposal,” to come from the nation’s ISOs and RTOs. This month so far has seen a final straw proposal from Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) put before stakeholders, as well as the latest iteration of straw proposal from PJM Interconnection. As the country’s biggest grid operator and as host to hundreds of megawatts of batteries playing into its frequency regulation market, PJM is a focus point for the industry.

These proposals are coming at a relatively rapid pace for a process that took nearly two years to move from a proposal to a final rule. ISOs and RTOs have a deadline of December 3 to file the tariff changes needed to “establish a participation model for electric storage resources that ensures eligibility to participate in its market in a way that recognizes the unique physical and operational characteristics of such resources.” By December of 2019, those rules are set to go into effect.