The market for power conversion systems (PCS) used in energy storage is becoming “increasingly crowded” with competitors, while the diverse field of players will contribute to “rapid technological innovations and price reductions”, Navigant Research has said.

Due to it being home to some of the largest and fastest growing markets for energy storage, the Asia-Pacific region could represent as much as 43.2% of the overall global market cumulatively for energy storage PCS.

According to ‘Innovations in power conversion technology for grid storage’, a new report from Navigant, North America, Western Europe and Latin America will be other big contributors to the overall picture, although authors Alex Eller and Peter Asmus wrote that “all world regions are expected to see significant growth over the 10-year forecast period”. Navigant also added that while North America is likely to see a higher capacity of energy storage installations in the next few years, Western Europe will deploy more distributed systems – at higher price points – than North America, meaning revenues from PCS market will be higher.

The report also identifies some of the key and leading players in the nascent ES PCS market: digital automation specialist ABB, Dynapower, Hyosung, Rhombus Energy Solutions and Solaredge, for a deeper look. It also looks at products and system setups from specific vendors, including Ideal Power, SolarEdge and Tesla.

Navigant also gave predictions for price reduction trajectories for PCS, although figures will only be made available to subscribers to the company’s research service. Nonetheless, it did say that the energy storage industry’s focus on battery price reduction has diminished as the market has matured, resulting in increasing efforts to reduce costs for balance of system (BOS) components and the PCS.

Renewable energy sources producing DC power, such as solar PV, and variable AC (wind), use PCS to convert their energy to regulated AC power which can be grid-integrated, thus, “PCS enable the utilisation of renewables, storage, and microgrids on a large scale”.

“The market for energy storage PCS is growing increasingly crowded as new companies enter the market leveraging a variety of backgrounds and expertise to introduce new products,” the authors wrote.

Market participants come from a range of backgrounds and expertise, from more pure play component vendors to those with a track record of developing inverters and other products for solar and wind.

According to Eller and Asmus, there are three key innovations or areas of innovation likely to drive the market forward: Smart islanding and backup power, where inverters and PCS combine to provide resilience and uninterruptible power systems (UPS) in the event of grid outages or off-grid use; cost reductions, driven by innovations in materials and components, including improvements in system architecture that reduce the complexity of system design; and the use of energy storage to support grids, with “features such as automatic reactive power support and variable settings to ride-through disruptions” helping with the integration of variable renewable energy through coordinating the different distributed energy resources (DERs) attached to grids.

US home energy storage systems installations hit a record high in the first quarter of 2018. 36 megawatt-hours of grid-connected home energy storage systems were installed during this period, which was the same amount for the first three quarters of the year. Nearly three quarters of the Q1 installations were in California and Hawaii.

“Changing net-metering rules and increasing customer interest in backup and solar self-consumption drove the residential energy storage market’s record quarter,” said Brett Simon, senior analyst at GTM Research.

US energy storage market growth was 26% from Q4 2017 to Q1 2018.

Hold on to your hats, because things could get a lot more interesting. In 2020, annual residential energy storage installations could reach 1,000 megawatt-hours, according to GTM Research.

There are more residential energy storage products available and many can be paired with home solar systems, meaning consumers have quite a few more options available today than just several years ago. It gets even more interesting when people start adding EVs to their home solar and energy storage systems, because they may never need to use fossil fuels again. These folks are not necessarily environmentalists in terms of being activists, but they are interested in doing their part to reduce their carbon and air pollution footprints.

Energy storage is expanding in America under the watch of an administration that has one of the most anti-environmental stances in many years. When paired with solar power, energy storage solves the intermittency problem. In other words, it no longer matters nearly as much when weather is inclement when solar power is active, because battery systems can provide backup electricity. Similarly, the current battery systems can provide electricity at night.

Furthermore, battery technology is improving gradually so it appears to be on track to become more robust. When more and more home owners and businesses are able to produce and store their own electricity there will be less need for electricity from utilities. It isn’t common yet, but a few homeowners already have solar power, energy storage, and an electric vehicle. These households are running on clean, renewable electricity.

It wasn’t that long ago that solar power and wind power were labeled as marginal, ‘green’ electricity, but in the last five years or so they have become much more affordable and economically more feasible than conventional sources like coal and nuclear.

What supported solar along the way partly was the emergence of energy storage in the form of battery systems. Electricity can now be made by solar power systems and the excess can be stored for usage at night or on less sunny days. At least, solar power has been paired successfully with energy storage, and it is catching up with solar power. The cost of this newish technology is dropping, “The overall estimated cost fell 32% in 2015 and 2016, according to the 2017 GTM Reseach utility-scale storage report. That will slow over the next five years, GTM reported. But battery storage is — in certain places and applications — on its way to cost-competitiveness.”

According to Lazard, it could drop another 36% between 2018 and 2022. The UC-Berkeley research study, “Energy Storage Deployment and Innovation for the Clean Energy Transition,” predicted lithium-ion batteries could hit the $100 per kilowatt-hour mark in 2018.

FERC Order 845, from this April, made conditions more favorable for wind energy storage, “FERC Order 845 is more important for wind developers because it changes the interconnection rules. A developer with underused interconnection capacity can now add storage without a new interconnection, allowing the wind developer to profit from underused interconnection capacity in a way that was not possible before,” said RES Group Chief Technology Officer Andrew Oliver.

It isn’t only lithium-ion batteries that have potential to back up wind power systems, as flow batteries might work too, “Due to its scalable energy capacity the Vanadium redox battery is a highly promising option to support our advanced technology offers for isolated and grid connected systems,” said Antonio de la Torre, SGRE’s chief technology officer.

The notion of cost-competitiveness can be a strange one, because the costs of fossil fuels go far beyond extraction, processing and shipping. What is the cost of burning oil and coal on human health and the planet? Fossil fuels have always had much higher costs than have been acknowledged, so comparing them directly with those of solar and wind is quite misleading.

Energy storage could get a big boost if California officials green-light plans by utility Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to move forward with some 567 megawatts of capacity.

Included in the mix is more than 180 MW of lithium-ion battery storage from Elon Musk’s company Tesla. The Tesla-supplied battery array would be owned by PG&E and would offer a 4-hour discharge duration. The other projects would be owned by third parties and operated on behalf of the utility under long-term contracts. All of the projects would be in and around Silicon Valley in the South Bay area.

Once deployed, the storage would sideline three gas-fired power plants—the 605-MW Metcalf Energy Center, the 47-MW Feather River Energy Center, and the 47-MW Yuba City Energy Center—that lack long-term energy supply contracts with utilities. Even without the contracts, the state’s grid operator identified the units as needed for local grid reliability. It, and independent power producer Calpine, which owns the plants, asked federal regulators to label the plants as “must run.” That would let them generate electricity and be paid for it even without firm utility contracts.

Both PG&E and California’s utility regulators object to that idea. They argue that the must-run designation without firm contracts would distort the state’s power market and lead to unfair prices. Backing up their objection, regulators earlier this year directed the utility to seek offers to replace the gas-fired power plants with energy storage.

The utility says that its search prompted more than two dozen storage proposals with 100 variations. PG&E narrowed the list to four, which it presented to state regulators in late June.

One of the projects, Vistra Energy Moss Landing storage project, would be owned by Dynegy Marketing and Trade, a unit of Vistra Energy Corp. The holding company manages more than 40 gigawatts of generating capacity across 12 states. The project would be a transmission-connected, stand-alone lithium-ion battery energy storage resource in Monterey County. The facility, which would feature a 300-MW, 4-hour duration battery array, could enter service in December 2020 under a 20-year contract.

A second project, Hummingbird Energy Storage, would be owned by a unit of esVolta, a new company that is partnering with Oregon-based Powin Energy Corp. and Australia-based Blue Sky Alternative Investments. The Santa Clara County–sited resource would include a 75-MW, 4-hour-duration Li-ion battery array. It also could enter service in December 2020 and would operate under a 15-year contract.

Energy storage experts got to ask what their country could do for them Wednesday.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee convened a hearing on “the role of energy storage in the nation’s electricity system,” which gave industry insiders the rare chance to share what they’ve been thinking before a national audience.

The committee members of both parties generally expressed support for energy storage as a nationally valuable asset to allow better control of the supply and demand of electricity, to avoid more expensive traditional grid upgrades and to provide resilience after cataclysmic events.

“Mr. Chairman, energy storage has the potential to fundamentally transform the way we produce and use electricity in a way that benefits the nation as a whole, but we must be willing to make the necessary commitments and the necessary investments in this technology for it to do so,” said Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois, a Democrat.

For a young industry that typically talks in state-level goals, but is largely focused in only a handful of states, the event marked a maturation in ambition. The goal: to clarify what a federal energy storage policy should look like.

No unified federal storage policy currently exists, although the oft-cited FERC Order 841 is pushing grid operators to systematically value storage’s unique attributes and allow it to compete in wholesale markets.

Potential congressional action will likely be focused elsewhere. Here are the key ideas proposed at the hearing.

Expand federal research and development funding for energy storage technology

Simply earmarking more money for storage research would be the easiest action for Congress to take.

This appears feasible, even in the current political climate. When the Trump White House proposed slashing the budget for the Department of Energy and ARPA-E, the House responded with more funding.

R&D funding could help bring down costs over the next few decades, but it won’t help the practitioners installing batteries today.

MISO last week outlined the range of stakeholder feedback it has received since revealing its straw proposal for energy storage resources (ESRs) in June.

The RTO’s proposal for complying with FERC Order 841 called for ESRs participating under four modes of commitment: charging, discharging, continuous operations and outage/offline. When in online mode, storage would be treated as must-run resources. (See MISO Offers Straw Storage Proposal to Meet Order 841.)

At a July 12 Market Subcommittee meeting, MISO said that stakeholders have stressed the importance of coordination with distribution system providers and expressed concern that requiring hourly offers might limit storage’s flexibility. Others reminded the RTO that storage resources are not generation and said they should not be bound to a must-offer requirement. Some said storage should be treated like load-modifying resources while others said storage should be restricted to the ancillary services market, despite FERC’s requirement that it be allowed to provide capacity and energy.

Stakeholders asked how hybrid storage-and-renewable formats will fit under the proposal and requested optimized pumping and withdrawal options for pumped storage facilities. MISO dismissed the latter as beyond the scope of Order 841 but said it will meet with market participants to discuss ways to fully incorporate pumped storage into the market.

MISO Director of Market Design Kevin Vannoy said the RTO would return in August with more detail around the proposal and examples of how storage will function under the model. It will focus examples on non-market services, storage modeling, metering, commitment and dispatch rules, Vannoy said. Market clearing prices or LMPs will set emergency pricing for injecting and withdrawing during maximum generation events.

“There might be restoration payments when energy storage resources provide black start restoration from an event,” he added.

MISO also said it will rely on its existing ramp performance measures — excessive and deficient energy flagging and deployment failure penalties — to evaluate storage performance.

Vannoy said he’s gotten at least two requests for private meetings with MISO staff to discuss the straw proposal. While MISO isn’t opposed to setting up one-on-one meetings, he said, staff are busy working on Order 841 compliance and have limited time. He also said it may be best to raise storage issues and suggestions in public meetings.

“We’re not necessarily looking to facilitate private discussions,” Vannoy said, urging stakeholders to bring their storage questions and recommendations to the Resource Adequacy, Market and Reliability subcommittees.

Redox flow energy storage systems, earmarked by Navigant Research to be one of the fastest growing electrochemical storage technology sets over the next decade, are being deployed in recent or upcoming projects by Cellcube Energy Storage Systems and Redflow.

Cellcube is the continuation of the line of energy storage systems dubbed VFB (‘vanadium flow battery’) and produced originally by Gildemeister Energy Storage. The German company’s VFB assets were acquired by Canada’s Stina Resources Group and the company changed its name to Cellcube Energy Storage Systems.

As previously noted, taking on a product with a history of testing early market appetite for long duration storage systems, Cellcube is targeting a level of vertical integration in its supply chain. Earlier this month the company also acquired Pure Vanadium Corp, a research and technology company licensed to produce vanadium electrolytes.

Last Monday, Cellcube announced the delivery of its first energy storage system in Germany, followed two days later by the announcement of an installation in New York. This morning, the company also said it has delivered a system to the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

EnerPrax (‘Energy storage in practice’) is a proof of concept project in Germany, conducted by municipal utility Gelsenwasser at Saerbeck Bioenergy Park, a Smart City pilot. The site will test an unspecified number of Cellcube energy storage systems supplied through Cellcube’s local subsidiary Enerox. They will act as eight-hour storage units to provide baseload energy, stabilising the grid and shifting energy production to meet demand.

The arrival of a VFB at the University of Calgary this week is in order to advance research in vanadium and vanadium electrolyte production. In a recent interview, Navigant Research analyst Ian McClenny said that while flow energy storage is expected to grow its share of the stationary storage market significantly over the next 10 years, improvements in components and raw materials are still desirable. Cellcube said in a release that the electrolyte is typically around 30% to 40% of the total cost of the battery.

In New York, two Cellcube systems are being installed at the offices of electric power line contractor O’Connell Electric. Again, while sizing of the units was not disclosed, Cellcube said the batteries will be integrated into a solar-plus-storage microgrid that could lower onsite electricity costs by as much as 40%.

Because renewable energy supplies in the Middle East are intermittent, viable storage solutions are needed in the region to ensure long-term success and broad adoption. The Middle East has set robust sustainable energy goals, so battery storage is the next step to increase reliability of energy supply and infuse the ability to store excess energy when demand for power is low. Batteries also reduce carbon dioxide emissions and can respond nearly instantaneously to increased grid demand, unlike fossil-fuel plants, which can take up to a few hours to reach peak. Battery storage technologies in the Middle East can enable widespread integration of renewables, unlock grid flexibility, and bolster grid reliability.

The upward trend of renewables has brought unlikely bedfellows to alternative energy discussions. Particularly, the falling costs of solar photovoltaic (PV) power has ushered in a new era in which countries are increasing their renewable commitments to the Paris Agreement reached at COP21. Middle East countries, too, are beginning to diversify their energy sources, which seems contradictory to a region that is one of the world’s leading oil and gas producers. Yet the Middle East’s oil producers have set ambitious targets to add solar and wind capacities to their power mix in order to free up more crude for export. Specifically, the UAE aims to produce nearly half of its electricity through renewables by 2050, while Saudi Vision 2030 includes a target of 9.5 gigawatts by 2050. Battery storage will be a crucial element toward this regional shift to renewables.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, will tender around 3.25 Gigawatts of solar projects and around 800MW of wind this year, as it looks to produce 9.5GW of power through renewable sources by 2023. The UAE, the second-biggest Arabian Gulf economy, currently derives around 98% of its energy needs from gas. It has set a target to meet 44% of its energy needs from renewables, 38% from gas, 12% from fossil fuels, and the remainder from nuclear sources.

Why Battery Storage is Essential to a Middle East Shift to Renewables

Renewable energy sources like the sun and wind are affected by location, weather, and time of day. Thus, renewable energy generation creates a variable supply of energy. That’s where battery storage comes in.

The electricity grid is a complex system in which power supply and demand must be equal at any given moment. Constant adjustments to the supply are needed for predictable changes in demand, such as the daily patterns of human activity as well as unexpected changes from equipment overloads and storms. Energy storage plays an important role in this balancing act and helps to create a more flexible and reliable grid system. When used for energy storage, batteries can be located nearly anywhere convenient for distribution, such as a battery facility located near consumers to provide power stability, or end-use, like batteries in electric vehicles.