Pumped storage is a decades-old technology with a relatively simple concept: When electricity is cheap and plentiful, use it to pump water up into a reservoir above a turbine, and when electricity is scarce and expensive, send that pumped water down through a turbine to generate more power. Often, these pumped storage facilities are auxiliary to other electricity-generating systems, and they serve to smooth out fluctuations in the amount of power on the grid.

A German research institute has spent years trying to tailor pumped storage to ocean environments. Recently, the institute completed a successful four-week pilot test using a hollow concrete sphere that it placed on the bottom of Lake Constance, a body of water at the foot of the Alps. The sphere has a diameter of three meters and contains a pump and a turbine. Much like traditional pumped storage, when electricity is cheap, water can be pumped out of the sphere, and when it’s scarce, water can be let into the sphere to move the turbine and generate electricity.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy Systems Engineering envisions spheres with inner diameters of 30m, placed 700m (or about 2,300 ft) underwater. Assuming the spheres would be fitted with existing 5 MW turbines that could function at that depth, the researchers estimate that each sphere would offer 20 MWh of storage with four hours discharge time.

In an underwater “energy park,” dozens of these spheres could be connected near an offshore wind farm to create a system that would be able to add extra reliability to a renewable-heavy grid. The institute admits that the economics of this project only work on a large scale. It estimates that more than 80 spheres would be needed “to achieve a relevant overall performance/capacity for the energy market.”

In November, the Fraunhofer Institute placed the test sphere 200m off the coast of Lake Constance and 100m under the lake’s surface. The institute just retrieved its sphere last week. Researchers are still sifting through the data gleaned by the pilot program in order to create better computer models on how this scheme would work in the real world. The institute wrote that it wants to conduct a follow-up project using a larger sphere that would be underwater for a longer time.

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Filipino renewable energy firm Solar Philippines has started construction on the first utility-scale solar project to be combined with battery energy storage in the Philippines.

It will feature a lithium-ion battery for shifting energy into the early evening and providing ancillary services to the national grid.

A Solar Philippines spokesman told Energy-Storage.News that further details of the storage technology would be announced in May, alongside other PV projects that would be using batteries.

The 150MW PV plant in at Concepcion, Tarlac, will also be the largest solar project in the country to date and the first to start construction after the government’s Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) programme came to an end, under the Duterte administration.

The spokesman said: “It aims to prove that solar is now viable in the Philippines without the FIT, and can in fact replace much of the 10GW of coal planned to be completed over the next five years.”

The project is also the first to feature ‘Made in the Philippines’ solar panels, from the newly-opened Solar Philippines 600MW solar module assembly facility in Batangas. The factory is managed and staffed by the former team of SunPower Philippines.

The spokesman added: “We envision [the] factory paving the way for the Philippines to become a leader in solar manufacturing. Its first modules will be used for our own projects, and then offered to module manufacturers as OEM capacity.

The project is set to power the equivalent of 300,000 households once completed by the end of 2017.

At the ground-breaking ceremony, energy secretary Alfonso Cusi said: “Currently, the country’s power demand is at 13,000MW and our supply is barely 14,000MW, hence we need more power as well as reserve power.

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Could the energy storage industry fabricate some of the “thousands and thousands of jobs” that President Trump says he wants?

The short answer from insiders is yes. But whether those jobs arrive during his administration or are delayed or lost to Asia will depend in part on decisions Trump makes on trade, energy, transportation and infrastructure.

Across the young industry, there are hopeful signs: Students have massed at Tesla Inc. job fairs in Nevada, where the company plans to hire 3,000 people in the first half of 2017, according to a spokeswoman. As many as 150 new jobs were posted recently at a plant in Michigan. CEOs across the industry speak of an upswing, though one that is suffering through a period of Trump-induced uncertainty.

If lithium-ion batteries scale up and become a fixture in homes, businesses and automobiles, energy storage could create more than 120,000 jobs, according to SuperCharge US, an industry coalition. Many would be local, living-wage positions that don’t require a college degree.

Decisions are being made now that will shape the industry’s job profile for years to come. Tesla and other energy storage manufacturers are investing heavily in automation, which could make domestic manufacturing competitive — but results in a lot fewer jobs. Universities in California and Nevada are founding the country’s first-degree programs that specifically focus on batteries.

Energy storage isn’t a business where people think small.

When Alevo, a maker of grid-scale batteries in North Carolina, started hiring a couple of years ago, 10,000 people applied. The 300 who got hired helped build the first factory line. If the cavernous factory reaches its capacity — 20 times the size of today — it could employ 3,000, said Chris Christiansen, the company’s president.

“We see the market coming and increasing every year,” he said.

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The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory has published a landmark report extensively detailing component and system-level cost breakdowns for residential PV solar systems equipped with energy storage.

The decreasing cost of solar systems has been well documented over the last several years, with increased innovation and decreasing manufacturing costs combining to make solar PV a competitive and economic choice for residents and utilities across the United States, and in fact the world. As such, the costs attributed to the development of residential and utility-scale solar projects has been well defined for some time — even though that figure keeps decreasing.

However, in the same way that technological innovation and manufacturing has helped to lower the costs of solar PV projects, the same catalysts have acted on energy storage technology. As a result, the attractiveness and economic viability of energy storage systems has increased dramatically over the last year or two, to the point where energy storage options are more and more frequently being considered to run in tandem with solar systems.

Researchers from the US Department of Energy (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have therefore published what is currently the most detailed component- and system-level cost breakdowns for residential solar PV equipped with energy storage. The report, Installed Cost Benchmarks and Deployment Barriers for Residential Solar Photovoltaics with Energy Storage: Q1 2016, also serves to quantify the previously unknown or uncertain soft costs for combined solar PV and energy storage.

“There is rapidly growing interest in pairing distributed PV with storage, but there’s a lack of publicly available cost data and analysis,” said Kristen Ardani, lead author of the report and a solar technology markets and policy analyst at NREL. “By expanding NREL’s well-established component- and system-level cost modeling methodology for solar PV technologies to PV-plus-storage systems, this report is the first in a series of benchmark reports that will document progress in cost reductions for the emerging PV-plus-storage market over time.”

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Snohomish County PUD this week dedicated its second energy storage system, recently installed at a substation in Everett, Washington.

The system is the PUD’s largest containerized vanadium flow battery system by capacity. The batteries and control systems are housed in 20 shipping containers, each 20 feet in length, packed with tanks of a liquid electrolyte solution.

The PUD’s battery storage systems aim to transform the marketplace and how utilities manage grid operations. They also are designed to improve reliability and the integration of renewable energy resources, which are rapidly growing in the Pacific Northwest.

The PUD was joined at the dedication by Washington Governor Jay Inlsee and representatives from partnering organizations, including UniEnergy Technologies, which manufactured the battery, Doosan GridTech and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The energy storage system was made possible in part with a $7.3 million investment from the Washington State Clean Energy Fund.

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The list of automakers entering the market for stationary energy storage seems to get longer by the day.

The most recent entry is Daimler, the German manufacturer of Mercedes-Benz autos, which in November launched a separate unit, Mercedes-Benz Energy Americas, that plans to begin selling its stationary storage products to residential, commercial and utility consumers this year.

With its new North American business unit, Daimler is looking to leverage the entry it made into stationary storage in 2015 with its Deutsche ACCUmotive unit. In fact, in April 2016,  Daimler spun off Mercedes-Benz Energy GmbH from ACCUmotive in order to concentrate on energy storage applications.

The new unit will have plenty of competition. Daimler joins BMW, Nissan, Tesla and VW, which have also all entered the market for stationary energy storage.

All of those companies have at least two concerns that are driving their interest in storage: What to do with batteries that are no longer useful in an electric vehicle but still have plenty of useful life left in them? How do they improve the economies of battery manufacturing and drive down costs?

Stationary storage presents possible answers to both questions by opening up new markets for new batteries and for recycled or repurposed batteries.

The underlying theme is how to make the most of an asset—in this case the battery in an electric car—which can serve more than one use.

That is a theme touched on by Boris von Bormann, the new head of Mercedes-Benz Energy Americas, in an interview with Utility Dive. “How do we use the car’s capacity that is driving around? How do we monetize it in the energy markets? How do we make it available to the grid operator, a utility, a city?”

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Scientists from all across the European Union are working on what could be the next large-scale energy storage option to combine with variable renewable energy technologies to increase their efficiency — air.

According to researchers from SINTEF, Norway’s largest independent research organisation, storing compressed air in sealed tunnels and mines as an alternative to the more cheaper, though regionally restrictive method of pumped hydropower energy storage. Compressed air storage is in no way a “new” concept, but scientists from all over Europe, working under the auspices of the RICAS 2020 research project, are investigating the possibility of storing large amounts of compressed air in disused caverns and tunnels as large-scale storage sites.

The existing premise is already in use in some areas of the world, and essentially uses surplus electric power to compress air, which is stored underground, only to be released through a gas turbine that generates electricity when needed. Such energy storage plants help meet peak electricity demand.

“The more of the heat of compression that the air has retained when it is released from the store, the more work it can perform as it passes through the gas turbine,” said Giovanni Perillo, project manager for SINTEF’s contribution to RICAS 2020. “And we think that we will be able to conserve more of that heat than current storage technology can, thus increasing the net efficiency of the storage facilities.”

Currently, one of the problems with this technology — as experienced at two of the largest compressed air stores in the world, in Germany and the US — is the loss of potential energy through the compression stage, as there is no means to store the heat produced. This contributes to the fact that existing sites lose around 45 to 55% of the produced energy during the compression process. Participants in the RICAS 2020 project have developed a means to minimize heat energy losses in future underground storage caverns — essentially adding an additional station in the final solution:

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The ability to store energy promises to revolutionize the way we generate, transmit and use electricity — making renewable sources such as wind and solar cheaper and more dependable.

Massachusetts is one of just three states requiring electric utilities to build battery facilities in the future.

A company in Marlborough believes it literally has the next hot technology in energy storage: molten metals.

About 10 years ago, MIT materials chemistry professor Donald Sadoway began wondering what it would take to make a better battery. One that could store huge amounts of energy, charge and discharge rapidly and operate reliably for decades. Of course it would have to be safe: non-toxic and not explode. And, oh yeah, inexpensive to make.

Sadoway stared at the periodic table of elements and had a “eureka” moment — build batteries out of liquid metals.

Fast forward a decade to a factory in Marlborough.

“This is where we have all the processes that we need to manufacture and test the cells we’ll be producing for prototype and commercial systems,” says AmbriChief Technology Officer David Bradwell.

Ambri is the company that Bradwell and Sadoway co-founded. It’s based on the idea of using liquid or molten metals to generate electricity.

“I was a Ph.D. student in the dungeons of MIT building the first [storage] cells,” Bradwell says.

The ‘Secret Sauce’

Those first storage cells were made of magnesium and antimony, but in order for the prototypes to operate, the metals had to be melted into liquids by getting heated to 700 degrees Celsius. That’s nearly 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

The researchers began churning out new chemistry options, using such metals as tin, lithium and calcium. Today, the new and improved molten metal batteries produced at Ambri’s factory operate at a cool 900 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Well, there’s a secret sauce on the specific materials that we’re using,” Bradwell says. “It’s not magnesium and antimony, but it’s similar type materials.”

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According to GTM Research, 21 U.S. states now have 20 megawatts of energy storage projects proposed, in construction or deployed. In fact, 10 U.S. states have pipelines greater than 100 megawatts.

The data comes from GTM Research’s new U.S. Energy Storage Data Hub, part of the company’s Energy Storage Service, launched today.

Wind and sun, two unpredictable resources, are becoming ever more important as sources of energy in Europe. This means that we face a growing need for energy storage facilities, because if energy cannot be used immediately when it is generated, it needs to be stored until it is needed.