Last week, CleanTechnica took note of some concerns that energy storage and renewables have enabled utilities to keep leveraging fossil fuels into the grid. Sure enough, here comes the US Department of Energy with a solution: a newly announced round of $30 million in funding for next-generation technology leading to batteries that can store electricity in bulk for at least 10 hours.

At that scale, energy storage can solve three problems at once: it can funnel more wind and solar into the grid, it can shrink reliance on coal baseload power plants, and it can push gas “peaker” plants out of the picture. Problem solved!

Why Exactly Is The Trump Administration Interested In Bulk Energy Storage?

By the way, 10 hours is just for starters. The new round of funding aims at systems that can shoot electricity into the grid for up to 100 hours, which puts nuclear power on even shakier ground than it is now (that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms).

The funding comes through the Energy Department’s ARPA-E (Advanced Projects Research Agency – Energy) office, which kickstarts high risk, high reward R&D. That means we taxpayers get the credit for pushing new clean tech into the market when private sector dollars lack the muscle. Group hug!

For those of you new to the ARPA-E topic, Congress breathed the office into life in 2007 during the last years of the Bush Administration, but it wasn’t funded until 2009 under the Obama Administration.

If you’re thinking that breaks down along political lines well, it does — up to a point. President* Trump threatened to kill ARPA-E and he appeared to be on track for successlast year, but Secretary of Energy Rick Perry seems to have gotten the last laugh.

Renewables are not ARPA-E’s only area of focus but they’re a big one, and that’s where the 10-to-100 goal for energy storage comes in.

If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. At least that is what the song says about New York City. And it stands for energy storage.

New York City has some of the most stringent rules in the country for permitting energy storage projects, as well as an ambitious storage target of 100 MWh by 2020. But there were only 4.8 MWh of storage installed in the city at the beginning of 2017, as it is so difficult to secure a permit for a project — especially involving lithium-ion technology.

At the end of April, New York took a step toward resolving that issue with the release of the first comprehensive guidelines for installing lithium-ion batteries in New York City.

The guidelines were the result of a collaboration among the City University of New York (CUNY) Smart Distributed Generation Hub, the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), the NYC Department of Buildings (DOB), Consolidated Edison and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). The guidelines are only for outdoor energy storage projects, including rooftop projects, but they represent a step forward in a multi-year process.

“Not only will the guidelines bring in more developers, I think we’ll see more movement in pending projects,” Tria Case, director of sustainability and energy conservation at CUNY, told Utility Dive.

A template approach

The CUNY guide is a “huge help because people are very uncertain about the process,” Veronica Ciechowska Weiss, a project manager with Burnham Nationwide, told Utility Dive. Burnham helps clients through the permitting process for a variety of types of projects.

The state treats the permitting of energy storage projects on an individual basis, which has led to a costly and time-consuming process, according to Ciechowska Weiss. Solar projects in New York faced a similar problem before the state came up with permitting guidelines like the ones now being developed for energy storage, she said.

“The goal is to help storage move to scale” by developing a process that provides more of a template-approach to project permitting, CUNY’s Case said.

Serial entrepreneur Kevin Williams of Kansas City developed a new power storage product called Wise Power and has a crowdfunding campaign to help bring it to market.

Williams founded Kansas City-based cybersecurity company Wilco Technologies. It was providing workforce credential services to more than 1.5 million registered users throughout the U.S. Department of Defense by 2017, when he decided to sell it.

Williams used the money to help develop a revolutionary new power storage unit and controller system that uses Internet of Things technology to communicate with all the electronic devices in your home. Now he has prototypes built and seeks to raise $1.07 million to hone them in preparation for mass production. He has field testing scheduled in August and hopes to go to market by the fourth quarter.

The crowdfunding campaign was launched on a regulated site called StartEngine, which was founded by Howard Marks, a video game programmer famous for bringing “Guitar Hero” and “Call of Duty” to market.

“I received an email from Howard’s group, which had seen some information about Wise Power and what we were doing,” Williams said. “They said I should really consider using their platform to raise capital.”

Williams has two patents for his products, with a plan to disrupt a market estimated to be worth $11 billion.

The Wise Power crowdfunding campaign offers convertible notes, which allow the holder to convert them into company stock once Wise Power raises at least $3 million in qualified equity financing during its next equity round. There is a minimum investment of $100. All investors gain preferred customer status for a period of one year.

“One of the reasons we’re using StartEngine is so the masses can invest for as little as $100,” Williams said. “We want to use distributors so others can share in this as well. We designed this specifically to be shared with the masses.”

A group of researchers at Stanford University have developed a new type of battery using water and salt that they hope could be used to store energy produced from wind and solar farms, increasing the effectiveness of renewable energy sources.

The two fastest-growing forms of energy generation in the world today are wind and solar, and both have the same fundamental limitation. They’re subject to the weather, and routinely go for hours or days without generating any electricity at all. Energy companies relying on these generation methods need some sort of backup while their solar farms and wind turbines are offline.

There aren’t too many options for these energy companies, and most simply turn to fossil fuels like coal or natural gas which significantly undercuts the benefits of green energy in the first place. An alternate solution—and one being trialed in places like Australia—is battery storage, so that excess power produced from renewable energy can be saved for later.

But batteries have their own problems. Most utility-scale battery systems are expensive to build, and there’s a limit to how long they last. Typically, rechargeable batteries have a lifetime of around a decade before they can no longer effectively hold a charge and need to be replaced.

The new battery developed by researchers at Stanfordsolves these problems with a cheap, long-lasting battery perfect for utility-scale energy storage. The battery is a manganese-hydrogen battery, and it’s made by dissolving manganese sulfate, a common salt, in water.

When electricity is pumped through the solution, it triggers a chemical reaction, creating manganese dioxide and pure hydrogen gas. That hydrogen gas can then be stored and later burned as fuel whenever excess electricity is needed. The battery itself can be recharged with more electricity and the process repeats.

The BP-backed solar developer Lightsource sees a very compelling case for deploying energy storage in the Western U.S.

All major utility-scale solar developers have added storage development talent, and some have begun regularly bidding on combined projects. But few have actually won bids for, much less constructed, hybrid plants. That makes it hard to determine just how central that kind of project is to their business models.

Not so with Lightsource, the largest European solar developer, which launched its U.S. branch last year and soon after received $200 million from oil and gas giant BP in exchange for a 43 percent ownership stake.

North America Chief Commercial Officer Katherine Ryzhaya affirmed the company’s view on storage in a keynote interview at GTM’s Solar Summit in San Diego last week.

“For a utility-scale solar developer, we’re not putting forward any proposals without storage, currently, to anybody west of the Colorado,” she said. “Every utility process, every bilateral at this point, at least on the West Coast, is looking at solar-storage hybrids.”

The American West enjoys a considerable solar resource, such that states like California and Arizona are starting to worry about a surfeit of solar on the grid at midday, with steep ramp requirements to meet peak demand in the evenings.

That dynamic has driven groundbreaking solar and storage contracts, like the NextEra project for Tucson Electric Power and the First Solar plant to deliver evening power to Arizona Public Service (the cartographically inclined may counter that most of Arizona lies east of the Colorado River, but it does sit west of the river’s source in the Rockies, so I’m going to count it for the purposes of this article).

So far, though, developers have kept their commitment to dispatchable solar more vague than “every proposal in the West.”

Co-location isn’t strictly necessary; on an interconnected grid, an offsite battery can store surplus solar power. Developing both resources together, however, creates savings on interconnection and installation costs, and improves system efficiency through DC coupling, which simplifies the power conversion process.

In order for power grids to rely mostly or entirely on intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar power, we’re going to need a lot of energy storage. Some studies have suggested that the United States would need 12 hours of energy storage in order to meet 80% of our grid needs from wind and solar, and in order to hit 100% wind+solar – without oversizing capacity or nationwide HVDC – the same study says we’ll need three weeks of energy storage.

While current technologies – namely lithium ion batteries – can technically run for as many hours as is needed, it is assumed that this technology won’t scale well due to its cost.

With that, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), has put out a request for projects to develop energy storage systems that provide power to the electric grid for durations of 10 to approximately 100 hours, or up to a month.

The program application page can be found here.

The DAYS program (Duration Addition to electricitY Storage) seeks two categories of projects – 1) DAYS systems that provide daily cycling in addition to longer duration, less frequent cycling and 2) DAYS systems that do not provide daily cycling, but can take over when daily cycling resources are either filled or depleted.

The program’s LCOS (Levelized Cost of Storage) target is 5 center per kilowatt-hour (kWh)-cycle, and ARPA-E suggests it likely requires system round-trip efficiencies greater than 50%. ARPA-E believes that long durations and infrequent cycling provide opportunities for design tradeoffs that may be leveraged to reduce costs and realize economically-viable long-duration energy storage systems. As can be seen in the image above, the goal is to be able to resell the wind and solar power, when including the generation costs of 2.5¢/kWh at 7.5¢/kWh.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced up to $30 million in funding for projects as part of a new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program: Duration Addition to electricitY Storage (DAYS). DAYS project teams will build innovative technologies to enable long-duration energy storage on the power grid, providing reliable electricity for 10 to approximately 100 hours.

Energy storage will play an increasingly critical role in the resilient grid of the future. Storage systems provide important services, including improving grid stability, providing backup power, and allowing for greater integration of renewable resources. Today’s dominant storage options have limitations that inhibit their use as long-duration solutions, particularly their high cost.

“Building the grid of tomorrow will require new tools and technologies to ensure Americans have access to affordable and secure energy,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. “At DOE, we are peering over the energy horizon and identifying the key technologies we need to support the power system of the future. These new storage options will offer us the opportunity to make the grid more resilient while enabling greater integration of our domestic energy resources.”

DAYS teams will develop energy storage systems that are deployable in almost any location and discharge electricity at a per-cycle cost target much lower than what is possible in systems available today.

The funding opportunity is open to a range of storage technology choices, including thermal, mechanical, electrochemical, chemical, and others. Driving the challenge are an aggressive set of cost targets, siting, power output, and duty cycle requirements.

A summary of the DAYS program can be found HERE. Additional information, including the full FOA, is available on ARPA-E’s online application portal, ARPA-E eXCHANGE.

CARMEL, Ind. — FERC’s extensive energy storage order has handed MISO’sReliability Subcommittee a new set of to-dos, including devising a storage capacity accreditation process and deciding whether storage will be subject to a must-offer requirement.

The subcommittee will also vet a proposal that will determine whether energy storage owners or MISO will manage the state of charge for resources. The group will additionally consider broader issues around storage, including:

• What information MISO needs about batteries to manage real-time operations;
• The risks of allowing market participation of energy storage at times when it’s not dispatched; and
• Whether MISO should employ reliability improvements to mitigate risks of storage use.

Finally, the group could lay out rules to clarify that energy used for charging is not considered “station power,” which MISO defines as the power a generating facility uses for operating electrical equipment. MISO’s current definition of station power does not include energy used for pumping at a pumped storage facility.

The items were handed down from MISO’s Steering Committee based on recommendations made from the Energy Storage Task Force after discussions on Order 841 and storage’s potential in the RTO.

At a May 3 RSC meeting, MISO Market Design Manager Kevin Vannoy said the RTO will bring storage participation straw proposals to a June 6 joint meeting of the RSC, Resource Adequacy Subcommittee and Market Subcommittee. He said MISO will vet storage proposals throughout summer to prepare for a December compliance filing.

Vannoy said MISO still hopes FERC will allow it to set a limit on the number of storage resources that can participate in its markets. FERC’s order set a 100-kW minimum size requirement for participation, causing RTO staff to worry that small resources will flood markets with finite capabilities.

GE Power has tapped former AES and RES Americas executive Robert Morgan to lead its new energy storage unit.

One of Morgan’s principal roles as GE’s CEO of energy storage will be to grow and expand the recently launched Reservoir – a comprehensive energy storage platform that delivers customized storage solutions to help customers manage the changing power landscape, according to GE Power.

“Energy storage is a key opportunity for our customers as they look for solutions with the best cost, lowest-carbon footprint, and greater reliability and resiliency,” says Russell Stokes, president and CEO of GE Power. “Rob brings the right skillset to lead GE Power’s energy storage unit as the industry shifts toward a more decentralized, decarbonized and digitized electricity infrastructure.”

According to Morgan’s LinkedIn profile, he served in various roles at AES from 1996 to 2003. He also founded Agile Energy LLC and served as the chief strategy officer and executive vice president of business development at RES Americas in 2013-2016.

Eric Gebhardt, vice president and strategic technology officer of GE Power, adds, “The global energy landscape is experiencing a dramatic shift with increasing renewables integration and the growth of distributed power. In his most recent roles as a founder of energy start-up Agile Energy and executive at RES Americas, Rob has been at the center of this market disruption and has demonstrated how to successfully build market-leading businesses. We’re confident he will do the same for GE Power’s energy storage portfolio.”

Tesla has recently deployed several very large energy storage projects, but a new one could apparently dwarf them all.

There was an important detail that came out of Tesla’s Q1 conference call but was mostly overlooked: Elon Musk teased a potential giant 1 GWh energy storage project, which would make it the biggest in the world by a wide margin, to be announced soon.

We published plenty of articles about the things that came out of the conference call, but I forgot about that particular comment until Galileo Russel reminded me of it during our podcast this week.

When Russel asked Musk about the impact of bringing online the giant 129 MWh Powerpack project in South Australia, the CEO answered:

“I think it had quite a profound effect. South Australia took a chance on doing the world’s biggest battery,and it’s worked out really well. If you read the articles, it worked out far beyond their expectations because the battery is able to respond at the millisecond level – far faster than any hydrocarbon plant. So, its grid stabilization was much greater actually than even a gas turbine plant, which normally respond quite fast.

Musk is referring to the grid services that the battery pack has been performing for the South Australian grid.

As we previously reported, the giant battery system made around $1 million in just a few days back in January though frequency response and it is already eating away at ‘gas cartel’s’ profits, according to a recent report.

Like Musk mentioned, it is proving to be much more efficient than the hydrocarbon peaker plants that the grid operators generally use to stabilize the grid.

But the question was about how it is impacting demand, so Musk continued:

The utilities that we’ve worked eith thus far have really loved the battery pack and I feel confident that we’ll be able to announce a deal at the gigawatt-hour scale within a matter of months. So, it’s 1,000-megawatt-hours…”

That comment is extremely important, but it sort of fell through the cracks.