Rooftop solar energy is becoming a financially viable way for millions of U.S. consumers to generate their own electricity — and utilities are doing everything to kill the solar boom before it gains too much traction. Utilities in states such as Florida, Wisconsin, and Nevada have tried to undermine rooftop solar at the regulatory level and in ballot measures. As a reaction, voters have fought back and beaten the efforts to squash solar energy. 

The impact on residential solar companies Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), Vivint Solar (NYSE:VSLR), Sunrun (NASDAQ:RUN), and SunPower (NASDAQ:SPWR) shouldn’t go unnoticed. They’re winning the policy war against utilities, and as they do, it’ll open a larger and larger market across the country. 

Policy wins are going to renewable energy

The election earlier this month was accompanied by a number of ballot initiatives that will impact solar energy for years to come. And for the most part, solar energy was a huge winner. 

Despite utilities’ spending $26 million to pass a referendum that would have undermined solar economics in the state, Florida voters rejected the utility referendum. The state now looks like it’ll have a bright solar future. 

In Nevada, less than a year after the public utility commission essentially killed the rooftop solar industry, residents overwhelmingly voted to break up Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK-B)-owned NV Energy’s long monopoly in the state. Customers have to be given energy choice, meaning more solar in one of the country’s sunniest states. 

In the past, Wisconsin has tried to add fees to utility bills that would kill solar energy before it ever got started, but those attempts were rejected by the court. 

There’s an important trend here for utilities and solar companies: When solar energy goes on the ballot or to the court, it wins. That should have every utility in the country frightened because that gives millions of customers choice regarding their energy needs. 

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Accompanying the launch of the its Powerwall 2.0 offering, Tesla will reportedly begin completely overhauling many retail locations to focus more on the energy storage side of its business.

The retail facelift will reportedly involve the installation of various interactive displays explaining how the firm’s energy storage products work in simple language.

Importantly, this overhaul will also involve a transition to the company actually taking Powerwall 2.0 orders in the store, as well as online, according to Business Insider (previously, all ordering of the Tesla Powerwall was done online).

Notably, the move closely follows the SolarCity acquisition, and likely serves as a sign of things to come. Presumably, the company will be highlighting the recently unveiled solar PV roof options at its stores soon enough as well.

The display of stylish all-electric vehicles, home energy storage systems, and solar PV roofs all in one store will lead to some nice sales synergies. As an imaginary example: someone stops in for a home energy storage system, takes a closer look at a Tesla Model 3 on display, reads/watches the information on display concerning Autopilot, and decides to put down a deposit for one. Or: someone stops in to work out the details of a vehicle purchase, and decides after looking around that the solar roof options are more affordable than they would have guessed, etc.

Business Insider provides more: “Tesla has already updated some stores in key locations across North America, Europe, and Australia. The company chose to focus the rollout on markets with the most demand for energy products, but the company plans to add its energy products to more stores in the near future.”

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Tesla is perhaps best known for its electric cars, but the company has another prominent business as well.

Its Tesla Energy division markets stationary lithium-ion battery packs for energy storage.

Energy-storage systems can increase the utility of home solar arrays, meaning Tesla Energy will likely become more important now that Tesla is set to acquire SolarCity.

DON’T MISS: Tesla, SolarCity, and Ta’u: sun, storage batteries, clean energy (video)

The acquisition of SolarCity—which, like Tesla, is controlled by Elon Musk—was approved by Tesla shareholders last week.

Tesla’s retail stores may soon get an update to reflect the newfound prominence of energy storage.

The company also plans to revamp the majority of its retail stores to better showcase its energy-storage products, reports Business Insider.

Citing an unnamed Tesla spokesperson, the website said Tesla will remodel its stores to showcase the Powerwall 2 home energy-storage battery pack, and will install new graphics explaining energy-storage products.

Customers will now also be able to order Powerwall battery packs in stores; they were previously available to order online only.

According to Business Insider, Tesla has already remodeled some stores in North America, Europe, and Australia.

These initial locations were chosen to get the new look because they were in local markets Tesla viewed as having particularly strong demand for energy storage.

But Tesla now reportedly plans to offer its energy-storage battery packs at a larger number of locations.

The Powerwall 2 was unveiled by Elon Musk at a media event last month, alongside solar roof tiles for SolarCity.

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As the cost of renewable energy continues to decline and intermittent clean power sources such as wind and solar gain ever an ever larger foothold in the global energy mix, the ability to store energy that can be quickly dispatched when needed has become as important as the development of renewables themselves.

Robust storage options could allow for greater integration of intermittent renewables, as they facilitate flexible capacity-building that relies far less on coal and gas-fired plants for baseload generation, meaning energy storage is a key step in the journey to wean the world off its fossil fuel addiction.

But cracking the energy storage conundrum is no easy feat. Advanced flow and lithium-ion batteries with storage capability hold great promise, but costs are high and technical aspects are complex as these technologies develop. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity – or ‘pumped hydro’ – is currently the world’s highest-capacity and most efficient energy storage method, but this option, which uses off-peak electricity to pump water from a lower-elevation reservoir to a higher one and then releases the water through turbines during high-demand hours, is limited by the geographical and infrastructure requirements involved.

US-based start-up Quidnet Energy is hoping to fill a gap in the market with an underground pumped hydro concept. The company, co-founded by energy entrepreneur Aaron Mandell and former Saudi Aramco petroleum engineer Howard Schmidt, is currently using rock formations in abandoned oil and gas wells to store pressurised water, which can later be run through a turbine to feed electricity back into the grid.

Quidnet has its first field demonstration plant up-and-running in Erath County, Texas, which has produced good results indicating that the concept is technically workable, and building a commercial-scale demonstration plant in 2017 is the next step. Further down the line, the company intends to drill its own reservoirs separate from the oil and gas sector’s leftover wells, and even integrate solar generation to create baseload solar power plants.

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Hydraflow and SolarCity have installed a 1 MW solar power system and 250 kilowatt (500 kilowatt hours) energy storage project at Hydraflow’s headquarters in Fullerton, California. Hydraflow, which designs and manufactures flexible light weight hose assemblies, fluid couplings and quick disconnects for use in engineered aerospace and defense systems, is expected to save more than $3.5 million over the next 30 years by purchasing affordable solar power and energy storage at a discount to utility rates.

“Our original goal was to offset 75 percent of our energy needs, but with the effect of our recently installed LED lighting and solar power system, we hope to realise a net offset of closer to 90 percent of our overall energy needs” said Paul Rodolf, Director of Operations, Hydraflow.

Corporations and large businesses like Hydraflow are subject to peak demand charges, but storage solutions can minimise these charges while providing additional savings by dispatching solar energy when it’s needed most. The project is equipped with DemandLogic, SolarCity’s smart energy storage system for businesses, to store 500 kilowatt hours of solar energy capacity onsite. Hydraflow will not only utilise affordable solar power to lower its costs compared to currently utility rates, but will further reduced energy costs by using stored electricity to minimise peak demand.

Along with solar power, Hydraflow has already modernised its 174,000 square foot facility with approximately 400 LED lighting fixtures and installed a lighting control system to further increase efficiency and reduce peak demand to avoid additional costs. With Hydraflow’s goal of increasing energy efficiency in mind, Hydraflow has advanced its Environmental Management System and Environmental Policy through the use of solar power and energy storage.

The solar power system is expected to prevent more than 18,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from entering the atmosphere over the next three decades. That’s equivalent to taking more than 3,800 cars off the road for a year or powering more than 3,800 average homes for a year.

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November 24 (SeeNews) – The island of Ta’u in American Samoa can now meet almost 100% of its power needs with renewable energy thanks to a solar power and battery storage-enabled microgrid from SolarCity and Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), which just closed the buy of the solar installer.   

The microgrid features 1.4 MW of solar generation capacity and 6 MWh of battery storage from 60 Tesla Powerpacks. It replaces diesel generators, providing cost savings and energy independence for Ta’u’s almost 600 residents.  

The project was funded by the American Samoa Economic Development Authority, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of Interior (DoI), according to a SolarCity blog post this week. It is operated by American Samoa Power Authority.

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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.

The latest proposal is available online.

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It makes more sense from an economic standpoint to recycle old plug-in electric vehicle batteries than to reuse them directly for home energy storage, according to a new report from Lux Research.

The primary reason? According to Lux Research, reused plug-in electric vehicle batteries will “deliver questionable returns on account of reduced performance, limiting them to application with less frequent and shallower depth of discharge cycles.”

This echoes what Tesla CTO JB Straubel said earlier this year. Tesla has said repeatedly that it plans to recycle almost 100% of the materials in its batteries at its Gigafactory. When asked about simply reusing batteries instead of recycling them, though, JB Straubel indicated that Tesla continuously finds that this doesn’t work out as a cost-competitive approach. Here were his comments on the matter:

“We’ve looked at reuse or kind of the second life of automotive batteries for grid applications very closely, and you know, ultimately, every time we’ve studied this we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not a very economical or very good use of those assets.

“You know, by the time they come out of a vehicle that’s lived its life, the technology will be quite old. We expect 10 maybe 15 year life at a minimum from these batteries. And, you know, the degradation is not entirely linear. By the end of their life, the efficiency has degraded on every cycle, you see lower efficiency, the capacity will have somewhat degraded, and for a lot of reasons, it makes it very difficult to deploy those efficiently back into a grid setting, where you want high reliability and you do want predictability.

“So, my view is that we’ll see new batteries dedicated to that market, that also have slightly different characteristics — they should have higher cycle life. In an electric vehicle that has 200+ miles of range, you don’t need as many cycles as you do on a battery that’s designed to charge and discharge every single day on the grid. There’s perhaps a factor of about 4 or 5 difference in the cycle life — so that’s one aspect.”

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Pumped-storage hydro is a known concept. It is the largest existing form of storing peak electricity for time slots with less supply.

Now Fraunhofer has started an experiment with a new idea. According to Georg Küffner writing at FAZ,  they built a sphere with concrete, diameter of three meters. Then they immersed that into the Bodensee lake.

The idea is to have a large sphere at the bottom of some lake or ocean and use that as the lower reservoir of pumped storage.

I have no idea if that works out to be cheaper than using mountains. But it might be a good idea for small scale projects sitting right next to some wind park. One advantage that comes to mind: This would probably be fast to build and modular, so you could start out small and easily add capacity as needed. That’s one of the advantages of solar and wind projects as well, so this might be a nice fit for them. In contrast, the old concept needs to build at a large scale fixed for decades.

Anyway, just like the idea of moving mountains, I thought it was worth keeping in mind.

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The energy storage industry is growing leaps and bounds, and opportunities for energy storage deployment are quickly opening across the country and around the world. Today, in the United States, we seem to be revising our projection estimates each quarter, anticipating even more deployments as markets and regulations are recognizing the value of energy storage systems. According to the US Energy Storage Monitor, deployment grew by more than 256 percent in 2015, and 2016 is on pace to be another record setting year in the U.S. alone. Markets across the globe are adopting cost-effective, reliable energy storage as well, with more than 2 gigawatts (GW) of new systems announced this year.

What are the main obstacles for broader energy storage deployment?

While energy storage is quickly advancing, historically these types of advanced energy systems have not been commonplace on the grid. This presents a number of challenges to overcome to ensure that storage systems have fair access to competitive markets and utility procurements. The two main obstacles are implementing regulations and market structures that account for storage systems operating parameters; and ensuring that competitive markets recognize the value that these systems provide and compensate performance and value delivered.

First and foremost, to be regulated is to be recognized, and even though systems are quickly going in around the country, most markets, integrated resource plans (IRPs), and utility procurements do not consider energy storage systems alongside traditional utility assets. Instead, we commonly see outmoded assets like peaker plants being procured without first considering multiple other solutions that are present and cost-effective today (energy storage, demand response, efficiency measures, etc.). ‘All-source’ RFPs – and IRPs that weigh storage side-by-side with other solutions – will drive innovative markets forward, encouraging regulators and decision makers to properly value the system-wide benefits that energy storage delivers.

When market and procurement consideration is given to energy storage, we must also make sure that we are properly valuing these systems and providing system owners compensation for the increased performance, resiliency, and flexibility delivered to the grid. In both short and long duration applications, storage systems enable us to operate the grid more efficiently and increases overall system reliability, saving money for utilities and ratepayers alike while improving overall system operations. But these savings and performance improvements, along with many other value streams that storage delivers, are not properly reflected in our markets and regulations.

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