General Electric will demolish a California natural gas-fired plant with 20 years remaining in its useful life, deeming the plant “uneconomical” as inexpensive solar and wind grab a larger share of power in the state.

The Inland Empire Energy Center (IEEC), a 750 megawatt plant, is slated for closure by the end of the year. GE told Reuters, “We have made the decision to shut down operation of the Inland Empire Power Plant, which has been operating below capacity for several years, effective at the end of 2019.”

The complete Inland Empire Energy Center Decommissioning and Demolition Plan has been published on the commission’s website. It notes that IEEC is selling the project site to Nova Power “for the purpose of developing a battery energy storage system (BESS).”

The plant relies on GE’s H-Class turbines, which is now considered a legacy technology. Experts told Reuters the turbine has a number of technical issues. GE noted the plant is now “uneconomical to support further.”

GE’s plant was first approved in 2003 and only came online about a decade ago, according to the California Energy Commission. Now the plant is set to close, only having gone through one-third of its designed useful life.

California is aiming to get 100% of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045, with 50% of its electricity generation to come from renewables by 2025. A report earlier this month noted the state is now putting so much solar power into the electrical grid that there’s a surplus at times. Starting next year, all new homes in California must come with solar panels.

The state’s own goals, combined with falling renewable costs, are putting the squeeze on fossil fuels. As the decommissioning and demolition plan notes:

The Hawaiian Electric Industries, the parent company of Hawaii’s investor-owned utilities, has officially kicked off the second phase of its renewable energy procurement agreement, whose roots date back to 2017.

Of the Hawaiian Islands, phase 2 procurement focuses on Oahu, Maui and Hawaii, with the former two given clear renewable generation and battery storage targets, while Hawaii’s figures are a bit more up-in-the-air.

All of the energy and capacity designations in this request for proposals are made in annual MWh for generation, while the accompanying storage is outlined in MW and MWh. The proposed RFP calls for Oahu to add 1,300,000 MWh of renewable generation, as well as 200 MW of storage (438,000 MWh). For Maui, those numbers are 295,000 MWh generation and 40 MW of energy storage (58,000 MWh). Hawaii will add somewhere between 70,000 and 444,000 MWh generation, with a ballpark of 18 MW of battery storage.

Using average capacity factors for Hawaii, the actual MW figure – how much generation the utilities are seeking – can be extracted. For Oahu, that figure is just over 148 MW. Maui isn expected to be on the receiving end of 50 MW, while Hawaii’s deployment is unclear so far and will be somewhere between 8 and 51 MW.

Another odd piece of this RFP is the storage seems to be more paramount of a goal than the renewable generation. This is supported contextually by the previous mention of energy figures, and by some wording in the RFP.

24M, currently thought to be one of the leaders in developing an advanced form of lithium-ion batteries which promise increased energy density, has struck a deal with Kyocera for initial production of cells for stationary storage applications.

Energy-Storage.news interviewed some of 24M’s leadership team in March this year, when the company, spun out of MIT’s labs by founder Yet-Ming Chiang, claimed to have exceeded an energy density of 350Wh per kilogramme for semi-solid lithium-ion battery cells.

While admitting that the technology is still at the early stages of its commercialisation journey, 24M said then that it is looking to establish a 100MW pilot production plant by the end of this year.

Kyocera, headquartered in Japan’s old capital, Kyoto, and known for its historic production of ceramic goods and latterly high tech products for a range of markets including solar PV, is already an investor in the US start-up. 24M said in a release on Friday that Kyocera is now constructing production facilities for pilot production of cells, aimed at the residential solar-plus-storage market, which is rapidly growing in Kyocera’s home country. The pilot production line is in Osaka, in the west of Japan and home city to many of the country’s battery big-hitters, including Panasonic and Sanyo Maxcell.

“Kyocera considers the unique 24M SemiSolid approach the emerging standard for lithium-ion battery manufacturing. The ability to cost-effectively manufacture advanced lithium-ion batteries can enable Kyocera to expand residential sales throughout Japan,” Kyocera senior executive officer Masahiro Inagaki.

Taking lithium into advanced and long duration territory
In an in-depth interview with this site at the time of that March announcement, 24M’s execs including CEO Rick Feldt said that the ‘Dual Electrolyte’ tech the company has developed could be applied for manufacturing processes for different types of lithium-ion battery, including lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and nickel manganese cobalt (NMC).

Record low clearing prices in the UK’s recently-held T-1 Capacity Market auction have rendered the mechanism unfit for purpose, while meeting its minimum requirements could seem “fatally onerous” for battery storage developers, voices around the energy industry have said.

Last week the T-1 auction concluded, clearing at a record low price of just £0.77/kW. Those economics made it significantly challenging for new generators to compete, and just one new-build battery storage project – Centrica’s 49.99MW Roosecote project – was successful in obtaining a contract.

Quentin Scrimshire, head of energy storage at Kiwi Power, said the latest prices didn’t achieve the mechanism’s purpose, and instead only served to reward larger generators that would already be generating throughout the winter.

“The whole mind-set around the Capacity Market has changed from being a mechanism that would drive investment to just a handout from the government on top of your standard operational case,” Scrimshire said.

It’s not the first time that questions have been asked about the Capacity Market and its ability to meet its objectives. When the T-4 clearing price dropped to £6/kW last year, triggering large quantities of new capacity to exit the auction, industry professionals labelled the mechanism “outdated” and decried de-rating factors which had left it in a “state of flux”.

Low prices a disappointment for clean energy technologies
While the T-1 is indeed a top-up auction – Tom Edwards, senior modeller at Cornwall Insight, said it was ultimately “neither here nor there” for generating plant – the low prices have still been disappointing for clean technologies hoping to compete against dirtier counterparts.

Ameresco has completed the construction of a comprehensive energy resiliency and energy infrastructure project at the United States Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) Parris Island, South Carolina.

The US$91 million project, which required no upfront capital from the Marine Corps depot, features distributed energy systems designed to withstand potential storm and seismic conditions. The distributed generation, energy storage, and secure microgrid controls that Ameresco designed and installed at Parris Island have dramatically enhanced the site’s resilience, giving the installation the capacity to sustain its critical training operations when the local grid is out of commission.

This project, which features an 8 MWh battery energy storage system, will save US$6.9 million in annual utility and operational costs, cut utility energy demand by 75%, and lower water consumption by 25%.

MCRD Parris Island signed off on an energy savings performance contract (ESPC) for this installation, which leverages private capital through a Department of Energy contract vehicle back in 2015 with the competitive selection of Ameresco.

Ameresco then replaced an aging central plant with a 3.5MW combined heat and power (CHP) plant and three diesel generators for backup generation, along with installaing 20,000 solar modules at carport and ground-mount sites that provide 5.5MW of power generation.

Nicole Bulgarino, executive vice president at Ameresco, said: “Resiliency at MCRD Parris Island means providing uninterruptible power in support of critical training operations. Distributed generation systems like the comprehensive solution we have just built there deliver a layered defense against threats to the power supply.

“Ameresco is proud to partner with the USMC to lead by example and demonstrate how a military installation can both reduce energy and enhance resiliency with this unique contract vehicle.”

Researchers have created an ink made of graphene nanosheets, and demonstrated that the ink can be used to print 3-D structures. As the graphene-based ink can be mass-produced in an inexpensive and environmentally friendly manner, the new methods pave the way toward developing a wide variety of printable energy storage devices.

The researchers, led by Jingyu Sun and Zhongfan Liu at Soochow University and the Beijing Graphene Institute, and Ya-yun Li at Shenzhen University, have published a paper on their work in a recent issue of ACS Nano.

“Our work realizes the scalable and green synthesis of nitrogen-doped graphene nanosheets on a salt template by direct chemical vapor deposition,” Sun told Phys.org. “This allows us to further explore thus-derived inks in the field of printable energy storage.”

As the scientists explain, a key goal in graphene research is the mass production of graphene with high quality and at low cost. Energy-storage applications typically require graphene in powder form, but so far production methods have resulted in powders with a large number of structural defects and chemical impurities, as well as nonuniform layer thickness. This has made it difficult to prepare high-quality graphene inks.

In the new paper, the researchers have demonstrated a new method for preparing graphene inks that overcomes these challenges. The method involves growing nitrogen-doped graphene nanosheets over NaCl crystals using direct chemical vapor deposition, which causes molecular fragments of nitrogen and carbon to diffuse on the surface of the NaCl crystals. The researchers chose NaCl due to its natural abundance and low cost, as well as its water solubility. To remove the NaCl, the coated crystals are submerged in water, which causes the NaCl to dissolve and leave behind pure nitrogen-doped graphene cages. In the final step, treating the cages with ultrasound transforms the cages into 2-D nanosheets, each about 5-7 graphite layers thick.

The resulting nitrogen-doped graphene nanosheets have relatively few defects and an ideal size (about 5 micrometers in side length) for printing, as larger flakes can block the nozzle. To demonstrate the nanosheets’ effectiveness, the researchers printed a wide variety of 3-D structures using inks based on the graphene sheets. Among their demonstrations, the researchers used the ink as a conductive additive for an electrode material (vanadium nitride) and used the composite ink to print flexible electrodes for supercapacitors with high power density and good cyclic stability.