Macquarie Capital Korea, a subsidiary of investment firm Macquarie Group, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the county office of Goesan in South Korea to finance a significant solar-plus-storage project, while it has also invested in what is said to be the largest energy storage project in the country.

A company spokesperson confirmed to Energy.Storage.News that the MoU is for a 16MW solar PV project with 35MWh of energy storage capacity in Goesan, North Chungcheong Province, central Korea. This project would supply power to the equivalent of 7,700 homes each year.

Income from the project will be shared with the residents of 100 local households and the project will be handed over to the locals after 25 years.

Macquarie will soon announce the EPC firm for the project.

Separately, Maquarie has also invested in energy storage projects at five of steel manufacturer SeAH Group’s factories in Korea. The overall combined project base of 175MWh will be the largest in Korea, the company claimed.

Notably, South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries is also set to install a 70MWh standalone energy storage system at its own facilities in Changwon, as well as a smaller battery installation co-located with solar PV.

The Macquarie project is expected to save KRW130 billion (US$115 million) in electricity costs for the factories over the next 15 years through peak shaving

LSIS, a smart energy company in Korea, will provide be responsible for design, procurement, construction and operation of the project, while Macquarie finances and develops the plants.

Macquarie Capital Korea chairman John Walker said: “As renewable energy penetration increases, energy storage increasingly becomes a critical part of the modern energy infrastructure. Macquarie is a leading investor in the energy storage sector, having made investments in various markets around the world, and is committed to supporting the Korean government’s policies in improving the efficiency of the Korean electricity infrastructure by constantly developing innovative methods of developing and financing new technologies.”

Macquarie-owned Green Investment Group (GIG) recently acquired PV developer Conergy Asia & Middle East.

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 5, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Maxwell Technologies, Inc.MXWL, -4.01% a leading developer and manufacturer of energy storage and power delivery solutions, today announced a grid energy storage subsystem design-in with Siemens to deliver economical, fast responding, long life grid voltage and frequency support solutions. The new Siemens Static VAR Compensator plus Frequency Stabilizer (SVC PLUS FS) enables ISOs, electric utilities and transmission system operators to have better control of their grids and reduce the risk of blackouts.

The combined effect of the rapid increase in solar and wind electricity generation with the decommissioning of traditional coal and gas-fired power plants runs the risk of increasing momentary grid imbalances due to less inertia in the grid. Power loss caused by these imbalances can result in significant economic damage for electricity consumers, as they may be dropped from the grid during periods of system instability.

The grid system inertia deficit is directly addressed in Siemens’ SVC PLUS FS through the use of ultracapacitor (supercapacitor) energy storage. Maxwell’s Grid Energy Storage Systems are an integral design element in the SVC PLUS FS that provide system inertia in the form of fast, active power injection, which bridges the time gap between grid disruption and the activation of secondary power reserves. The SVC PLUS FS can feed the reactive power needed for stable grid operation in less than 50 milliseconds. At the same time, up to 200 megawatts of electric power stored in the ultracapacitors can be transferred to the grid.

Due to their rapid response time at high power levels, long lifetime, and minimal maintenance, Maxwell ultracapacitors were selected as the energy storage asset of choice to provide grid frequency and voltage support. Moreover, due to the high power density of the ultracapacitor subsystem, the SVC PLUS FS takes up about two-thirds less space than a comparable battery storage solution at the reference power of 50 megawatts.

“Through a rigorous evaluation of various energy storage technologies and manufacturers, it became clear that Maxwell was the best partner for integration in the SVC PLUS FS solution based upon their capability to design and engineer grid-scale systems utilizing their field-proven commercial supercapacitor technology,” said Alexander Rentschler, head of product lifecycle management for transmission solutions at Siemens. “We look forward to deploying SVC PLUS FS, enabled by Maxwell’s Grid Energy Storage Systems, that will provide grid operators with an efficient and future-proofed solution to maintain grid power stability and enable more renewable power generation.”

The California legislature last week approved SB 700, which extends funding for the Self Generation Incentive Program (SGIP), the state’s chief vehicle for expanding behind-the-meter energy storage.

While solar and storage advocates cheered the bill’s passage for the positive impacts it will have on deployment, the bill also seeks to bring the SGIP more in line with the state’s greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals.

The state has acted as a leader in fighting climate change and reducing GHG emissions by setting a 100% renewable portfolio standard and increasing electric vehicles on the road. GHG reduction is one of the statutory goals of SGIP.

A key question when it comes to climate impacts is whether storage batteries are being charged by clean energy and discharged during times of high fossil fuel use.

Any changes are likely to become more apparent as the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) updates the regulations for SB 700. The changes also reflect some of the challenges facing the storage industry in California.

GHG targets unmet

Every year, the CPUC issues a report card on the SGIP program. The current report, released in November 2017 to reflect 2016 performance, found that while SGIP is generally helping to reduce system peak demand and customer bills, the program’s GHG reduction targets are not being met.

In theory, charging a storage device during low-price periods and discharging during high-price periods saves customers money. Using energy storage to offset peak-hour generation was assumed to reduce GHG emissions. However, the report found that during 2016, the non-residential storage projects analyzed increased GHG emissions by 726 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

To reach the GHG goals, SGIP storage projects must charge during cleaner grid hours and discharge during dirtier grid hours, or peak marginal GHG emissions hours. That doesn’t always happen.

The report said that the 2016 GHG shortfall was principally due to “rate designs that are misaligned with peak marginal GHG hours, which prevent customers from receiving signals that would lead to GHG reductions.”

Demand for residential energy-storage is surging in the U.S., with more capacity installed in the second quarter than in all of 2017.

Consumers installed home batteries with 57.5 megawatt-hours of storage capacity last quarter, according to a report Wednesday from the Energy Storage Association and Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables. That’s more than the 39.8 megawatt-hours added during all of last year. It was also the first time residential storage exceeded big utility-scale projects, which totaled 51 megawatt-hours for the quarter.

Declining costs are helping drive the surge in energy storage, along with wider availability of solar-plus-storage products. At the same time, consumers are showing more interest in generating and using their own power, and utilities are starting to impose time-of-use rates with prices that vary depending on when electricity is consumed. California will soon require solar atop almost all new homes, which should encourage greater battery adoption.

The residential market is “moving beyond simply being a cool toy and into something that’s being widely deployed and used by people across the country,” said Brett Simon, a senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, in an interview.

Residential installations were concentrated in California and Hawaii, which both have ambitious clean-power targets.

More growth is coming. Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables expects residential storage installations to almost triple in 2019 from this year.

During the past couple of years at renewable energy conferences and industry events, the conversation regarding battery energy storage systems has focused on the prevailing notion that energy storage, from an emerging technology standpoint, is where traditional solar was roughly eight to 10 years ago.

In the utility-scale context, despite the increasing deployment of battery energy storage systems, some utilities are still hesitant to purchase energy storage systems because the costs and technology are still evolving. From a contractual standpoint, utility-scale battery energy storage system transactions present unique legal issues and require special analysis of traditional contract provisions.

Here are the top five legal issues to consider when contracting for utility-scale energy storage:

1. Uptime Guarantee
2. Intellectual Property
3. Security for Payment and Performance
4. Force Majeure and Changes in Law
5. Indemnity and Insurance

Uptime Guarantee

A critical performance component of a battery energy storage system is the guarantee the vendor and/or manufacturer is willing to provide the purchasing utility regarding the amount of time (usually reflected as a percentage and calculated monthly or annually) the system will be fully operational (i.e., the system’s “uptime” or performance assurance).

From a contractual standpoint, several critical issues regarding uptime guarantees must be considered and negotiated:

• How to define uptime, which requires, among other things, the parties’ agreement on
  the scheduled maintenance parameters for the system because scheduled maintenance
  is not counted as downtime for purposes of calculating the system’s uptime;
• How to define and quantify damages from a breach of the system’s uptime guarantee.
  In states such as Texas, where utilities can generate significant revenue from energy
  storage systems by performing frequency regulation, damages from a breach of the
  uptime guarantee are typically tied to the revenue lost by the utility during the time
  the system was down beyond the uptime guarantee;
• The vendor’s and/or manufacturer’s monetary liability caps as a result of revenue lost
  by the purchasing utility due to breaches of the uptime guarantee; and
• Contingencies of the uptime guarantee, such as the requirement that the vendor and/or manufacturer perform operation and maintenance services on the system.

US utilities deployed more than 520MWh of energy storage on their networks in 2017, bringing the country’s cumulative installed capacity of grid-connected energy storage systems to over 1GWh, trade organisation Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) has found.

By the end of 2017, 922.8MW / 1293.6MWh of grid-connected storage capacity was on US networks across 5,167 systems. Throughout 2017, utilities alone interconnected 216.7MW / 523.9MWh to the grid, amounting to 2,588 systems. Surveying 137 utilities, SEPA said 13.3MW / 29.3MWh of residential systems were added during the year, with 59MW / 139.7MWh of non-residential and 144.4MW / 354.9MWh of utility-supply systems.

SEPA, which considers its remit to be that of helping utilities to deploy clean and smart distributed energy solutions, publishes regular ‘Top 10’ lists ranking utilities in the US by the amount of solar deployed in their respective services areas, has this time out issued a 52-page report which can be found on the organisation’s website. As well as including rankings of energy storage utility deployment figures, both in watts and watts-per-customer, the report features in-depth analysis of the national picture state-by-state as well as at national or federal level.

From the top-down perspective, it appears durations of storage are increasing. Overall deployments in megawatts across the US rose by 5% from 2016 to 2017, while the corresponding megawatt-hour figure rose by 104%.

The two ‘Top 10’ tables for utility deployments are as follows:

China is looking to boost its energy storage market and projects as it adds growing renewable power capacities. At the end of last year, the Chinese authorities issued a unified nationwide policy to boost the energy storage industry that has been lagging behind other countries despite the fact that China is leading global investments in renewable energy.

Also thanks to the central government policy boost, and to some regional storage policies, China added nearly as much battery storage capacity in  the first half of 2018 as it had in total at the end of 2017, according to  data by the China Energy Storage Alliance (CNESA).

Between January and June, new energy storage projects of various scale and capacity were announced in the provinces Jiangsu, Henan, Qinghai, and Guangdong. Those projects—including planned, under construction, or already operational—total 340.5 MW. That’s almost as much as the entire Chinese capacity that was operational as of the end of last year—389.4 MW.

So far this year, the newly operational capacity has already surged by 281 percent compared to the entire new capacity for the whole of 2017, the Chinese Alliance says.

“If the entirety of this new capacity begins operation on schedule, China’s domestic energy storage market will see an amount of growth that will make 2018 one of the most significant years yet for the industry,” CNESA said.

The growth looks impressive, but compared to China’s population, territory, and renewable installations, 340.5 MW is not that big of a figure and doesn’t include storage technology for electric vehicles, of which China built 40 GWh worth of batteries in 2017, Quartz reports.

Related: Will Saudi Arabia’s Geopolitical Strategy Backfire?

In energy storage, China hasn’t been a big market player and developer, but according to a GTM Research report on global storage deployments, in five years China could surpass almost everyone except for the United States.

“It’s a bit surprising that China hasn’t adopted storage any faster, because it has all the right ingredients to be a major storage market,” Ravi Manghani, energy storage director at GTM Research, said.

The energy storage sector has been growing robustly, despite some concerns about the global supply chain for one key material, lithium. Well, that question could soon be moot. The California-based startup Lilac Solutions has just received a major financial boost for an innovative, low-impact method for extracting lithium from abundant brines around the globe.

Diversifying the global supply chain could help alleviate one source of anxiety for US energy policymakers. Currently, the top lithium producers are concentrated in a relatively small number of countries overseas, and uncertainty over President* Trump’s trade policy has layered another layer of complexity onto an already fraught situation.

Energy Storage And Lithium

For those of you new to the topic, lithium-ion technology is the gold standard for energy storage today. A more diverse field of options is beginning to emerge, but for now lithium is powering everything from smart phones and electric vehicles, on up to utility-scale batteries for grid use.

Though the reserves are mostly concentrated in just a few countries, lithium is relatively abundant. The primary source is salt brine, and the conventional extraction process is based on evaporation.

Last week, Lilac Solutions was among three startups selected for investment by the non-profit organization PRIME Coalition, which focuses on a high tech approach to manage climate change.

The company’s new technology addresses a couple of key issues involved in conventional lithium extraction. Lilac describes the problem in a nutshell:

Following news of SB100, legislation that would set California on a path to 100% renewables by 2045, the state is also on the brink of setting up a rebate programme for energy storage equipment sales.

Senate Bill 700 (SB700), authored by Senator Scott Wiener, would extend the state’s feted SGIP (Self-generation incentive programme) policy to 2024 and make more provisions to include energy storage. SGIP supports the deployment of solar, wind turbines, microturbines, fuel cells, energy storage and other distributed energy technologies by utility customers.

The rebate for energy storage equipment had been proposed some time ago. Last summer, Energy-Storage.news reported in June that the policy’s introduction appeared imminent, designed for mitigating the effects of California’s famous ‘duck curve’ of solar production versus load demand. Then, in July, the passing of the bill appeared to stumble, taken off the voting agenda at a California Assembly meeting.

At the time, analyst Brett Simon of GTM Research (now Wood Mackenzie), said it “spoke volumes” that the bill was excluded from the vote rather than “struck down” completely. Simon said that it was likely SB700 was being put to one side as California lawmakers sought to determine the future of the SGIP programme first before committing to new policy directions.

Yesterday, the California Storage + Solar Association trade group applauded as SB700 was passed by the California Assembly with a 57-18 final vote after passing the Senate with 25 votes to 13. It will now go to the attention of Governor Jerry Brown for his approval. The association said the Assembly’s vote was a “broad, bipartisan victory for local clean energy”, likening it to the start of 2006’s California ‘Million solar roofs’ programme.