PHILADELPHIA, PA –(Marketwired – December 14, 2016) – Customized Energy Solutions (CES) recently passed the 100MW milestone managing grid-connected energy storage projects, making it the largest and most experienced independent third party manager of energy storage in North America. CES provides dispatch instructions, monitoring services, and market interactions for these energy storage resources from its Market Operations Center located in its Philadelphia, PA, headquarters. The resources being managed include battery and flywheel technologies located in the Mid-Atlantic, New York, New England, and Ontario, Canada energy markets. CES is currently contracted to add additional storage resources to its portfolio in California and Texas during the first quarter of 2017.

“CES is proud to be managing a storage portfolio of this magnitude. Energy storage is expected to have a pronounced positive impact on the transmission and distribution systems in the coming years, and CES is excited to be working with the developers and owners of these storage facilities,” said Erik Paulson, CES’ Vice President of Wholesale Market Services. CES has been a pioneer and leader in the energy storage industry. CES’s contributions have helped energy storage transform from a concept to viable commercial solution. For over a decade, the CES team has worked in the energy storage space — providing consulting and advisory services to organizations that have ranged from early-stage start-ups to large technology and project developers. CES’s practical experience with the day-to-day operation of battery and flywheel energy storage facilities in competitive energy markets provides the team with an experience base that sets CES apart from other providers.

About Customized Energy Solutions

Established in 1998, Customized Energy Solutions assists clients in managing and staying ahead of the changes in the wholesale and retail electricity and natural gas markets. Serving hundreds of clients, Customized Energy Solutions offers best-in-class hosted software solutions and consultative services focused on optimizing energy market operations. CES manages over 5,500MW of generation in total, and is committed to promoting economic development through the advancement of transparent, efficient and non-discriminatory practices in the energy markets. CES empowers clients by helping them better understand and manage the inner workings of energy markets and new technologies. CES provides the highest level of energy information technology and services to clients around the globe.

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The world will witness an international ‘megashift’ towards energy storage – batteries in particular – within the next 10 years. That was the prediction made by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) in the summer of 2015. 

A year later, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) went a step further, estimating that he annual investment in energy storage systems will increase six-fold to $8.2bn (£6.7bn) in 2024, and to $250bn (£197bn) by 2040. This massive growth in energy storage – first in the utilities sector, and then among corporations seeking to reduce overheads –  will create a “fundamentally different” global power system, BNEF senior analyst Logan Goldie-Scot said at the time.

If 2016 was anything to go by, the energy storage megashift is already beginning to gather pace. The battery market has seen breath-taking levels of growth from utilities over the past 12 months, while non-utilities are increasingly realising that lithium-ion or flow storage systems can act as the perfect accompaniment to on-site renewable energy installations.

Here, edie has rounded up some of the biggest and best energy storage projects across the globe – most of which were installed or agreed in 2016 – which are together demonstrating the vast potential that this low-carbon innovation has to offer for the green economy.

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Maybe you missed it. It happened right before Thanksgiving. FERC announced a proposed rulemaking that will allow energy storage and distributed energy resource (DER) aggregators with resources on both sides of the meter to participate in the wholesale electric market as fully interactive grid resources. Referencing the nearby holiday, is FERC’s new rule a game changer or a turkey?

FERC claims storage resources and distributed energy resources (DERs) functioning under aggregators may not be able to fully participate in wholesale markets. FERC’s solution with the proposed rulemaking is to require each Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) and Independent System Operator (ISO) to revise its tariff to:

 1) Establish rules that accommodate participation of storage resources in the organized wholesale electric markets; and

2) Define DER aggregators as a type of market participant that can participate in the organized wholesale electric markets under the rules and protocols that best accommodates the resources being aggregated.

The FERC announcement and the full notice of proposed rulemaking (NOPR) are available at this link.   

Some parts of this proposed rule may seem ho-hum or unnecessary. For example, pumped storage has participated in wholesale markets for a long time. Why are new rules needed to accommodate storage resources?  The answer is that each RTO and ISO has its own rules for the participation of different resource types and without a specific set of tariffs and rules for each one, the resource may have been unable to fully participate in the capacity, energy and ancillary service wholesale markets. Rules developed specifically for storage may make it more profitable for this resource category to participate in the market and thereby increase supply, innovation and competition. Not so ho-hum is the point that the proposed rules would allow storage resources to set the wholesale market clearing price (the price that all suppliers are paid). The ISOs/RTOs also will be required to set a minimum size storage resource not greater than 100 kW for participants in the storage market. Industry pundits claim that whoever can master energy storage will revolutionize the power industry. Will this proposed rule help storage providers move in that direction?

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For the first time, battery storage has won agreements as part of the UK’s latest Capacity Market auction, winning over 3.2 gigawatts (GW) of contracts according to provisional auction results.

The UK’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy has published provisional auction results for the T-4 Capacity Auction for delivery in 2020/21, which concluded on December 8. Over 52 GW was awarded at a clearing price of £22.50 kW/year, including new gas generation.

However, the big news out of the provisional auction results was the awarding of over 3.2 GW of energy storage contracts, the first time energy storage has won agreements as part of the market wide auction. Specifically, four battery projects which had previously been successful under the National Grid’s Enhanced Frequency Response (EFR) tender were provided with 15-year contracts as new build generators under the T-4 Capacity Auction. These four projects are the 10 MW Cleator and 40 MW Glassenbury projects being developed by Low Carbon, a 49 MW project being developed in West Burton by EDF Energy Renewables, and the 10 MW Blackburn Meadows project under construction in Sheffield by E.ON UK.

“Our homes and businesses need an electricity supply they can rely on all year round. We’ve provided them with that certainty, at a low cost to bill payers, years in advance,” said UK Business and Energy Secretary Greg Clark. “Technological innovation, as part of our low carbon future, will create jobs and opportunities across the UK. We are rebuilding an archaic energy system, bringing forward brand new gas power and innovative low-carbon capacity like battery storage to upgrade our energy mix.

“This is about more than just keeping the lights on. A modern, reliable, and flexible electricity system powers the economy and Britain’s future success.”

Hydropower was also awarded agreements of 711 MW, though the lion’s share was awarded to gas generation.

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An Arizona scheme to study the use of energy storage and smart inverters in integrating solar to the grid has contracted the deployment of 4MW of AES Energy Storage’s lithium battery systems.

While regulators in the state are poised to rule next week on the value of solar to the network and consumers, ending what Energy-Storage.News’ solar sister site PV Tech reported today amounts to “years of drawn-out discourse”, execution of this project, for utility Arizona Public Service (APS) is already underway.

The 4MW of storage will be deployed as two separate 2MW installations of AES’ Advancion energy storage systems. They will form part of APS’ ongoing ‘Solar Partner Program’, which evaluates the possibilities for integrating a high penetration of PV on the grid.

The utility has already put 10MW of PV onto more than 1,500 customers’ rooftops through the programme. Participants receive a US$30 monthly bill credit for 20 years and do not have to pay for panels themselves. APS claims this will help inform them and other utilities around the country on how smart inverters and storage can play a part in lowering emissions, maintaining reliability of the system and best manage peak demand while renewable energy assets increase their share of generation.

‘The best renewable energy is the type a customer never thinks about’

AES’ Advancion systems will be located in the cities of Surprise and Buckeye and will be used to keep electricity service reliable and to meet times of high demand and high electricity prices. They will be among the first Advancion systems to be under utility ownership, with AES having opened up the platform to third-party ownership in 2015. There are some 120 customers with PV installed through the APS Solar Partner Program in the two cities.

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Enphase recently announced its involvement in one of the world’s first apartment building projects using solar panels, battery storage and software-based energy management – and it’s in Australia.

The system was installed at building in Newtown, Sydney; operated by student housing co-operative Stucco.

The installation features 30 kilowatts of solar panels, 114 Enphase S230 microinverters and 36 Enphase AC Batteries. Combined, the batteries have a total of 43.2 kilowatts of storage capacity and represent the largest Enphase storage system commissioned anywhere in the world to date.

The system is expected to provide up to 80 percent of energy requirements for the building; which is home to 40 residents.

“In addition to being the largest Enphase Storage System commissioned since the Enphase AC Battery was launched in Australia in August 2016, this project illustrates how solar and storage can co-exist in multi-unit residential buildings, said Nathan Dunn, managing director of Enphase Asia-Pacific.

The Enphase AC Battery is an affordable modular system, enabling system owners to add capacity as required. Demand for AC battery in Australia and New Zealand has been strong and in September the company forecast 70,000 of its batteries would be purchased in the two countries over the next year.

Enphase microinverters are also a popular solar product; with approximately 13 million shipped globally to date. More than 540,000 Enphase residential and commercial systems have been deployed around the world.

Unlike conventional string inverters installed with many residential and commercial solar power systems, microinverters operate independently; with one of the compact units associated with each panel in the array. This means if a single solar panel is malfunctioning for whatever reason, it won’t pull down the electricity production of the entire system.

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(TNS) — Bill Coleman needed to replace the roof on his Los Altos home. The tech entrepreneur decided to package new roof tiles with a solar power system and a battery unit to store electrical power.

The solar panels have dropped his electric bills to nearly nothing, and the rechargeable battery pack from Sunverge has kept the power on at his house during blackouts. It’s quiet and, so far, hassle-free, he said. The extra expense was worth the peace of mind.

“The lights don’t even blink,” Coleman said. “They stay on.”

Coleman is part of a small but growing group of homeowners coupling solar panels with rechargeable energy storage systems. These battery units provide power during emergencies and can potentially reduce power usage and bills.

But it’s also a new technology, which means it can be expensive and unreliable.

“At this stage of the game, energy storage isn’t quite for everyone,” said Cory Klausmann, vice president of sales at Simmitri. “There’s a select demographic that it works really well with.”

A typical home battery storage unit is a collection of rechargeable, lithium ion batteries, connected to power-generating solar systems.

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The two top competitors in the home energy storage market — a market that barely exists at present — are preparing for burgeoning sales in coming years as renewable energy supplies grow more common.

One name is familiar: Tesla, the electric car maker, which makes a battery called the Powerwall to store rooftop solar power at home.

The other name is Sonnen, a European company little known in the U.S. that has sold more than 15,000 lithium ion storage batteries to homes and businesses, primarily in its home country, Germany, a global leader in renewable energy.

Their products are similar but their business strategies are not.

At an energy storage conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, representatives of each company laid out the differences.

Tesla, whose merger with solar rooftop giant SolarCity is imminent, envisions a wide network of Tesla retail stores where customers can shop for an electric car, a solar roof and a battery to store excess energy for later.

“We see a convergence in a number of ways around the consumer experience,” said Mateo Jaramillo, vice president of products and programs for Tesla’s energy arm. “We obviously think a lot of that starts with the vehicle.”

Electric car customers will naturally be interested in related technologies, he said.

Sonnen, which counts General Electric as a major investor, works with contractors who install solar roofs and power supplies, and emphasizes its software systems that help customers manage home and business energy use.

As the solar rooftop business grows, “you won’t make money welling power; you’ll make money managing power,” said Philipp Schroder, Sonnen’s head of sales and marketing.

And unlike Tesla, which — in partnership with Panasonic — is making batteries that form the core of the Powerwall at a giant factory in Nevada, Sonnen will buy from suppliers.

“We don’t care where the battery is coming from, from Panasonic or anyone else,” said Schroder.

Tesla believes that having control of the battery manufacturing process will lead to lower costs and better designs.

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