On day one of Energy Storage Europe, which runs until March 15 in Düsseldorf, Germany, a vivid panel discussion involving energy industry luminaries from Engie, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) tackled the question: Energy storage or grid extension?

The question was intentionally blunt and obtuse, and found uniform disagreement among the panelists.

“It is the wrong question to be asking,” said Martin Keller of NREL. “The right question should be: what combination of energy infrastructure, together with flexibility options, is better?”

Michael Taylor of IRENA said that storage will instead begin “nibbling at the edges of the grid”, particularly in regions where grid capacity expansion is difficult or prohibitively expensive.

Thierry Lepercq, executive VP at French utility, Engie, pressed home the point that the very nature of storage means more flexibility, and goes beyond mere batteries supporting the grid during times of peak demand.

“It is my belief that a power and gas approach can offer a range of tools better equipped to solve the issue of storage and grid integration,” Lepercq said. “We do know that the performance of storage is going to improve, and with that costs will come down, deployment grows, research grows – it’s a virtuous circle.”

Lepercq told the audience that Engie is intent on tackling the ‘diffused’ nature of energy consumption, and believes that the firm is close to solving one of the major stumbling blocks for stored energy – costs.

“In Chile we can use hydrogen to store solar energy produced at $11 MWh,” he said. “Chile has vast amounts of land, space and sun. I believe we can produce 3,000 terrawatt hours of production over 18,000 square kilometers – this is just a small part of the Atacama desert, but could produce enough to cover Europe.”

The energy storage provider Blue Planet Energy recently deployed its Blue Ion energy storage systems to support the electrification efforts in Puerto Rico. These deployments took place in areas where there has not been reliable electricity since September of 2017, when Hurricane Maria struck. One site is a volunteer housing facility in the Isabela municipality and the other is located in the Corozal municipality to provide electricity to a clean water pumping system. Blue Planet Energy is also providing support through training and education sessions.

“Too many of Puerto Rico’s residents have not had a functioning electric grid since Hurricane Maria’s landfall in September. Our Blue Ion units will provide critical sites with reliable, safe and self-sustained power to ensure they can continue providing essential services to their communities. We’re proud to be able to lend our support to Puerto Rico and to contribute to its mission of rebuilding with stronger, cleaner and more reliable energy infrastructure,” said Henk Rogers, Blue Planet Energy CEO and founder.

A 16 kilowatt-hour (kWh) Blue Ion 2.0 battery unit was installed at the well pumping system in Corozal. The energy storage technology is working with a 7 kW solar power system in a remote neighborhood called Palos Blanco. This area was experiencing a lack of both clean water and reliable electricity, so the solar power and energy storage system is helping to produce both.

“Our mission on the ground in Puerto Rico is to coordinate with the EPA and FEMA to install safe drinking water stations and solar-powered pumping systems to service those that need it most, ” explained Mark Baker, Director of Disaster Response for Water Mission. This organization is working to address water safety in many rural communities in Puerto Rico.

As the market for stationary storage grows, it is becoming more mobile. With the rental model that Younicos is introducing, a storage device can be put in place for a limited amount of time and moved when conditions change.

While not the first example of such leasing, Younicos’s move demonstrates another way for storage companies to differentiate themselves.

“We believe that this offering extends the benefits of energy storage to a new segment of customers who, for one reason or another, value financial flexibility,” Alexander Schönfeldt, head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa sales for Younicos, said in a statement.

Under the company’s “Energy-Storage-as-a-Service” model, customers pay a rental fee, as well as mobilization and de-mobilization charges, but incur no other costs. The storage systems are housed in containers and can be shipped to the site, dropped in place and operated by Younicos.

“Younicos’s move makes sense,” considering that the company’s corporate parent is Aggreko, one of the largest rental providers of power generating equipment in the world, Tim Grejtak, an analyst at Lux Research, told Utility Dive. Younicos was acquired by Aggreko last year in a $52 million cash deal.

The move is another sign of a wider trend under way in the energy storage industry, Grejtak said. “We are starting to see more differentiation in financial business models, which is important,” he said.

At first, companies differentiated themselves by the assets or technology they offered. But the ubiquity of lithium-ion batteries obviated that, Grejtak said. Next, companies differentiated themselves with control software, but most companies now offer some form of software. “Now, companies are looking at differentiation by finance. We saw a similar differentiation in the solar industry when companies began to adopt the solar lease model,” Grejtak said.

Younicos’s model may be unique, but it is not the first company to offer an alternative to the outright purchase of a storage system or even a temporary storage solution.

Hawaiian Electric, in partnership with Amber Kinetics and Elemental Excelerator, has launched operations of a four-hour kinetic energy storage system powered by flywheel technology. The pilot project is the first commercial use of Amber Kinetics’ advanced technology in the U.S.

Hawaiian Electric and Amber Kinetics are testing the 8-kW/32-kWh storage system for local grid reliability and support and aid in the integration of renewable energy. One 8-kW unit can power approximately 25 homes for one hour.

Technical field data is being collected and is expected to guide planning for future utility-owned energy storage projects in Hawaii. Communications and controls Amber Kinetics is developing in collaboration with Hawaiian Electric will be tested in a real-world setting and scaled to other jurisdictions.

The five-ton flywheel stores electricity as rotational kinetic energy and is capable of charging and discharging for multiple duty cycles per day with no loss of capacity. The environmentally friendly system is 98% steel that can be fully recycled at the end of its 30-year design life. It was installed by American Electric, a Hawaii-based company, at Hawaiian Electric’s Campbell Industrial Park generating station on Oahu.

“Hawaiian Electric is eager to test the grid stabilizing and renewable energy storing of the flywheel,” said Colton Ching, Hawaiian Electric senior vice president for planning and technology. “Our evaluation of this very promising energy storage system will help us determine how we can use flywheels to help integrate renewables at a lower cost while improving reliability and resiliency of the grid.”

Amber Kinetics’ products offer substantial benefits for a wide range of utility and commercial applications. The firm’s breakthrough technology is the first to extend the duration and efficiency of flywheels from minutes to hours, resulting in safe, economical and reliable energy storage for a variety of utility-scale applications, including load shifting, peak shaving, frequency regulation, renewable firming and spinning reserve. The system is scalable and designed to allow for increased size through the addition of multiple flywheels.

Just one day after receiving final approval from Texas regulators, Sempra Energy completed its acquisition of Energy Future Holdings Corp., the bankrupt owner of 80 percent of Oncor.

“The completion of this acquisition – the biggest in our 20-year history – represents an important milestone in the execution of our growth strategy moving forward,” said Debra L. Reed, chairman, president and CEO of Sempra Energy. “We expect the addition of Oncor to diversify our base of U.S. utility earnings and create a broader platform for our expansion in the future. Oncor is an exceptional utility and we plan to provide the support it needs to continue to safely and reliably meet the needs of its millions of customers and the expanding economy in Texas.”

Oncor will remain in Dallas, and Allen Nye, Oncor’s senior vice president and general counsel, will become Oncor’s CEO. Former CEO Bob Shapard is now the company’s chairman.

NextEra Energy had sought to purchase the company last year for $18 billion, but the Public Utility Commission of Texas shot them down twice.

Afterward, Oncor drew the attention of multiple suitors, starting with a $9 billion bid from Berkshire Hathaway. That bid was soon topped by a proposal by Elliott Management Corp 11, the largest creditor of Energy Future Holdings Corp., for $9.3 billion.

Sempra’s $9.45 billion bid came just hours before a purchase hearing deadline in August. A person familiar with the matter said Elliott’s public bid allowed Sempra to quietly work on its bid for weeks.

Sempra’s bid was approved by a bankruptcy court.

Combining component parts into hybrid systems to reap the benefits has always been an attractive prospect. In the past years, successful projects have come online for both solar-plus-storage and wind-plus-storage — the resiliency of battery energy storage combined with the financial boost from power generation.

So what does hybrid refer to in the world of energy storage? While the idea isn’t new, the technology is still in an early phase, only really being explored for grid applications in the past couple of years. Hybrid energy storage systems (HESS) can refer to several different types of set up; the point in common is that two or more types of energy storage are combined to form a single system.

There is no single energy storage solution that is ideal for every grid-scale application. As explained by Greentech Media, they “are typically designed for high-power applications (i.e., “sprinter” mode that provides lots of power in short bursts) or energy-dense applications (i.e., “marathon” mode that provides consistent lower power over long durations), and there are lifetime, performance, and cost penalties for using them in unintended ways.”

HESS typically combine both “sprinter” and “marathon” storage solutions to fulfill applications that have diametrically opposed requirements; e.g. fast response vs peak shaving. The potential for value stacking immediately jumps to mind.

Hybrid storage offers other avenues for cost reductions; two or more systems can share much of the same power electronics and grid connection hardware, reducing both upfront and maintenance costs. Three types of hybrid storage have started to appear past the pilot stage:

Chinese inverter manufacturer Sungrow has leaned on its joint venture with Samsung SDI to supply both inverters and lithium batteries to a large-scale energy storage project in Japan.

Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands, has been deploying renewables at pace, particularly since the creation of the current feed-in tariff (FiT) policy in 2012. The region only has old-fashioned undersea cables to interconnect it with the rest of Japan.

As with the rest of Japan, Hokkaido’s local grid network is maintained and operated by a utility, Hokkaido Electric Power (HEPCO). Long-running issues of grid constraints, both perceived and real, led to some of the 10 regional utilities calling for a temporary halt to new solar farm approvals in 2014.

In response, HEPCO started looking at energy storage, deploying a 60MWh flow battery in 2015 and a 102.3MW solar PV project combined with 27MWh of battery storage is underway from SB Energy – the renewables arm of Japanese firm Softbank – and Mitsubishi UFJ Leasing, as reported by Energy-Storage.News in late 2017. HEPCO also added various technical requirements for renewable energy plant installations to obtain grid connections, including curtailing the offtake of power from solar or wind in times of overproduction and requiring energy storage to mitigate the variable output of the generators.

Sungrow said it will supply a full turnkey energy storage system for the island, with around 30MWh storage capacity and 23 containers of inverters. It will utilise lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) batteries from the Sungrow-Samsung SDI joint venture. The JV began a series of demonstration energy storage projects in China in April 2016.

Engie last week made official its agreement to acquire a majority stake in Electro Power Systems, a French-based energy storage and microgrid company with projects in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.

The acquisition aligns with a strategy Engie announced in 2016 “to become leader of the world energy transition.” The EPS deal, originally announced in January, kicks off the last leg of Engie’s three-year, $12.5 billion investment plan.

“It’s a full ‘3-D’ vision. D as in ‘decarbonization.’ D as in ‘decentralization.’ And D as in ‘digitalization,’” Thierry Lepercq, executive vice president at Engie in charge of research, technology and innovation, told Greentech Media in early 2017. The EPS investment is the latest indication of this vision becoming a reality.

The purchase also reaffirms a several-year trend of large energy companies, especially in Europe, pouring money into customer energy management.

“As of right now, building out a distributed practice for these European energy giants will not result into a multibillion-dollar business in the near term,” said GTM Research grid edge analyst Elta Kolo. “Rather, acquisitions and large investments are expected to continue throughout 2018 as these energy giants seek to remain on top of emerging activity at the grid edge and in tune with where competitors are concentrating.”

EPS joins the Engie portfolio at €9,5 ($11.70) per share and joins recent solar additions Fenix International and SoCore and 2016 acquisitions including OpTerra, Ecova and Green Charge, which have been rebranded under Engie. The French utility said it will continue to list EPS shares.

Kolo said that after a spate of acquisitions and investments, 2018 will be a big year for consolidation. Companies are also likely to continue eyeing investments and acquisitions in energy storage, e-mobility, demand response, energy efficiency, smart home and residential retail spaces.

The Valuation Office Agency (VOA) is calling on the sector to engage with the development of business rates that will be applied to energy storage projects in 2022, including those attached to subsidy-free solar farms.

The division of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is currently investigating how to apply new rates to the revenues accrued by energy storage technologies, including standalone and co-located projects with all generation technologies, Solar Power Portal has learned.

Following last year’s widely reported and controversial review, which saw a ‘solar tax hike’ of six to eight times the previous levels applied to existing solar installations, the VOA is now casting its eye towards energy storage, which currently are not included in the business rating list at all.

The new rates to be applied to storage for the first time are likely to impact subsidy-free solar farms currently being developed.

Historically, business rates have been applied to the subsidy payments made to solar projects under the Renewable Obligation and feed-in tariff schemes. However, with the UK moving to a subsidy free environment, these are likely to be applied only to the generation capacity of the solar park that it exports to national or distribution grids.

With many of these projects planning to use battery storage to build a subsidy-free business case, the VOA is seeking out where new battery projects are being planned or built and if they are co-located with solar farms.

Using technology and revenue values in 2020, two years before the next review as set in legislation, rateable values could be applied in two ways to these projects. The VOA is considering the use of a capital expenditure or contractors’ revaluation, taking into account a range of initial project costs to form an annual equivalent of business rates applied to revenues.