The national Renewable Energy Association has taken aim at a British government proposal to hike up tax rates attached to some energy saving equipment purchases, including solar and battery storage.

A consultation launched by the government department responsible for tax, HM Revenue & Customs closed late last week, proposing an increase in the VAT (value-added tax, the UK’s sales tax mechanism) attached to these energy saving materials from 5% to 20%, essentially eliminating a discount that had been applied to those products.

It is not the first time that solar PV has been threatened with a higher rate of VAT. In 2015 the European Court of Justice ruled that the UK’s application of a discounted rate was illegal and, despite attempting to fight it, the government eventually conceded that the increase could not be averted.

An increase to 20% – the default rate of VAT for goods and services – was initially expected in the 2016 Budget. However HMRC’s consultation response was absent, and later it emerged that a cross-party group of MPs had voiced their concerns over the plans.

Just a few weeks later, the ECJ published its VAT action plan with no comment on the solar decision, instead electing to “modernise and reboot” Europe’s taxation framework.

Since then the government has remained coy, however the storage market secured a partial victory in late 2017 when HMRC said that domestic battery storage systems could also enjoy the 5% VAT rate as long as they were installed alongside solar systems.

The new consultation seeks to amend the discounted rate so that a full 20% rate of VAT is applied to the machinery costs should they be above 60% of a total installation fee. Labour costs will still benefit from the reduce rate.

There is also a carve out for homeowners who are aged 60 or above and those receiving particular benefits, and housing associations will also be eligible for the reduced rate still. The new rates are proposed to come into effect from 1 October 2019.

The race to build Europe’s first lithium-ion energy storage system ‘Gigafactory’ could be won by Tesvolt, as the German manufacturer announced a “multimillion-euro investment” in production lines this week.

Promising fully carbon neutral production of the company’s battery energy storage systems, which have been used both on and off-grid in more than 1,000 projects already, Tesvolt’s factory will be “fully supplied by solar energy”, the company claims.

This will include a 200kWp PV system to power offices and system production lines, paired with a 350kWh Tesvolt energy storage system. Heat pumps using a natural refrigerant will mean the facilities’ heating also comes from solar. Mechanical engineering company teamtechnik will fit out the factory’s semi-automated production line. The facility will have an annual production capacity of over 1GWh when completed.

Tesvolt’s battery systems were recently installed at Britain’s largest subsidy-free solar farm to date, with the energy storage thought to be a key part of the project’s business plan. Similarly, Tesvolt said it is “financing its multi-million Euro investment in the gigafactory without any outside funding”, although it is accepting a small amount of EU support worth 10% of the cost.

The company did not give a timeline for completion of the production lines, although it says 12,000 sqm of floor space will be ready next month and that by the final phase of construction the production space will total 20,000sqm. Tesvolt expects employee numbers to roughly double by then from today’s workforce of 60. As with the majority of its competitors, Tesvolt does not make its own battery cells and has sourced nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) cells from Samsung SDI in the past.

“The world market for stationary energy storage systems has already reached a total capacity of 16GWh. Europeans are calling for an end to harmful coal-fired power plants and diesel scandals. They want a future free of environmental disasters. We want the gigafactory to be our contribution to reaching this goal, making clean and affordable energy possible anywhere in the world,” Tesvolt co-founder and CEO Daniel Hannemann said.

Utility Arizona Public Service reaffirmed its commitment to grid batteries after a fire at one such facility injured four first responders.

The April 19 explosion at the McMicken facility prompted Arizona’s largest utility to power down its remaining energy storage plants, and raised questions about the future of this rapidly growing grid technology. APS committed in February to a considerable escalation of energy storage installations, to capture more solar power during the day and make it available at night.

The investigation to determine the cause of the fire is still underway, but APS is not giving up on those plans for battery expansion, President Jeff Guldner told Arizona regulators last week.

“As you know, we have moved forward and made an announcement as to work that we intend to pursue on battery storage,” Guldner said. “This hasn’t changed our determination to move forward on that.”

In February APS announced plans to deploy 850 megawatts of battery storage by 2025, the single largest storage procurement from a utility to date.

Indeed, the investigation will provide valuable information to ensure safe practices as that expansion proceeds, locally and nationally. “This is important because battery technology is such an important future component to the operation of the grid,” Guldner noted.

The full remarks, made at the April 23 meeting of the Arizona Corporation Commission, are visible on a public video recording (starting around 2:46:00).

The ACC similarly signaled that it sees batteries playing a larger role in the future of the state’s grid.

During the hearing, Commissioner Boyd Dunn made that point explicitly.

“I agree with your comment that batteries are our future,” he said. “Wherever you go, that’s going to be the talk.”

Pika, a manufacturer of home energy storage systems headquartered in Maine, US, has been bought up by power generation equipment manufacturer Generac.

The company makes a line of ‘smart’ battery storage products, including the Coral smart battery, an ‘entry-level’ system for households scalable up to 8kW. The system is based on AGM (absorbent glass mat) lead-acid battery technology and promises to aid integration of solar and provide backup power in the event of outages.

The company also makes energy storage systems using Panasonic’s batteries, with Pika’s inverters showcased at last year’s Solar Power International in California in September, paired with Panasonic equipment. Pika’s Harbor ‘smart battery’ can go up to 10kW / 17kWh using the Japanese company’s lithium-ion battery modules.

The company has been marketing backup power products to regions including Puerto Rico recently, where, in the wake of recent disasters and the territory’s island geography, backup power is considered a big value-add feature for energy storage systems.

Generac, in the power solutions business since 1959 when it first started making and selling residential backup generators, makes a wide range of power products up to industrial scale and transfer switching and backup power equipment for applications up to 2MW.

Generac announced last week that with the acquisition of Pika, Generac has “entered the home energy storage market”. A Generac press release said that Pika has expertise in developing power electronics, software and controls for “smart energy storage and management”, while the integrated nature of the solutions help reduce costs and minimise disruption to the grid. The acquisition closed on 26 April. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Energy-Storage.news approached Pika for comment but did not receive a reply at time of going to press. Ben Polito’ Pika’s CEO and co-founder was quoted by the Generac release as saying that: “Generac is dedicated to providing people with innovative and forward-thinking solutions to power their homes and businesses. Pika energy storage technology, combined with Generac’s distribution strength and demand creation capabilities, will make this solution immediately available to more users.”

The battle between renewable energy and fossil fuel is already at a boiling point, but that’s nothing compared to the steaming hot mosh pit of internecine warfare going on between coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy. In the latest development on that score, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry went on a bomb-throwing mission at the EarthX 2019 conference in Dallas, Texas last week.

Wait — What Is EarthX?
If you’ve never heard of EarthX before, join the club. Here’s the pitch:

We are an international, nonprofit environmental forum whose purpose is to educate and inspire people to action towards a more sustainable future. We assemble and connect citizens, educators, students, businesses, nonprofits, and global leaders to explore sustainable solutions for today’s most pressing challenges.

As for where they are coming from, the person behind EarthX is Trammell S. Crow, founder of Earth Day in Texas. EarthX lists Tetrapak, Oncor, and Santander as main sponsors.

Occidental Petroleum also weighs in along with Green Spring Technologies (think hemp, not electricity) and other local Dallas companies.

A Quick Digression Over To Occidental
Wait — Occidental?! Didn’t huge fan of wind power and mega mogul Warren Buffett just lay down a cool $10 billion to juice Occidental’s takeover of Andarko — even though Chevron already has dibs?

Oh yes he did! If anybody can guess what that is all about, drop us a note in the comment thread. Buffett is asking for a good slice of the shareholder pie, which could mean that Occidental-Andarko will finally join the ranks of legacy oil and gas companies diversifying into renewables.

On the other hand, nah. We’re thinking natural gas power plants and petrochemicals, which should give ExxonMobil the willies, but that’s just a wild guess.

Where Were We? Oh Right — Coal, Meet Bus
With all this in mind, let’s take a look at what Secretary Perry said at EarthX. In a speech on April 25, he basically made the case that the US energy strategy for decarbonization should be this:

Now the first step is to take energy that is free of emissions…and generate more of it.

Okay, so that excludes coal and includes renewables, except for that intermittent thing (don’t tell Perry about wind and solar complementarity because he doesn’t think that’s a thing yet).

The UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) has conducted testing of an advanced energy storage system in collaboration with the US Navy.

The system is known as the Flywheel Energy Storage System (FESS) and is based on Le Mans motor-sport technologies.

FESS has been developed under collaboration between GKN and Dstl to demonstrate an energy storage option for the Royal Navy’s most advanced ships. The new technology was originally developed by the Williams F1 team.

Testing of the FESS was performed at both UK and US facilities under an agreement called Advanced Electric Power and Propulsion Project Arrangement (AEP3).

To perform testing, the UK’s Dstl and DE&S teamed up with the US NAVSEA’s Electric Ship Office and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

The testing in the US was also supported by US Coalition Warfare Program (CWP) funding.

FESS uses high-speed and lightweight flywheels to provide high-power electrical pulses.

It is intended to serve the Royal Navy’s future systems such as Dragonfire Laser Directed Energy Weapon (LDEW) and help reduce the impact of these systems to the rest of the ship.

In addition, the technology will remove safety concerns related to battery-based systems.

As part of the collaborative programme, the US and UK used a power hardware-in-the-loop (PHIL) approach.

The PHIL approach involved the integration of a ‘real’ FESS into a virtual ship power system that simulated a Royal Navy vessel operating in real-time.

This approach can be used to develop the hardware and de-risk its integration into a real ship in a cost-effective way.

Following the US trials, the FESS was delivered to the UK and tested at the Power Networks Demonstration Centre (PNDC) in Scotland.

Two Arkansas utilities are in a race to offer the state’s first solar energy facility featuring an onsite battery for energy storage, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and saving Arkansans money.

Ozarks Electric Cooperative (OEC), in a trilateral agreement with Today’s Power, Inc. (TPI) and the city of Fayetteville, broke ground in March on two solar power systems with a combined 12-megawatts of solar generation and a total of 24-megawatt hours of energy. Concurrently, Entergy Arkansas, in partnership with NextEra, announced plans in March to build a 100-megawatt solar energy facility near Searcy that will be capable of storing up to 30-megawatt hours of electricity.

Ozarks Electric Cooperative joins forces with Today’s Power Inc., on Fayetteville’s Energy Action Plan

“Ozarks Electric Cooperative is the first utility in the Mid-South to lead the charge on energy storage in partnership with the City of Fayetteville, who has accomplished 72 percent of their renewable energy goals with this project,” TPI spokesperson Jennah Denney says, adding that TPI is currently deploying the only energy storage system in the Mid-South.

Kris Williams, director of Energy Services at Ozarks Electric Cooperative, says the project is expected to be completed in late June of 2019.

Located at the east and west wastewater treatment facilities in Fayetteville and spanning a total of 70 acres, each system will utilize an onsite battery charged through solar panels during the day and offloaded during peak evening hours.

“Batteries with their increasing capacities and decreasing prices take the intermittency out of renewable energy,” Denney says. “Batteries also enable us to continue using green solar energy into the night, long after the sun has set.”

Williams says the batteries are each about the size of a school bus and will be kept in structures separate from the solar panels to ensure the appropriate environmental conditions to preserve the life of the batteries.

The power grid is a pretty complex system. Electricity is generally produced on an as-needed basis. Generators ramp up and down based on demand. However, energy storage systems are beginning to change how demands are being met.

Hydro Is Storage
Energy storage isn’t a new concept. In fact, pumped-storage hydro systems have been around since the late 1800s. According to the Department of Energy (DOE), there was 23.6 GW of operational pumped-storage capacity in the U.S. in June 2018, which accounted for 94% of the country’s energy storage. Furthermore, some experts have argued that all hydropower is a form of energy storage.

“Our water reservoir[s] are our batteries,” Eric Martel, president and CEO of Hydro-Quebec, said in March during a panel session at the BloombergNEF (BNEF) Summit in New York. Hydro-Quebec is a Canadian public utility that operates some 60 hydroelectric generating stations. Martel said Hydro-Quebec’s reservoirs are so large that the utility “can store 175 TWh, which is more than enough to provide the whole electricity for the New York state for a year and a half almost.”

Pumped-storage hydro systems function kind of like a bank. Owners can make deposits, that is, use electricity to pump water into a reservoir when power is abundant and the price is cheap. Then, they can make withdrawals by reversing the operation and generating power when electricity prices increase, thus pocketing the price difference. There is some lost energy along the way, because the systems are not 100% efficient, but as long as the price difference more than makes up for the losses, the economics work.

Besides arbitrage, energy storage can also help defer generation, transmission, and distribution capacity additions; improve grid flexibility, reliability, and resiliency; provide ancillary services; stabilize power quality; minimize renewable energy curtailments; and assist end-users in managing energy costs.

“If we use the hydro capacity to store energy and to firm the production of other resources, then we are getting to power which is as-consumed power, no longer as-produced,” Grzegorz Górski, managing director of ENGIE’s Centralized Generation Métier, said at the BNEF event.

By concluding another solicitation for energy storage resources, SCE continues its run as one of the country’s leading utilities in storage deployment. SCE’s vision to add 30 GW of additional renewable capacity to California’s electric grid by 2030 makes energy storage increasingly important.

The seven new projects, which remain subject to California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approval, further the utility’s clean energy goals.

“Unlike other solicitations to increase the generation capacity of the overall electric system, this solicitation specifically sought to meet local needs in the Moorpark area and address electrical energy storage needs related to restricted natural gas operations at Southern California Gas Company’s Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Field,” Colin Cushnie, vice president of energy procurement and management at SEC, said in a statement.

SCE’s Aliso Canyon Energy Storage 2 request for offers and the Local Capacity requirements request for proposal targeted clean energy resources connecting through the Santa Clara and Goleta substations to address local reliability needs, the company said.

The latest SCE procurement comes only months after Pacific Gas & Electric received the CPUC’s approval for four energy storage projects totaling 567.5 MW / 2,270 MWh in capacity.

Energy storage has helped decrease California’s reliance on gas for years, particularly since 2016, when regulators ordered accelerated battery procurements to counteract the closure of a natural gas storage facility outside Los Angeles.

Utilities across the country are increasingly turning to energy storage. The technology is vital as it turns power generated by non-dispatchable energy sources, such as wind and solar, into dispatchable ones, improving grid reliability and allowing the integration of even more renewable capacity.

However, there are some concerns regarding the safety of large-scale energy storage facilities, in particular those using lithium-ion batteries.

A recent explosion at an Arizona Public Service (APS) facility that sent four fire fighters to the hospital highlighted those concerns, though the exact cause of the accident remains under investigation.

“The question of how you manage these things safely, when you’ve got thousands of these cells in close proximity, that’s still a work in progress,” Donald Sadoway, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert in battery technology, told Utility Dive.

APS, the largest investor-owned utility in Arizona, has been a leader in the procurement of energy storage. In February, the utility announced that it will add 850 MW of battery storage and at least 100 MW of solar generation by 2025. Despite the incident at its McMicken facility, the utility plans to follow through with its plans.

“As far as we are concerned, we know that energy storage, including batteries, is vital to a clean energy future. We will continue with our plans to add clean energy projects to our system,” Lily Quezada, APS spokesperson, said. “[It] is a breakthrough technology that is solving important issues and challenges. We are still committed to our plans.”

Concerns in the industry
The fire at its storage facility in Surprise, Arizona was not the first such incident for APS. Back in 2012, a 1.5-MW system near Flagstaff, Arizona also caught fire. The utility said it took several key design lessons from the 2012 fire, including improving air ventilation between cabinets, incorporating a 24/7 monitoring system and the ability to send remote alarms.