It’s a busy time for corporate deals in the energy sector. Multibillion-dollar mergers are happening across the U.S. utility sector. PV monitoring companies are trading hands at a brisk pace. But what of energy storage?

The stakes are rising in the nascent storage market as technologies approach commercialization and business models get more sophisticated.

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We’ve heard about the value of energy storage for integrating renewables, shaving peak demand and regulating frequency, but there’s another service it can provide: combating air pollution.

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The sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow and the water doesn’t always flow when people want it to. Thus, the problem for renewable energy — if the sun, wind and water become America’s main sources of power, how will the grid function when those sources aren’t generating?

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Investment in grid-level energy storage is expected to triple over the next five years, with a multitude of players delivering a wide variety of technologies, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. Duke Energy recently installed a hybrid energy storage system (HESS) that combines high-capacity batteries with fast-responding ultracapacitors. The pilot project will provide peak demand response, load shifting, and support for a utility-owned 1.2 MW photovoltaic array.

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Forget about Tesla Motors Inc.’s batteries: The hottest way to store energy in the electricity business today is a century-old technology that involves moving water to stash power.

Known as pumped storage, the giant facilities push large volumes of water uphill when there is surplus electricity, and then let gravity move it back down through turbines to generate hydroelectric power when extra kilowatts are needed.

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Sonnen recently announced a new residential energy storage product called the eco compact. The company said the price is up to 40% less than its other energy storage products. The cost is $5,950 for the 4 kWh system, which does not include installation, but does include an inverter, a smart energy manager, and measurement technology. The system can be expanded up to 16 kWh, in 4 kWh increments. The battery is guaranteed for 10,000 cycles, or 10 years. The system has been designed to work well with home solar power systems for self-consumption.

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Harvard researchers have identified a whole new class of high-performing organic molecules, inspired by vitamin B2, that can safely store electricity from intermittent energy sources like solar and wind power in large batteries.

The development builds on previous work in which the team developed a high-capacity flow battery that stored energy in organic molecules called quinones and a food additive called ferrocyanide. That advance was a game-changer, delivering the first high-performance, non-flammable, non-toxic, non-corrosive, and low-cost chemicals that could enable large-scale, inexpensive electricity storage.

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Indianapolis Power & Light Co. and AES leaders cut the ribbon last week on the new IPL Advancion Energy Storage Array Facility located at the Harding Street Generation Station. The Advancion Array is the first grid-scale, battery-based energy storage system to make a footprint in the 15-state Midcontinent Independent System Operation (MISO) region, which will provide affordable and reliable power for our customers. 

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Washington, D.C. — Extreme weather events and natural disasters, from hurricanes to floods and droughts to wildfires, already exact an enormous toll on the reliability of the nation’s electricity grid. This problem promises to worsen as climate change makes these events more frequent and severe. A new issue brief by the Center for American Progress describes how advances in energy storage technology are positioning distributed battery systems to be a feasible option for mitigating service interruptions caused by extreme weather. The brief looks at how the economics of energy storage have changed and how a coordinated resilience effort to collectively strengthen the electric grid with energy storage technology could improve grid reliability.

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