According to the latest edition of GTM Research and ESA’s U.S. Energy Storage Monitor, corporate investment in energy storage reached an all-time high in terms of quarterly investments in Q3. Disclosed venture funding and project finance totaled $660 million in the third quarter of the year, bringing the annual total to $812 million.

The largest announced deal during the quarter was $300 million in project financing from the Electric Gas & Industries Association for Tabuchi Electric. The report notes that Advanced Microgrid Solutions also closed a large project financing deal worth $200 million with Macquarie.

“Financing activities in this most recent quarter are noteworthy not just because of the scale, but also because project financing made up a significant portion of the total,” said Ravi Manghani, GTM Research’s director of energy storage. “While one quarter alone doesn’t constitute a trend, growth in project financing, especially in the residential segment, is a harbinger for further strengthening of deployment business models.”

Compared to corporate investment, deployments for the quarter were relatively quiet, however, as no front-of-meter projects above 1 megawatt were brought on-line. Across all segments, the U.S. saw 16.4 megawatts of energy storage deployed in the third quarter of 2016.

The behind-the-meter segment, which is made up of residential and commercial deployments, accounted for the majority of the quarter’s storage deployments. The U.S. deployed 14.1 megawatts of behind-the-meter storage in the third quarter of the year, which is essentially flat year-over-year.

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An open fund for solar energy and energy storage in various emerging markets has been launched by Franck Constant, the co-founder of Sonnedix Group and director of Sithe Pacific, Energy-Storage.News’ sister site PV Tech revealed today.

The new fund named ‘Constant Energy’ aims to reach US$100 million by the end of 2017 and while predominantly aimed at solar, it will have 20% focused on energy storage, Constant told PV Tech at the Solar & Off-Grid Renewables event in Bangkok.

Target nations in Asia include Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Korea, Taiwan, as well as selected African markets such as South Africa and possibly Kenya, depending on how the market evolves. Several of these countries have had regulation and policies favourable to PV deployment evolve at a slower pace to neighbours.

Nevertheless, Constant said: “A lot of these countries already have a tradition of private power generation in the conventional space. It’s only a matter of time before they are moving to private power generation in the solar space.”

To date, only a few funds have specifically focused on both solar and energy storage.

Constant added: “Storage is today where solar was nine years ago when we started Sonnedix. Probably as a first step, I expect it will be a combined solution, where we get land, we have a solar plant, and we add storage to improve the dispatch of the solar plant or to support the grid, like we have done in Puerto Rico in the past.”

Constant also expects a rise in standalone energy storage systems as has been seen in the UK – adding: “With this fund we want really to surf the wave of storage and I think it is coming to countries like Japan over the next few years. It is coming to countries like Indonesia, or some fragmented grids like in Cambodia. We want to do that.”

Isolated grids, as are common in Cambodia or across the multiple islands of Indonesia, are also “fertile ground” for storage .

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Zinc-air battery-based energy storage system maker Fluidic Energy has received US$20 million in investment for projects in Southeast Asia from a private equity fund which includes the Asian Development Bank as a partner.

Asia Climate Partners (ACP), the private equity fund which has invested in Fluidic, includes Japanese financial services company ORIX and Dutch asset management firm Robeco – which is also owned by ORIX – as joint venture partners alongside the Asian Development Bank.

Headquartered in Arizona, USA, with production facilities in Indonesia, Fluidic claims its batteries are made with low cost, non-toxic materials. The company is particularly keen to target remote applications such as telecoms towers and off-grid and microgrid rural electrification projects.

Fluidic claims to have installed more than 100,000 batteries already, including 22MWh at 96 solar-plus-storage projects in the Indonesian archipelago which serve more than 100,000 people. Following the signing of an MoU earlier this year, Fluidic is also deploying some 45MWh to rural Madagascar, enabling more than 400,000 people to have access to energy. The company has also signed an agreement with heavy machinery maker Caterpillar for solar-plus-storage projects and was selected as a supplier to US utility Duke Energy’s first “non-demonstration” microgrid earlier this month.

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The US energy regulator has opened a consultation process on the integration of energy storage into a competitive market structure.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said it wanted “to more effectively integrate electric storage resources into organised wholesale markets to enhance competition and help ensure that these markets produce just and reasonable rates”.

It has circulated a proposal and requested input from the country’s six regional transmission organisations (RTO) and independent system operators (ISO).

The proposal would require each RTO and ISO to alter their tariff structure in order to recognise the specific characteristics of energy storage resources and classify storage operators in a way that enables their participation in wholesale energy markets.

“Today’s announcement is a major step forward in transforming America’s power sector, and FERC’s action lays the foundation for competitive markets where energy storage and distributed energy resources are considered side-by-side with traditional grid assets,” said Matt Roberts, executive director of the Energy Storage Association.

“Regulatory and market certainty is paramount for our emerging industry, and the outcomes of this rulemaking will undoubtedly fuel continued energy storage growth – bringing even more jobs and investment in the advanced energy economy, and accelerating our transition to a more resilient, flexible, and sustainable grid,” he added.

The public have 60 days from the date of publication to respond. FERC began working with network operators in the spring.

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Advances in wearable technology requires improvements with energy storage. Wearable devices are increasing in sophisticated and application, and power capacity needs to meet the demand.

New devices require energy sources that are both tiny, so they can be easily accommodated, and efficient, so that device can run for longer and perform more sophisticated functions. This requires the technological feat of fitting maximum energy density into a tiny space. By density this refers to the amount of energy that can be stored within a given device. A low density means that a battery does not hold charge for long and requires more regular ‘charge’ and ‘discharge’ cycles.

To improve energy capacity, researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have created a microsupercapacitor that exploits three-dimensional porous electrodes. The outcome is a more powerful, micro-sized power unit. The aim is for these devices to be integrated with the next wave of ‘smart’ wearable devices.

The power devices – or ‘micro-batteries’ – are based on films and they have a thickness of only a few micrometers. The film has considerable energy density. The devices are described as ‘microsupercapacitors.’ The devices use two different electrode materials for the cathode (nickel cobalt sulfide) and anode (carbon nanofiber.) The output is such that the microsupercapacitors achieve between one and forty microwatt-hours per square centimetre. This offers improved power capacity.

Discussing the application with Controlled Environments, Professor Husam Alshareef, who led the university team, stated: “while batteries must be charged at a constant voltage, a supercapacitor charges most efficiently by drawing the maximum current that the source can supply, irrespective of voltage.”

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A researcher at TU Graz says it is possible to combine the high-energy density of batteries with the high-power output of supercapacitors using liquid energy storage materials.

“Batteries release energy so slowly and take so long to charge because their energy storage materials are solid. This make it difficult for the ions to move. But as the ions in a supercapacitor move in a liquid, they are much more mobile,” explains TU Graz researcher Stefan Freunberger, pictured.

The redox active ionic liquid developed by Freunberger, in co-operation with a team from Montpellier University, consists of an organic salt that is liquid at 30°C.

“Our principle of an energy hybrid can offer enormous advantages,” Freunberger noted, “for example when applied in electric vehicles. So far, electric vehicles often carry a combination of different battery types or battery systems together with supercapacitors. If we had a single system that combines the benefits of both energy storage types, we could save considerable space and resources.”

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AUSTIN, TX–(Marketwired – Nov 29, 2016) – ViZn Energy Systems Inc. (ViZn), a leading provider of zinc and iron chemistry-based flow battery energy storage systems for utilities and microgrids, announced today that company CEO Ron Van Dell will be speaking at Greentech Media’s U.S. Energy Storage Summit that will take place December 7-8 in San Francisco, California. The session on energy storage standardization will be held from 2:45 PM – 3:15 PM PST on day two of the conference (Dec. 8), will be moderated by Ravi Manghani, Director of Energy Storage at GTM Research, and will include other leading storage industry executives.

“The GTM Energy Storage Summit is one of the most important conferences of the year for the energy storage industry, so I’m excited to have the opportunity to represent ViZn Energy next month,” said Mr. Van Dell. “We’re partnering with leading global suppliers of power conversion and systems controls to eliminate system integration risk and accelerate the customer’s time to revenue.”

Van Dell will bring his more than 30 years of business experience — including more than a decade at the helm of companies in the cleantech and energy industries — to the panel discussion called Standardization: Making Storage Plug-and-Play. Van Dell will also be speaking on Wednesday, December 14, at Power-Gen International in Orlando, Florida, from 1:30 PM – 3:30PM EST. Van Dell currently serves on the Industrial Advisory Board for the College of Engineering at Michigan Technological University, served as Chairman of the Clean Energy Council for the Austin Chamber of Commerce in 2012, was appointed by Austin City Council to its Local Solar Advisory Committee in 2012, serves on the Oversight Committee for the M-TRAC commercialization program of the Michigan EDC and as an Advisory Fellow, NSF Center for Next Gen PV, University of Texas.

ViZn Energy’s flow battery systems are capable of performing both high-power and long-duration services which enables utilities, C&I customers, and other end users to stack applications and incorporate multiple value streams. ViZn’s systems have an expected lifespan of 20 years with negligible degradation regardless of the duty cycle.

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It is often said that an energy storage project needs more than one stream of revenue to succeed and often regulatory barriers are seen as the biggest impediment to reaching that goal.

Indianapolis Power & Light’s 20 MW, 20 MWh Harding Street storage facility that entered service in May is one example. It provides grid services for IPL, but market rules in the Midcontinent ISO are not conducive to battery storage plants, so IPL has petitioned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to find that MISO’s rules are discriminatory and need to be revised.

However, some storage companies have built a dual revenue stream into their business model. They see the market for energy storage not as a flow of services from on one side of the meter to the other, but as more of a two-way street serving customers on both sides of the meter.

A big part of Advanced Microgrid Solutions’ business, for instance, involves installing behind-the-meter energy storage systems, but as CEO Susan Kennedy said, “We are a utility-facing company.”

That was evident in the company’s July 2015 announcement of a deal to deliver 50 MW of energy storage for Southern California Edison. Under the deal, SCE will purchase capacity from the storage systems under a 10-year contract, and expects to use the electricity stored in AMS’ hybrid-electric buildings to offset the power once produced by the decommissioned San Onofre nuclear power plant and other soon-to-be retired gas-fired plants.

But the storage system to provide the utility those services will reside on the customer side of the meter in what AMS calls hybrid electric buildings. There, a combination of energy storage technology and analytical software will enable the building owners to improve energy efficiency, lower energy bills and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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The US energy regulator has opened a consultation process on the integration of energy storage into a competitive market structure.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said it wanted “to more effectively integrate electric storage resources into organised wholesale markets to enhance competition and help ensure that these markets produce just and reasonable rates”.

It has circulated a proposal and requested input from the country’s six regional transmission organisations (RTO) and independent system operators (ISO).

The proposal would require each RTO and ISO to alter their tariff structure in order to recognise the specific characteristics of energy storage resources and classify storage operators in a way that enables their participation in wholesale energy markets.

“Today’s announcement is a major step forward in transforming America’s power sector, and FERC’s action lays the foundation for competitive markets where energy storage and distributed energy resources are considered side-by-side with traditional grid assets,” said Matt Roberts, executive director of the Energy Storage Association.

“Regulatory and market certainty is paramount for our emerging industry, and the outcomes of this rulemaking will undoubtedly fuel continued energy storage growth – bringing even more jobs and investment in the advanced energy economy, and accelerating our transition to a more resilient, flexible, and sustainable grid,” he added.

The public have 60 days from the date of publication to respond. FERC began working with network operators in the spring.

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