Since its inception, power generation has been notoriously difficult to build. Even once developers sort through regulatory preferences and siting difficulties, they still must construct huge slabs of modern industry on time and on budget — a feat that’s tripped up more than one utility in 2017.

Whether in a regulated or restructured state, building even relatively simple natural gas plants or grid upgrades can take years, and the process for more complex nuclear generators or transmission lines often stretches decades. The long lead times mean utilities must plan for new infrastructure many years in advance and make it difficult to respond to short-term changes on the grid.

But recent developments in California could prove to be a turning point. After the worst methane leak in United States history took the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility offline, California regulators early last year issued a series of mitigation measures, including energy efficiency programs and an expedited approval process for energy storage projects.

It was the opening the energy storage industry was waiting for. A year and a half from the decision, California utilities have deployed multiple long-duration storage applications, including installations from Tesla, AES and Greensmith/AltaGas.

The largest of these facilities is the 30 MW, 120 MWh Escondido energy storage project built by AES, and is one of the biggest lithium ion battery installations in the world. Built in about six months, it and a smaller, 7 MW battery provide daily ramping and peak shaving services for San Diego Gas & Electric — services typically delivered by gas generators.

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Tesla built the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery ahead of schedule. It’s an important milestone for the technology, and for Tesla itself. 

But is it coming at a cost to smaller players in the industry?

This week on The Interchange, we’ll talk about how Tesla’s battery supply constraints are hitting downstream installers and developers. We’ll bring GTM Staff Writer Julian Spector on the show to discuss his recent reporting on Tesla’s delivery delays.

Then, we’ll cover some of Spector’s other big stories this year, including howstorageis suddenly challenging natural-gas peaker plants around the world, and why New York is struggling to put a cohesive energy storage framework in place. (Note: This podcast was recorded on Monday. On Thursday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the state’s energy storage target into law.)

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Elizabeth Ingram is managing editor of PennWell’s Hydro Group.

Energy storage is undoubtedly a hot topic worldwide. And as more focus is placed on this vital piece of the electricity system puzzle, particularly in the face of the increasing deployment of intermittent wind and solar generating facilities and growing demand for renewable generation, more technologies and approaches are being developed to provide needed storage.

The panel discussion session entitled Recent Energy Storage Project Deployment Around the World that took place on Tuesday, Dec. 5, covered a variety of approaches being implemented worldwide, from hybrid gas turbines to combining steam generation and batteries to compressed air energy storage. Another presentation discussed distributed energy resources at the customer level.

An important point is that this session focused not on size of the energy storage solution but rather on the suitability of each to the unique situation for which they were deployed. Although when you discuss current actual deployed energy storage technology, pumped storage hydropower is at the top of the list, the focus of this discussion was more on smaller, more localized systems that are undoubtedly faster to deploy.

For example, Joe Heinzmann with GE Power Services presented information on a gas turbine-battery hybrid system with up to 50 MW nominal of operating reserve. The example given of application of this technology was Southern California Edison’s Grapeline Peaker project.

Curtis VanWalleghem with Hydrostor discussed the company’s approach to storing compressed air in such a way that the facilities do not need to be sited near a salt mine but instead can be placed at the point of demand. Again, capacities of this technology were small, with systems of 660 kW and 2 MW being developed.

Michael Welch with Siemens AG covered the value of including batteries with steam or gas turbines. He discussed the importance of hybrid solutions to decarbonize power generation.

One unique portion of the presentation discussed locating storage at the customer’s location, with information covered by Matt Owens with Stem and Flavio Dal Lago with Socomec.

Engagement in the content by the audience was robust, with many questions posed. Often I find this portion of a conference session the most valuable and informative, as it indicates their interest in the topic and respect for the panelists as people who can help them get the answers they need. Additionally, audience members who have a special interest in this topic may also have valuable expertise to share with the audience.

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New York has become the latest US state to decide to support energy storage through its legislature and will be setting targets for deployment of the technologies in the coming weeks.

State governor Andrew Cuomo, credited by some in the industry for helping initiate and persevering with the New York Reforming the Energy Vision (NY REV) programme to modernise and add flexibility to the grid, has just approved Assembly Bill A6571 – Establishing the energy storage deployment programme.

First tabled by multiple sponsors in March this year, the bill was delivered to state Assembly and passed through Senate in June. It instructs the regulator, New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC), to develop a programme supporting the deployment of energy storage across the state. As part of that, a procurement target will be established, which is to be reached by 2030. There has been no indication yet of what that target might be. Cuomo signed off on the bill on 29 November.

The bill calls for “commercially available technology” which is cost-effective and can assist in lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, reducing peak demand, reducing the need for expensive infrastructure upgrades and otherwise improving the reliability of the electrical network, all cornerstones of the NY REV programme. Technologies could include mechanical, chemical or thermal energy storage.

California has in place the mandate AB 2514, which requires the three investor-owned utilities in the state to deploy 1.325GW of energy storage by 2024 in four biennial solicitations, another 500MW was added to that target in May this year. Meanwhile, Massachusetts has set a 200MWh “aspirational” i.e. non-binding target for electric distribution companies by the beginning of the year 2020. More recently in New Mexico, the state Public Regulation Commission (NMPRC) in August unanimously voted to amend its rules governing utilities’ integrated resource planning (IRP) to allow power companies to include energy storage in those IRPs.

As with June’s announcement that the bill was passing through the legislative process, key trade groups NY BEST and the US’ national Energy Storage Association have warmly welcomed Cuomo’s approval of it.

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One battery to rule them all: when it comes to energy storage technology, it’s hard to beat lithium-ion. However, the rise of wind and solar has brought forth new motivation to develop new batteries that offer higher energy density at lower cost, and it looks like magnesium is in the running.

In the latest magnesium energy storage development, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have teamed up with MIT to demonstrate, for the first time ever, the potential for magnesium mobility in a battery.

The Magnesium Energy Storage Problem…

Magnesium offers two potential advantages over lithium-ion, on cost and electrical current. That’s because magnesium (Mg) is a multivalent ion, as Berkeley Lab explains:

Whereas a Li-ion with a charge of +1 provides only a single electron for an electrical current, a Mg-ion has a charge of +2, which means Mg-ions, in principle, can provide twice the electrical current of Li-ions if present with the same density.

So, what’s the problem? In the energy storage field there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch:

The catch for multivalent ions is that their increased charge draws more attention to them — they become surrounded in the battery’s electrolyte by other oppositely charged ions and solvent molecules — which can slow down their motion and create energetic penalties to exiting the electrolyte for the electrodes…

…And The Solution

Got all that? The basic problem is that the liquid electrolyte in a Mg-ion battery tends to corrode other elements in the system.

The good news is that Mg-ion technology is so new that researchers haven’t reached the end of the rope yet. In fact, the new study gives the boot to liquid electrolyte altogether and goes straight to cutting edge solid state energy storage technology.

That’s quite a leap of faith, considering that the conventional science indicates that magnesium moves sl-o-w-ly through most solids.

You can get all the details from Nature Communications under the title, “High magnesium mobility in ternary spinel chalcogenides.”

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SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) strengthened its commitment to a clean energy future with the presentation of six energy storage contracts totaling 165 megawatts (MW) to the California Public Utilities Commission for review and approval on December 1. California’s Energy Storage Decision requires investor-owned utilities to procure 1,325MW of storage by 2020. PG&E’s share is 580MW. Since 2015, PG&E has signed contracts for 79MW of new energy storage capability.

Storage plays an increasingly important role for California energy companies as they work to achieve the state’s ambitious clean energy goals. By the end of 2017, PG&E forecasts that about 33 percent of its retail electric deliveries will come from renewable sources. Energy storage will help integrate many of those resources, such as wind and solar, which are intermittent or provide peak output during times of low demand.

Energy storage has been a part of PG&E’s power mix for decades, starting with the Helm’s Hydro-electric Facility and continuing with pilot projects such as the 2MW Battery Storage Pilot at the Vacaville Substation and the 4MW Yerba Buena Battery Energy Storage System located on the property of Silicon Valley storage technology company HGST.

On December 1, 2016, PG&E issued a request for offers (RFO) to solicit proposals for energy storage projects. The projects were required to be between 1MW and 50MW, and needed to be operational no later than the end of 2024.

In addition to third-party owned storage offers, PG&E identified a distribution substation where it would like to consider energy storage projects on distribution circuits to defer distribution investments. PG&E also identified three sites where it owns and operates solar photovoltaic facilities where energy storage could be added.

Martin Wyspianski , PG&E senior director for Energy Portfolio Procurement and Policy, said he was pleased with the progress PG&E has made toward meeting California’s renewable energy and storage goals.

“As our clean energy portfolio grows, so does the importance of storage technology. These contracts and the storage capacity they represent will help us better integrate our growing renewable generation sources, and bring increased reliability to the grid. They are an important milestone in our progress toward a clean energy future,” Wyspianski said.

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill Nov. 29 to create a statewide energystoragetarget, more than five months after it unanimously passed the legislature.

Depending on how it’s executed, the target could reduce regulatory barriers to storage development and spur adoption of this technology, which stands to help New York’s effort to increase clean energy and efficient grid usage.

“It really creates an important market,” said William Acker, executive director of the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium. “It lets industry know that New York State is serious about opening and creating a market for energy storage in the state.”

The law calls on the Public Service Commission to investigate and set a target for 2030. The original text called for a determination of the target by January 1, 2018, but that timeline is expected to be pushed back to allow more deliberation. 

Once set, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the Long Island Power Authority will run a deployment program to meet the goal. The program must consider both customer-sited and front-of-the-meter storage, evaluating its use for transmission upgrade deferral and peak load reduction in constrained areas.

NYSERDA has been working on a storage roadmap study that will form the analytical basis for the target.

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Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil’s Batwind project in Scotland, combining wind turbines with energy storage, will have a battery system installed by system integrator Younicos.

Batwind is under development through a partnership between Statoil and Masdar, the renewables and energy efficiency company owned by a government investment group in the United Arab Emirates’ Abu Dhabi. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by parties including Statoil and the Scottish government to develop the project in March 2016.

The project also hosts the world’s first floating wind turbines, based on Statoil’s proprietary Hywind platform, with the wind farm portion of the project dubbed Hywind Scotland. The floating turbines generate 30MW of electricity and began production in mid-October, when the facility was officially opened by Scotland’s First Minister Nichola Sturgeon.

The offshore power plant, some 25km off the coast of Aberdeenshire to the east of the Scottish coast, is 75% owned by Statoil and 25% by Masdar. Statoil announced yesterday that it has awarded Younicos the contract to deliver a battery energy storage system of 1MW / 1.3MWh to connect to Hywind Scotland.

The battery is intended to maximise the output of the wind farm usable by the grid, which in times of overproduction could mean storing the energy generated for injection into the grid later, could smooth out the variable generation of the six 5MW Siemens Gamesa-supplied turbines and otherwise mitigate peaks and troughs in energy production. Younicos has in the past sourced batteries from Samsung SDI and others, acting as integrator for grid-scale and commercial energy storage projects, using its own energy and battery management software and control platforms.

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Tesla built the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery ahead of schedule. It’s an important milestone for the technology, and Tesla itself. 

But is it coming at a cost to smaller players in the industry?

This week on The Interchange, we’ll talk about how Tesla’s battery supply constraints are hitting downstream installers and developers. We’ll bring GTM Staff Writer Julian Spector on the show to discuss his recent reporting on Tesla’s delivery delays.

Then, we’ll cover some of Spector’s other big stories this year: howstorageis suddenly challenging natural gas peaker plants around the world; and why New York is struggling to put a cohesive energy storage framework in place. (Note: This podcast was recorded on Monday. On Thursday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the state’s energy storage target into law.)

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Hawaiian Electric on Thursday said it started installing a flywheel energy storage system at its Campbell Industrial Park generating station in West Oahu to test the device’s capabilities.

The flywheel system, created by California-based Amber Kinetics, is expected to be in operation at the beginning of next year. The 8-kilowatt, 32-kilowatt-hour system will be capable of charging and discharging electricity for multiple duty cycles per day with no loss of capacity over a 20-year-plus service life, according to a joint statement.

“Energy storage is essential to reach our 100‐percent renewable energy goals by taking advantage of Hawaii’s abundant but variable solar and wind energy,” Colton Ching, Hawaiian Electric senior vice president for planning and technology, said in a statement. “We are very enthusiastic to work with Amber Kinetics to evaluate this very promising flywheel energy storage system.”

The pilot project is jointly funded by Hawaiian Electric and Elemental Excelerator. The Honolulu-based startup accelerator selected Amber Kinetics to its portfolio in 2013.

According to the statement, Amber Kinetics managed to created the world’s first commercially available four-hour flywheel system. Its technology extends the duration and efficiency of flywheels from minutes to hours.

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