Developer Convergent Energy & Power has installed a commercial and industrial (C&I) energy storage system in Ontario for an injection-moulded plastics company, sized with 8.5MWh of batteries.

In common with C&I projects elsewhere, the system is designed to help the host, Husky Injection Molding Systems, reduce its electricity bills by reducing the number of times in a year Husky’s operations need to draw electricity from the grid at peak times. Convergent said it is expected to reduce electricity costs on the load the system is connected to by 15% to 30% each year, beginning in early 2018.

Ontario also has what are known as Global Adjustment charges, levied on the majority of electricity bill-payers, to help pay for ensuring there is adequate generation capacity on the network to meet demand and to pay for renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation measures.

Global Adjustment charges are set monthly, reflecting the difference between wholesale electricity prices and what it costs to keep nuclear and hydroelectric plants running, to build and maintain energy infrastructure, to pay for power fed into the grid and the cost of conservation programmes.

Essentially, while the methodology varies for different classes of customer, the amount of power drawn from the grid will affect how liable for these charges each customer is. For large industrial users of power, the contribution of their peaks in demand to Ontario’s overall demand peaks determines how much they pay. While in the US, demand charges for C&I customers can comprise 50% of their bill, in Ontario, Global Adjustment charges can account for as much as 70%.

Convergent Energy + Power has delivered the project, based on a Lockheed Martin Gridstar Lithium battery system – the aerospace and engineering firm spoke with Energy-Storage.News of having a “long-term interest” in the market as it launched its turnkey energy storage product range in 2016 – which Convergent said it selected due to its compact, robust and reliable design. Local firm S&T Electric is supplying balance of plant equipment, while Montreal-headquartered engineering company SNC Lavalin designed the whole system.

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A detail in Lazard’s latest levelized cost ofstorage(LCOS) report has highlighted a little-known but potentially major issue for the lithium-ion battery industry.  

The financial advisory and asset management firm downgraded its estimates for lithium-ion round-trip efficiency to account for parasitic losses, GTM has discovered.

“As more battery systems are deployed, estimates of actual round-trip efficiencies are lower, and installation costs are higher than expected and than reported in last year’s LCOS 2.0,” according to the Lazard study.

“Consequently, estimates for total ‘Commercial’ use case LCOS rose slightly, despite [a] lower equipment cost estimate,” it states.

Lazard’s two previous LCOS studies had simply used the round-trip efficiency of the battery and power electronics since there was little reliable data on the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) requirements of the system, Lazard said.  

Experience is beginning to show this parasitic load could be significant. By its LCOS 3.0 study, said Lazard, some published reports and estimates were providing a range of 80 percent to 90 percent round-trip efficiency for entire systems, including the cooling load. 

Figures for parasitic loss in lithium-ion battery systems remain notoriously hard to find. “It’s almost impossible to find detailed information on this subject,” said Hugh Sharman, principal at the energy consultancy Incoteco.

HVAC energy consumption levels will also vary between projects as different regions and usage levels require different cooling loads, Lazard noted.

One study of three battery systems in 2014, by experts from EA Technology and Northern Powergrid, hinted that electrical energy storage (EES) losses might be significantly higher than those used by Lazard in its calculations.

“The round-trip efficiencies for the EES systems have been calculated as between 83 percent and 86 percent, falling to between 41 percent and 69 percent where parasitic loads are included,” concluded the study.

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By 31 December, a half-dozen 1-megawatt lithium-ion batteries could be in place, helping to support Puerto Rico’s electric power grid, which was almost entirely destroyed by Hurricane Maria.

Independent power producer AES is working with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) to site and deploy the batteries. Most likely, says Chris Shelton, chief technology officer of the Virginia-based company, the batteries—which AES is donating—will support the still-fragile grid by enhancing both power quality and grid stability.

“We are not looking for commercial applications,” Shelton says. “We are focused on putting them to work to help.”

Storage batteries are gaining credibility as a reliable and rapidly deployable technology. A pair of crises thousands of miles apart illustrates how the technology can bolster grids when they face difficult challenges.

California Crisis

The first crisis struck in October 2015 when the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility in southern California began leaking. The accident shut the facility for months and threatened gas supplies to electric power generating facilities providing 10,000 megawatts of capacity to the region. Also at risk were dozens of industrial facilities and public buildings like schools and hospitals.

State regulators in May 2016 approved deployment of more than 100 MW of battery-based energy storage systems. Among the systems was the 20-MW/80 megawatt-hour (MWh) Mira Loma Battery Storage Facility, installed by Tesla in less than three months.

And at a utility substation in Escondido, Calif., a 30-MW, four-hour-duration lithium-ion Advancion battery array was installed by AES Energy Storage. At the time, it was one of the world’s largest such deployments.

The Aliso Canyon response showed that developers could design, build, and commission significant amounts of energy storage in a short amount of time. Installing an equal amount of natural gas-fired generation likely would have required years rather than months.

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Lithium and cobalt are key components of lithium-ion batteries, and are receiving a huge amount of attention as demand for these batteries continues to grow.

Graphite is another key material required for lithium-ion batteries, but it has not gotten as much attention this year. To learn more about its role in these batteries and about the future of energy storage technology, the Investing News Network spoke with Dr. Ryan Bayliss, a senior research fellow in the Department of Materials and a fellow of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford.

In the interview below, Bayliss, who is also interim chief of staff of the Faraday Institution, the UK’s new electrochemical energy storage institute, also discusses nickel’s role in lithium-ion batteries, as well as electric vehicle (EV) adoption in Europe. Bayliss spoke to the Investing News Network via phone.

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The scientists outline a simple strategy to improve catalytic activity to reduce activation barriers of electrochemical reactions by tuning interfacial electronic coupling between the adsorbate and catalyst surface.

“The electrocatalytic processes usually involve the adsorption of reactants on the surfaces of catalysts, break some reactant bonds to form new chemical bonds between the catalyst and reactants, and result in activated intermediates. Because the catalytic activity is attributed to the interfacial electronic coupling, adsorption energy is a good descriptor to identify catalytic activity for surface reactions.”

Based on the free energy change of electrochemical reaction, the authors divided the whole electrochemical reaction into an intrinsic reaction part and a catalytic effect part. “The catalytic effect is directly reflected in the adsorption energy differences of reactants and products,” they stated. Adsorption energy as a catalytic descriptor in those typical reactions is discussed in on-electron pair reactions, evolution reactions and reduction reactions to present the effect of electronic coupling between catalysts and charged species on catalytic activity.

“The relationship between adsorption energy and catalytic activity is helpful for the initial selection of catalysts and the key of mapping the relationship is to establish the quantitative relationship between the intrinsic electronic properties of materials and catalytic descriptors,” they write. Structural and elementary descriptors such as d-band center, tolerance factor and eg electron number are explained in d-band framework to related to adsorption energy. “Furthermore, because structural and elementary descriptors are experimentally quantified compared with adsorption energy, structural and elementary descriptors are useful to discover new catalyst materials and ensure a leap forward in electrochemical performance.”

“Charge transfer is also an important part in electrochemical reactions and improve the catalytic activity. The principle of charge transfer is to remove charge from stable bonds in reactants and lower the activation barrier of the rate-limiting step,” they added.

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An energy transition is underway. Solar and wind are being added in ever-greater numbers. Electric vehicles are becoming more commonplace. Meanwhile, policy makers are grappling with the right mix of policies to pay for it all.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s conference on the future of energy in Asia assembled industry executives, policy makers and bankers tackle some of the big questions surrounding energy.

“The past tells us a very clear lesson, and that is that we have underestimated the pace of the energy transition,” BNEF analyst Kobad Bhavnagri said as the conference started in Shanghai.

Here are some of the highlights from Tuesday’s presentations:

EVs are here to stay

Electronic vehicles have become a key element of the energy transition.

BNEF expects 530 million EVs on the road by 2040. Moreover, the researcher expects more electric buses and trucks as that segment of the transportation market becomes more attractive for electrification.

The implications for oil are significant, with the researcher expecting EVs to displace 8 million barrels of daily oil demand by 2040. Meanwhile, China is not only interested in EVs for the domestic market. The world’s most-populous nation is aiming to become a globally competitive automaker by the 2020s — with the latest EV technology.

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Solar energy and energy storage have always been natural partners for homeowners and businesses who want to produce their own energy. But the energy storage side of the equation has never made economic sense, partly because batteries are expensive and partly because residential and commercial solar owners can export electricity to the grid under net metering. 

What’s changing right now is that battery costs are coming down rapidly and net metering is coming under pressure as utilities try to fight off growing residential and commercial solar installations. That creates an opening for solar and battery storage to become a booming market as companies create the technology that allows people to produce and consume more of their energy on-site. Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), SunPower (NASDAQ:SPWR), SolarEdge(NASDAQ:SEDG), and Sunrun (NASDAQ:RUN) are the four companies to watch as the industry grows. 

Tesla

Tesla’s Powerwall is probably the most well-known battery for residential solar systems, making the company a leader in the market. The Powerwall combines an inverter with a 13.5 kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery and controls for your energy system. It will connect to a solar system as well as Tesla vehicles, charging when you want it to and providing backup power for the home. 

Also, don’t forget about Tesla’s scalable Powerpack battery system. It’s one of the leading products in commercial and utility scale energy storage. The company just completed a 129 megawatt-hour (MWh) energy storage system in South Australia, the biggest lithium-ion battery storage system in the world. 

What Tesla can do is sell energy storage systems through SolarCity and through other installers. That makes it a solar battery storage powerhouse with a number of ways to grow in energy long-term. 

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Australian large-scale renewables investor Lyon Group has confirmed it is selling three projects under development, totalling 800MWh of energy storage and 545MW of PV generation capacity, in Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.

The group said on Friday in a statement sent to Energy-Storage.News that the Cape York, Nowingi and Riverland projects are expected to be sold by the end of this year. Lyon already has a shortlist of bidders, but refused to reveal names at this stage.

The sales will help support Lyon Group’s ongoing strategy to develop more than 2,000MW of solar PV and over 1,000MW of battery energy storage within the next three years. The company was behind the development of Australia’s first utility-scale solar-plus-storage facility, Lakeland in Queensland, which pairs 22MW of solar with 1.4MW of energy storage.

Lyon Group launched a ‘Battery storage market services tender’ for 640MWh of energy storage across the three projects in June, open to electricity retailers and generators, heavy electricity users, and other sector participants.

The Riverland project in South Australia features what is thought will be the world’s largest lithium battery installation to date when completed, pairing 240MW of solar PV with 100MW / 400MWh of energy storage, although the solar portion could be scaled up to 330MW in future. It will take the ‘world’s largest’ crown from Tesla’s just-completed 129MWh project, also in South Australia.

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As renewable sources of energy like wind and solar gain traction, scientists and engineers are eyeing new ways to store that energy in a cost-efficient manner — laying the groundwork for a future in which renewables rival fossil fuels in powering our homes and vehicles.

Over the last decade, Sunverge has become a preferred provider of home solar-battery systems to utilities. It rivals Tesla in scope and scale of its deployments, if not in its marketing hype. 

But just like Tesla, the startup has seen its share of struggles, albeit of a different scope.

While Tesla is seeking mass-market acceptance for its Powerwalls (and achieving decidedly mixed results in terms of keeping production on track with its sales) Sunverge has shifted from making its own battery units to providing software to utilities, in hopes of finding a niche as a trusted virtual power plant (VPP) platform provider. 

On Tuesday, the company announced three more utility customers, including two with some advanced interest in solving the solar-storage grid challenge. 

The first, Arizona Public Service, plans a neighborhood-scale installation of Sunverge One battery-inverter units, along with home energy controllers, to help balance the rising neighborhood-level swells and sags in customer-generated solar power throughout the day. 

This pilot is the latest in the utility’s long-running study ofstorage power electronics and communications to manage its rising tide of customer-generated solar power. The first round, a joint effort with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), has been testing megawatt-scale grid batteries, as well as more than 1,600 advanced inverters. This next phase, known as the Solar Innovation Study, involves distributed energy resources at the residential scale, including rooftop solar, load controllers, HVAC systems and battery storage. 

The Sunverge One, the company’s basic 6.4-kilowatt, 11.8 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery and inverter unit, has a decidedly low-key feel, suggesting more of an outdoor air conditioning unit than Tesla’s futuristic turtle-shell wall mounting. That’s partly because it’s meant to be installed outdoors, and is rated to withstand the typical utility ranges of heat, cold and rain, and partly because Sunverge seeks to involve the customers as little as possible in the unit’s overall operation, beyond informing them how much it’s earned them over the course of time. 

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