Alphabet’s secretive research lab X is developing a new way to store renewable energy that otherwise might be wasted — by using salt and antifreeze, reports Bloomberg. Researchers are developing a system that can be located anywhere, has the potential to last longer than lithium-ion batteries, and competes on price with new hydroelectric plants and other energy storage methods.

“If the moonshot factory gives up on a big, important problem like climate change, then maybe it will never get solved,” Obi Felten, a director at X told Bloomberg. “If we do start solving it, there are trillions and trillions of dollars in market opportunity.” The project is codenamed “Malta,” but it isn’t an official X project yet, so it doesn’t currently enjoy the benefits of a full-blown undertaking like Project Loon.v

The Malta team is currently working on an early test prototype in Silicon Valley. In renderings cited by Bloomberg, the system features four cylindrical tanks connected via pipes to a heat pump. Two are filled with salt, while the other two are filled with antifreeze or hydrocarbon liquid. The system takes in energy in the form of electricity, creating two streams of air: hot air that heats up the salt, and cold air that cools the antifreeze. A switch is then flipped which reverses the process: the hot and cold air “rush toward each other” which creates gusts powerful enough to spin a turbine to produce electricity when needed. Depending on how the tanks are insulated, the system can store energy for many hours or days. Thermal salt-based storage has the potential to be several times cheaper than lithium-ion batteries and other existing grid-scale storage technologies, Raj Apte, Malta’s head engineer, told Bloomberg.

Scientists have previously proven this system as a plausible technique in storing energy. Malta’s contribution has been to lower the operating temperature of the system so that materials like expensive ceramics and steels won’t be needed. A working system can vary in size from a “large garage” to a “full-scale traditional power plant.”

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In October 2015, the Aliso Canyon gas fields in Southern California sprang a leak that took the state’s largest gas-storage system out of service. The leak raised red flags for California’s energy planners, who worried that there would not be enough gas to fuel peakers—generating plants that kick in when summer heat causes electricity demand to soar. In response, the California Public Utilities Commission issued a solicitation for energy storage projects that could help ensure the state would have enough power.

As a result, companies such as AES Energy Storage, Greensmith Energy and Tesla stepped up and within eight months—a fraction of the time it would take to build a gas plant—the state had 70 MW of storage online. “Aliso Canyon was a significant sea change” for the power industry, says Daniel Finn-Foley, senior analyst for energy storage at GTM Research. It showed energy storage could be effective in filling the role traditionally played by gas-fired peakers.

After decades of being just out of reach, a steep decline in the cost of lithium-ion batteries is making energy storage a viable solution for a variety of energy industry applications.

Between 1991 and 2005, the cost of lithium-ion batteries dropped from about $200 per watt-hour to about $0.40 per Wh. The batteries have become ubiquitous in laptops, cell phones and in the rapidly growing market for electric vehicles—pushing up demand and triggering economies of scale. In a recent study, investment bank Lazard says it expects the cost of lithium-ion batteries to plummet by about 50% over the next five years.

Energy storage is still only a very small piece of the power marketplace, but it is growing quickly. There were 234 MWh of energy storage installations in the first quarter of 2017, a 944% increase compared with first-quarter 2016, according to a GTM Research report done with the Energy Storage Association.

Market shift

The falling prices that have led to the growth of energy storage is part of a wider shift underway in the power sector. The industry is moving away from the central-station model that has prevailed for a century to a model where electricity flows two ways, where customers can also be generators. In many states, customers with rooftop solar panels can sell excess electricity back to their utility.

New York is one state trying to come to grips with how technologies like energy storage are becoming market disruptors. The state’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative is funding pilot projects and seeking to rewrite the rules for the industry.

In New York City, utility Consolidated Edison’s participation in REV has allowed it to use a combination of energy efficiency, demand management and energy storage to defer a $1-billion investment to upgrade a substation.

ConEd also is looking at energy storage as one alternative to make up for the potential loss of the Indian Point nuclear plant just north of the city, which supplies about 20% of the city’s base­load power. The plant is set to close by 2021.

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Scientists have designed a new type of cathode that could make the mass production of sodium batteries more feasible. Batteries based on plentiful and low-cost sodium are of great interest to both scientists and industry as they could facilitate a more cost-efficient production process for grid-scale energy storage systems, consumer electronics and electric vehicles. The discovery was a collaborative effort between researchers at the Institute of Chemistry (IOC) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Lithium batteries are commonly found in consumer electronics such as smartphones and laptop computers, but in recent years, the electric vehicle industry also began using lithium batteries, significantly increasing the demand on existing lithium resources.

“Just last year, the price of lithium carbonate tripled, because the Chinese electric vehicle market started booming,” said Xiao-Qing Yang, a physicist at the Chemistry Division of Brookhaven Lab and the lead Brookhaven researcher on this study.

In addition, the development of new electrical grids that incorporate renewable energy sources like wind and solar is also driving the need for new battery chemistries. Because these energy sources are not always available, grid-scale energy storage systems are needed to store the excess energy produced when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.

Scientists have been searching for new battery chemistries using materials that are more readily available than lithium. Sodium is one of the most desirable options for researchers because it exists nearly everywhere and is far less toxic to humans than lithium.

But sodium poses major challenges when incorporated into a traditional battery design. For example, a typical battery’s cathode is made up of metal and oxygen ions arranged in layers. When exposed to air, the metals in a sodium battery’s cathode can be oxidized, decreasing the performance of the battery or even rendering it completely inactive.

The researchers at IOC of CAS and Jiangxi Normal University sought to resolve this issue by substituting different types of metals in the cathode and increasing the space between these metals. Then, using the Inner-Shell Spectroscopy (ISS) beamline at Brookhaven’s National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—a DOE Office of Science User Facility—Brookhaven’s researchers compared the structures of battery materials with unsubstituted materials to these new battery materials with substitute metals.

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Minnesota’s largest retail electric cooperative is in negotiation with vendors to build the largest storage energy project in the state alongside three solar installations.

Connexus Energy plans to install storage capable of storing 20 megawatts, the equivalent of 40 MW hours of energy, according to Brian Burandt, vice president of power supply and business development.

“I believe it’s the largest project being contemplated at this time,” he said. “There are larger projects in the country at this time but this is the largest we know about in Minnesota.”

The storage would be sited at three proposed solar installations that Connexus plans to build likely next summer. The collective output of the solar project would be 10 MW.

The battery storage installations would be co-located at the solar sites, Burandt said. The co-op is “still in negotiation” about the solar projects.

Connexus, the largest customer-owned utility in Minnesota, serves 130,000 homes in the suburbs of the Twin Cities.

Ellen Anderson, executive director of the University of Minnesota’s Energy Transition Lab, applauded Connexus for embarking on the project.

Her lab recently issued a report on energy storage and is among the sponsors of a conference on the same topic in September. It also convenes the Minnesota Energy Storage Alliance.

“It’s really is going to be an extremely influential example” in Minnesota and the Midwest in showcasing how “energy storage is an opportunity right now for utilities looking to combine customer benefits and cost savings and renewable energy goals.”

The project may resonate beyond the region because a cooperative is embarking upon the energy storage-solar concept, Anderson said.

“Co-ops see an opportunity they may have not considered before,” she said. It’s safe to say Connexus sees this as a first step to storage improving their system and helping customers. They’re being real innovators here.”

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The House passed a government spending bill on Thursday that would provide a small funding boost for energy storage research as part of the appropriations for energy and water development programs in fiscal 2018.

House lawmakers voted 235-192 to pass a “minibus” spending bill that includes $37.56 billion for energy and water development — $3.6 billion more than the White House request. The appropriations bill would then head to the Senate, where similar legislation calls for $38.4 billion in funding for the next fiscal year.

House lawmakers on Wednesday adopted an amendment offered by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) that would shift $10 million from the Energy Department’s administration account to its Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability for energy storage systems demonstrations. Despite the small dollar amount, Gallagher said it’s a sign of bipartisanship on the issue.

“There’s growing, strong support among conservatives for a smart approach to energy that is both environmentally friendly and economically friendly,” Gallagher said in a brief interview Thursday.

The House adopted the amendment by voice vote on the same day the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation published a study that recommends continued federal investment in late-stage energy research. That analysis evaluated 53 demonstration projects initiated between 2009 and 2011 that received federal funding through 2015. Of those, 16 were energy storage projects that relied on the federal government for almost half of their funding, 10 of which have been successfully completed.

“When these projects actually do get built, it’s very rare for them to be built entirely with private funding,” lead author David Hart, former innovation director for the manufacturing industry at the White House during the Obama administration, said at an ITIF panel discussion Wednesday.

Hart, who’s now a senior fellow at ITIF and a professor of public policy at George Mason University, said demonstration projects are integral to the commercialization of technology because complex energy systems need to be developed gradually. The poster child for proper development and deployment, he said, is the Petra Nova carbon capture project in Texas: completed on time, under budget and led by the private sector with the reassurance of federal funding.

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There is increasing high-level interest in the potential for energy storage in the Middle East, with grid-connected systems forecast to reach 1.8GW in the region by 2025, according to I.H.S.

This interest, from the likes of government agencies and utilities – many of which are state-owned – comes primarily from the burgeoning interest in utility-scale PV plants, an energy asset class which the region has wholeheartedly embraced in recent years according to Julian Jansen, a UK-based senior analyst with the research company.

“We are seeing that total deployment, the overall installed base by 2025 in the Middle East region, is going to reach around 1.8GW of grid-connected energy storage,” Jansen said.

“With a lot of that growth, to caveat, it’s going to be seen more towards the end of the period. Up to then, it’s going to be quite a slow market to get going until about 2020. Then we’ll see some strong growth.”

The region is at present unquestionably a small market as far as energy storage and especially utility-scale advance battery energy storage is concerned. The majority of the Middle East’s installed base comes from just one project, a 108MW sodium-sulfur battery energy storage project for Abu Dhabi Electricity and Water Authority supplied by Japanese company NGK. While Jansen said it was hardly controversial to state that energy storage is in its infancy in the region, it was unlikely to remain the case long term. One developer with experience of the region, Sami Khoreibi, CEO of Enviromena, recently blogged for this site that energy storage will transform Middle East and Africa’s energy market over the next 10 years.

“What we see now is that interest is ramping up very significantly,” Jansen said.

The UAE, Saud Arabia and Qatar are among the region’s countries that have enjoyed progress in solar PV in very recent times, with all of them adding significant utility-scale projects. Meanwhile Jordan, another of those countries to see large-scale PV rollout underway, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a 20MW battery-based energy storage system with AES Corporation in 2015.

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A cutting-edge new cargo ship from the company Eco Marine Power could be the first out of the box to integrate a rigid sail system with solar power and energy storage. Going by the concept design, the renewable energy hardware seems to be taking up some valuable deck space, but this first vessel will be a floating R&D platform intended to arrive at the optimal balance between renewables and cargo for various ship models.

If all goes well, the company foresees that various iterations of the wind+solar+storage combo could be used in the cruise ship and ore carrier sectors, in addition to cargo ships.

A move in the direction of rigid sails for cargo ships crossed the CleanTechnica radar back in 2012, when the Irish company B9 Shipping came up with an idea for a wind-powered cargo ship modeled on rotating sail technology used in the then-largest luxury yacht in the world, the Maltese Falcon, which hit the water in 2006 using DynaRig sails.

DynaRig is rooted in a 1960’s concept for placing sails on a rotating mast. The heavy materials in use at the time prevented the concept from breaking into commercial application, but the introduction of lightweight carbon fiber and other new materials enabled DynaRig sails to slide into the superyacht market.

DynaRig also got a mention in CleanTechnica back in 2013, when the high-end yacht company Oceanco came up with an idea for deploying a ship equipped with both solar panels and DynaRig technology.

That yacht (dubbed Solar) made a huge splash when first announced in 2012. It was under wraps as a super secret project until it launched into a testing phase earlier this year.

Despite Oceanco nailing down the Solar name, it looks like Eco Marine Power could still have bragging rights to the first integrated wind + solar ship. It’s pretty hard to spot where Solar is hiding its solar panels, and there doesn’t seem to be much room for them on deck considering all the superyacht extras crowding for a spot in the sun:

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Only a handful of states – California, Oregon and Massachusetts – have energy storage procurement targets. California and Oregon were the first to enact mandates for energy storage. They were followed by Massachusetts, which recently set an “aspirational” 200 MWh storage target. And in June, the New York legislature passed a bill calling for an energy storage target.

But a new report from the ESA put establishing a procurement target at the top of its list of state policies needed to jump start energy storage deployment. A target creates an environment in which storage purveyors can learn by doing. In states like California, this has already resulted in procurements that have exceeded mandated targets, the report says.

Among the other recommendations from the ESA is the creation of time-varying electricity rates that can demonstrate the value of storage to customers while better aligning customer costs with system costs.

The report argues that the benefits of energy storage must be realized through accurate market signals that enable the value of storage to be monetized. This could include solutions such as locational pricing and crafting rates that signal the best time to leverage storage capabilities, the report says. New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision is one notable efforttackling these issues, including compensating distributed energy resources according to the value assigned by the location. 

As prerequisites for competition, ESA recommends that states include energy storage in its integrated resource planning, distribution system planning, grid resilience and emergency management planning, peak demand reduction and energy efficiency programs. The report also recommends cost-benefit analysis for storage, and potential tax incentives to scale deployment in states. 

To encourage access, the report recommends that interconnection rules and interconnection queues should be updated to reflect changes in the energy storage market.

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Business minister Greg Clark, announced yesterday, that the first phase of the Government’s £246million investment into battery technology and energy storage in the UK had begun.

Nissan plans to be at the forefront of EV technology with the roll out of its Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology, under its Intelligent Mobility platform.

V2G technology allows electric vehicles to be fully integrated into the electricity grid and will help improve grid capability to handle renewable power, making renewable sources even more widely integrated and affordable.

Private EV owners and businesses with large EV fleets will have the opportunity to create mobile energy hubs by integrating their vehicles into the grid.

Nissan EV owners can connect to the grid to charge at “low-demand, cheap tariff periods”, with an option to then use the electricity stored in the vehicle’s battery at home and at work when costs are higher, or even feed back to the grid which could generate additional revenue for the EV owner.

Nissan Europe’s director of energy services Francisco Carranza said: “Nissan has been saying for a long time that the future is electric. That forward-thinking led us to produce the the Nissan Leaf.

“Our vehicles can be plugged into the grid and support the transmission and distribution companies in making the UK grid more sustainable and more stable. The increase of electric vehicles penetration, the introduction of more and more distributed generation and storage and the overall increase in renewable energy penetration should be done smartly.

“In addition to Nissan electric vehicles and the vehicle to grid services, we also have plans for our batteries once they have been used in cars – as stationary energy storage units which can be filled by renewable sources.”

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Utility-scale solar

Utility-scale energy storage