Wet’n’Wild Hawaii and Stem Inc have activated a large customer-sited energy storage system in Hawaii, connecting mutiple sites. According to a press release, the system has been supported by Hawaii’s Energy Excelerator, the Hawaiian Electric Company, and the US Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative.

As for specifics, the storage system, equaling 108 kilowatts / 216 kilowatt-hours, represents an important stage in the deployment of storage solutions, stated  Tad Glauthier, vice president of Hawaii Operations at Stem last January:

“By providing increased visibility and control of customer-sited resources, Stem is adding a new arrow to utilities’ quivers and turning a challenge into a solution. This project not only supports Hawaii’s goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045, but also serves as a replicable model for global energy companies of how today’s distributed resources can truly compete with traditional, fossil fuel-based alternatives.”

This storage endeavor is part of a three-year pilot to deploy electric storage systems at about 30 local businesses on O‘ahu, Maui, Hawaii Island, using Stem’s storage solution.

The platform goal is to help improve reliable electric service for customers of utilities with high levels of rooftop solar and other distributed energy resources. The project will be part of the U.S. DOE SunShot Initiative’s “Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV (SHINES)” to demonstrate visibility and control of edge-of-network resources.

“Hawaii’s renewable energy growth and isolated location present unique and significant challenges for local grid operators,” said John Carrington, CEO of Stem. “Utilities and regulators are watching Hawaii to determine the viability of storage-enabled grid services. We are proud to be working with Hawaiian Electric to address those grid challenges with our technology.”

Deploying its software platform, supported by real-time data and predictive analytics, Stem will work to better integrate energy storage at customer sites to help customers manage their loads and provide the Hawaiian Electric Companies with grid responsive resources. For the first time, grid operators will be able to see and manage customer-sited resources, including energy storage, alongside conventional generation resources from their existing control platforms.

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Spanish researchers have developed a system based on molten silicon that can store solar energy ten times more efficiently than existing storage systems.

The war between solar homeowners and utility companies has been an ongoing, fierce fight. Homeowners with rooftop solar want to be compensated at retail rates for the energy they feed back into the grid. Meanwhile, utilities want to maintain lower rates and keep control over the centralized grid. Residential energy storage could help solve these issues.

Through a collaborative and cooperative effort, utilities and residential solar storage owners could build a stronger, more reliable distributed electrical grid. To move forward, it’s necessary to take advantage of new technology, open up communication and give up control. The technology is here, and costs are down, making a battery-based distributed grid more possible now than ever. With a distributed grid, everyone wins.

Using advanced tech and communication

The growth and advancement of technology, especially in the solar and energy storage sector, has been on an upswing in the last decade. The electrical grid infrastructure, however, remains largely unchanged. Systemic change on the utility side will inevitably be slow, but it’s time for utilities to catch up with the growth of energy technology. The companies that do this will be able to do their jobs better – namely, continue to reliably meet energy demand.

Solar photovoltaic installations are on the rise, and more and more solar homeowners are looking for a way to store the energy generated by their panels. As a result, the battery business is booming, with many big brands unable to meet the growing demand. This means that residential energy storage capacity, especially in locations like Southern California, is rising, even though that storage capacity isn’t owned by utilities.

But just because utilities don’t own it, that doesn’t mean they can’t or shouldn’t use it. Another area of major technological advancement is the progress of communication. It’s time for utilities to start using that, too.

In a world of lightning-fast information exchange, it’s surprising how little utilities and customers are communicating. There have been many compromises proposed to wage peace between solar homeowners and power companies, but there hasn’t been a lot of talk of the free-flowing information. Communication, itself, could be the compromise everyone is looking for.

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Elon Musk has had a good couple of weeks as the Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) stock price has shown recently. Very strong Q3 auto sales are expected to continue into Q4. Musk’s talk about his Mars colonization plans, though typically highly ambitious, were well-received by all but the usual Tesla Musk bears. Recent commercial storage orders have been less emphasized but represent further strong gains for the company.

Those writers who criticize Musk’s vertical integration model for new energy products are either hooked up with the fossil fuel industry or fail to understand the way the world is going. Chinese manufacturer BYD Company (OTCPK:BYDDY) have already gone a long way down that road, and have been very successful accordingly. They have just launched a new energy storage system in Europe using lithium iron-phosphate batteries.

Tesla is now consolidating its vertically integrated new energy systems. This will tie in their interests in electric vehicles (EV’s), rooftop solar and energy storage systems. Success is coming remarkably quickly now in their energy storage business. This is happening as the Gigafactory production ramps up and approvals are received. There is a huge market appearing rapidly for cost-effective energy storage which can overcome the mismatch between renewable energy supply and energy demand.

Commercial Gains.

In September the California Public Utilities Commission awarded the world’s largest lithium ion battery storage project to Tesla. The company will provide a 20 MW/80 MWh Powerpack system at the Southern California Edison Mira Loma substation. This was necessitated by a huge and polluting rupture in the Aliso Canyon natural gas reservoir. 15 million residents were potentially affected.

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Borrego Solar Systems Inc., a provider of large-scale solar development, design, financing, construction, and operations and maintenance, has announced its entry into energy storage solutions with the launch of a new division. This marks the company’s first-ever formal expansion into energy services beyond solar PV. The company will be offering both stand-alone energy storage solutions and storage integrated with solar PV.

“We’re excited to launch this new chapter, as a way to further our mission of accelerating the adoption of renewable energy,” said Borrego Solar CEO Mike Hall. “Energy storage – and, in particular, the long-duration energy storage on which we’ll be focusing our efforts – is an important piece of what we need to effectively integrate more and more renewable energy into our electricity system, and it’s something that our customers, electricity regulators and policymakers are asking for.”

The energy storage division will be based in Massachusetts and will serve customers nationally. Borrego Solar’s executive vice president of strategy and business development, Dan Berwick, will lead the new division.

“We’re realizing that all across our customer base – from cities, school districts and public agencies to businesses, manufacturers and electric utilities – it is more frequently making economic sense to evaluate energy storage in conjunction with solar,” said Berwick. “We knew that this technology shift was around the corner given the changes happening to the grid as we add more wind and solar power to it. As climate change becomes an increasingly present danger, and the need to decarbonize our electricity system more immediate, the distributed energy marketplace will demand greater amounts of flexible energy storage. We’re now prepared to meet that need.”

Over the coming year, Borrego Solar’s energy storage division will focus on supporting utilities across the U.S. in the development and installation of megawatt-scale energy storage systems for integration with renewables and peak-load management. The team will also offer energy storage solutions to its existing solar PV portfolio, totaling more than 400 MW, and to new solar customers, which are primarily large-scale electricity users in its core state markets of California, New York and Massachusetts.

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Wet’n’Wild Hawaii and energy storage firm Stem Inc., flipped the switch to activate a customer-sited energy storage system in Hawaii, supported by Hawaii’s Energy Excelerator, the Hawaiian Electric Co. and the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative.

The Wet’N’Wild system—108 kW / 216 kWh—is part of a three-year pilot to deploy electric storage systems at about 30 local businesses on O‘ahu, Maui and Hawai‘i Island, using Stem’s storage solution to help improve reliable electric service for customers of utilities with high levels of rooftop solar and other distributed energy resources. The project will be part of the U.S. DOE SunShot Initiative’s “Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV (SHINES) to demonstrate visibility and control of edge-of-network resources.

With its robust software platform, supported by real-time data and predictive analytics, Stem will work to better integrate energy storage at customer sites to help customers manage their loads and provide the Hawaiian ElectricCompanies with grid responsive resources. For the first time, grid operators will be able to see and manage customer-sited resources, including energy storage, alongside conventional generation resources from their existing control platforms.

“We follow the sun. Our hours of operation are specifically during peak times for sunlight, so this project is very attractive for us,” said Jerry Pupillo, Wet’n’Wild Hawaii general manager. “The batteries will kick in to decrease that peak usage spike we have always battled. This makes dollars and sense for us as a business as our peak use determines the rate we pay.  Big picture: this could help the utility avoid building another power plant because with battery storage our electricity use can be more precise and controlled to help manage the grid.”

“Hawaiian Electric is very happy to partner with Wet’n’Wild in our distributed energy storage pilot with Stem,” said Shelee Kimura, Hawaiian Electric vice president for corporate planning and business development. “With this ‘behind-the-meter’ storage at our customers’ sites, we can help them manage how they use energy with technologies that have dual value, saving participating customers money and improving grid reliability and efficiency for all our customers.”

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As the energy storage market rose and as prices for storage continued to fall, more than 900 MW of energy storage grid-tied inverters were shipped globally in 2015, according to IHS Markit. The research firm forecasts global energy storage inverter shipments will surge at a compound annual growth rate of 38% to 4.5 GW in 2020. Furthermore, prices for energy storage inverters will continue to fall an average of 13% per year from 2016 to 2020.

“The energy storage market hinges on cost-efficient and flexible inverters,” said Isabella Ni, senior analyst at IHS Markit. “Recent inverter launches have the ability to distribute power flows between the network, the batteries, the load centers and generation assets.”

According to IHS Markit, products with a power rating less than 1 MW will capture 70% of cumulative grid-tied energy storage inverter shipments between 2016 and 2020. In particular, nearly 40% of inverter shipments during the forecast period will have a power rating between 100 kW and 999 kW, as these products are utilized extensively in the utility-scale market, as well as playing a growing role in the commercial segment where average system sizes are quickly increasing.

According to IHS, Parker Hannifin and BYD led the market, supported by shipments to utility-scale projects. SMA topped the providers of the sub-100 kW energy storage inverters segment.

“The sub-100 kW inverters segment is highly competitive; about half of the shipments came from companies with a global market share of less than 5 percent,” Ni said. “The large-scale energy storage inverter market, by comparison, is much more concentrated, with three manufacturers – BYD, Parker Hannifin and Woojin Industrials – representing half of the market.”

More information on the report is available here.

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GE and longtime customer Southern California Edison announced a plan to install a battery storage and gas turbine hybrid.

The two-project solution first calls for installation of a battery energy storage system from Current, powered by GE, followed by upgrades to a GE LM6000 gas turbine to integrate the two systems.

The LM6000 Hybrid EGT, which is scheduled to be deployed at two SCE sites in the coming months, was developed in response to changing regulations and grid requirements in the wake of California’s Aliso Canyon energy crisis earlier this year and will ultimately support increasing renewable energy capacity on the California grid.

The solution, which will qualify for California’s Independent System Operator’s tariff for contingency reserve, answers a critical need for Southern California, where regulations on natural gas usage and storage are changing in the wake of the state’s Aliso Canyon energy crisis earlier this year. GE’s Power Services and Current businesses worked to develop the joint solution in a competitive offer in collaboration with Wellhead Power Solutions, LLC.

The LM6000 Hybrid EGT product integrates a 10 MW battery energy storage system from Current and an existing GE LM6000 aeroderivative gas turbine with control system upgrades provided by GE’s Power Services. The system will allow the turbine to operate in standby mode without using fuel and enable immediate response to changing energy dispatch needs. By eliminating the need to constantly run the turbines at minimum loads to maintain spinning reserves, the LM6000 Hybrid EGT will save fuel, reduce maintenance costs and cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

The LM6000 Hybrid EGT offers ancillary and grid support at a lower cost and smaller GHG footprint than traditional resources, plus it can provide 50 MW of GHG-free spinning reserve, flexible capacity, and peaking energy; 25 MW of high-quality regulation; and 10 MVA of reactive voltage support and primary frequency response when not online.

The battery energy storage system is expected to be installed and operational by the end of 2016, and the updated and integrated turbine controls are scheduled to be operational in early 2017.

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The UK is a key market for Tesla’s Powerwall and Powerpack energy storage products, and Tesla is seeing demand for additional installations of its commercial oriented products after the first Powerpack install was completed last month.

Tesla is exhibiting at Solar Energy UK|Clean Energy Live this week. This is the first exhibition in Europe where the company is demonstrating its three key products – Powerwall, Powerpack and its electric vehicle range.

The UK was the third market globally to receive Tesla Energy products after the US and Australia due to the high level of interest expressed when the Powerwall and Powerpack products where launched in 2015.

Tesla has been accrediting installers to its programme since the turn of the year and has increased its base to several hundred. It said it intends to increase this number in the coming months with the right partners to provide customers great service and technology.

Although the first Tesla Powerpack install in Europe was completed by Camborne Energy Storage to provide services to the grid, Tesla sees a product benefit when stacking this with other applications such as peak-shaving, that enables commercial and industrial customers to reduce their exposure to peak energy prices.

While there had been early doubts surrounding the potential for commercial energy storage solutions, particularly at the start of the year, the UK market is appearing to embrace the technology. Earlier this summer supermarket chain Sainsbury’s revealed it was testing an energy storage application in one of its stores with a view to a wider roll-out in the near future.

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If Massachusetts acts on recommendations in the recently released report from the state’s Department of Energy Resources (DOER), the state could have a mandate for 600 MW of energy storage by July of next year. 

The DOER is in the process of forming a stakeholder group to discuss the details of what a storage mandate would look like, with a year-end 2016 target date for setting out its recommendations. If a mandate is approved, it would be put in place by July 12, 2017 with a target date of 2020.

However, the State of Charge report goes beyond the possible creation of an energy storage mandate and recommends a list of programs and projects, as well as policy changes that would facilitate the integration of energy storage into every aspect of the state’s grid. 

The report used tools from Alevo Analytics to model the state’s electric system and found that the total optimal amount of advanced energy storage would be 1,766 MW. “Advanced” storage in the report does not include pumped storage, though it was included in the simulations. Massachusetts has about 1,600 MW of pumped storage capacity.

The modeling showed that adding up to 1,766 MW of advanced energy storage would maximize Massachusetts’ ratepayer benefits to the tune of $2.3 billion. That would yield a benefit-cost ratio ranging from 1.7 to 2.4 for ratepayers. In addition to benefits for ratepayers, the modeling results also shows the potential for $1.1 billion in direct benefits to resource owners from market revenue.

The report identifies benefits from a range of functions that storage can provide, including energy cost reductions, reduced peak capacity, ancillary services cost reductions, transmission and distribution cost reductions and a greater ability to integrate renewable resources into the grid.

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