FlexGen, an energy storage integrator, announced that Vistra Energy, an integrated power company, awarded a contract to design and integrate a 10-MW/42-MWh FlexGen energy storage system at the Upton 2 solar power plant in Texas.

When completed in late 2018, the energy storage system, using FlexGen’s Hybrid OS software, will allow Vistra to store inexpensive solar energy generated during the day and deliver it to customers during evening hours when demand is greatest, improving grid reliability.

The lithium-ion energy storage project at Upton 2 will be the largest in Texas, and the seventh largest in the United States.

“Vistra is leading our country’s transformation toward a reliable, low cost, sustainable energy mix and we’re thrilled to be supporting its storage strategy,” said Josh Prueher, FlexGen CEO. “The power grid of the future will see energy storage integrated on site with solar, wind, and gas generation, and the Upton solar plus storage project is a trailblazing example.”

FlexGen, backed by Altira Group, General Electric and Caterpillar, designs and delivers energy storage solutions to utilities, power companies and industrial customers worldwide. FlexGen products combine proprietary software, advanced energy storage and power conversion technologies to improve cost, reliability, quality, safety and sustainability of electrical power systems.

In order to combat the devastating effects of climate change and ensure a clean future for coming generations, massive investments and research are being undertaken in renewable energy solutions. Arguably, numerous advances have been made in solar and wind power – but these systems have a major drawback: they are most effectively used when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

This brings us to the biggest challenge the sector has to tackle: effective ways to store that energy for longer, so it can be used when the sun and wind are not available. Mass-scale energy storage does exist, but it is dominated by just one technology: pumped hydro, where excess electricity is used to pump water into a reservoir, and that stored water is in turn used to run turbines to generate extra power when needed. There are other technologies, such as batteries, electrochemical storage, etc., but these make up a small percentage of total capacity (less than 5% of the total, according to policy group REN21).

This gap hasn’t gone unnoticed: some of the biggest companies and several top investors are funneling money into research on mass-scale energy storage. And this is a market that will continue to grow as renewable energy as well as battery costs are set to drop further in coming years.

Powering the world

Growing concerns about dangerous levels of vehicular pollution are necessitating a global move to encourage less polluting forms of private and public transport, giving a major boost to electric vehicle technology—which depends massively on batteries. This in turn has boosted research and sales of energy storage systems.

But it’s not just cars that will need better and more effective storage. Residential, commercial and industrial establishments also have an urgent need for better storage, thus providing another driver to the sector.

To this end, many countries around the world have already seen major growth in the energy storage systems market. Key regions are Asia Pacific, North America, Europe and the Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific retains the biggest share, with China’s potential as a battery manufacturing hub being the prime driver of growth.

Daimler, through its subsidiary Mercedes-Benz Energy and with partners, is turning a coal power plant into a large energy storage facility using over a thousand modules from its electric car battery packs.

Like Tesla and its ‘Tesla Energy’ division, Mercedes-Benz is leveraging its experience with battery packs for electric cars into making stationary energy storage projects.

They created a ‘Mercedes-Benz Energy’ subsidiary and launched several projects.

One of them was a residential battery pack to compete with Tesla’s Powerwall.

Earlier this year, the company killed the project after admitting that their product was too expensive and overengineered for its application.

While they got out of the residential market, they are still going strong with bigger-scale projects.

Their latest project was unveiled today and it consists of a 8.96 MW/9.8 MWh project using a total of 1,920 battery modules installed in Elverlingsen on the site of the former coal-fired power station that was built in 1912 and recently shut down – pictured above.

Daimler said about the site of the project:

“The large storage plant is therefore a symbol for the transformation in the storage and use of energy – away from fossil electricity grid supply and towards a sustainable extension of the e-mobility value chain that reduces CO₂.”

The battery modules would have normally found their ways into about 600 third generation electric smarts.

The project is going to be used for primary balancing power on the German grid, which has added a significant amount of renewable energy in recent years.

Across the country, increased energy storage deployments are being spurred by customers looking to gain more control over their energy bills and utilities aiming to build resilience and flexibility into their grid operations.

Grid flexibility has always been important, but its significance continues to grow as more and more variable generation is added to the grid — primarily in the form of wind and solar.

Storage acts as a buffer to absorb and offset the changing energy supply and demand. As a result, 431 MWh of energy storage was installed in the U.S. in 2017, and nearly three times that amount (1,233 MWh) is expected in 2018, according to GTM.

Energy storage has arrived. It’s gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have for utilities that are integrating renewables on the grid. For utilities navigating how to integrate storage into their planning, here are a few things to consider.

1. Look for grid congestion

In some parts of the grid, transmission capacity has not kept pace with growing end-user demand due to an increase in renewables and distributed energy resources. Strategically placing storage along demand-strained transmission or distribution systems can not only improve performance of these systems, but also help delay or even avoid costly upgrades.

Think of it this way — to add more capacity to a transmission system often requires a full replacement of wires and transformers to deliver more power to a node on the transmission or distribution (T&D) system. Energy storage has the ability of clipping the peak demand on that system, shown in the figure below as “overload,” allowing the existing transmission and distribution system to be used.

For example, Arizona Public Service installed a 2 MW, 8 MWh battery arrayinstead of rebuilding 20 miles of transmission and distribution lines last year. The energy storage project will delay transmission investments for three to six years and has been deemed “very, very cost-effective.”

Vistra, which emerged from the bankruptcy of Energy Future Holdings and recently completed the acquisition of Dynegy, said last year that it will close 4.2 GW of Texas coal capacity. Despite that, the company has said it has no plans to build new plants and will instead look to optimize its remaining fleet.

At a June 12 analyst meeting, Morgan said he is “happy with what we have in conventional generation.”

The Upton 2 battery project is expected online in the fourth quarter of this year to soak up renewable energy that would have been wasted.

“With batteries, some of this extra generation will be captured and discharged at peak times,” the company explained in a presentation. “Batteries can also be charged from [the] grid at low power prices (i.e., at night) and discharged in the morning.”

The project should have attractive returns because of its eligibility for the Investment Tax Credit and bonus depreciation, its ability to use excess solar generation, and energy arbitrage opportunities, Vistra told analysts.

In the near term, batteries are “most likely to threaten investment in new peaking plants … short duration storage may allow peaking plants to provide non-spinning reserves,” Vistra noted in its presentation.

A GTM Research report released in March concluded a third of new gas peaker capacity will be at risk from four-hour energy storage by 2027. The report said 20 GW of new peaking capacity are forecast to come online by 2027.

The founder and CEO of Off Grid Energy has stressed the importance of battery storage and smart charging systems as the take up of electric vehicles (EVs) increases.

According to Danny Jones, the power demand from charging electric vehicles is too great for the already buckling London power grid.

Earlier this year, UPS – in conjunction with UK Power Networks Services – installed Off Grid’s UBESS system which had the task of reinforcing the local grid using battery storage to allow the powering up of the company’s fleet of EV delivery vehicles from the current limit of 65 to all 170 vehicles at its Camden depot.

Jones said: “The primary issue with the Camden installation was that the incoming grid supply was insufficient to support the additional power demands of the new fleet of EVs. The cost of re-enforcing the grid at the substation jeopardised the business case for full electrification of the fleet.”

Jones says that Issues such as these are not exclusive to UPS – EV applications are demanding more power and they need it now. Logistics operations and bus companies are looking to electrify their fleets to help in the fight against air pollution and climate change but are often held back by a lack of grid capacity.

“At Off Grid, we have the ability to install and have energy storage solutions up and running in a matter of weeks and bring the benefits of battery storage to the fore,” added Jones. “The benefits of deploying these systems are manifold and are absolutely necessary to prevent a delay in EV deployment because of the cost and lead-in times to reinforce the electricity network at substations, not to mention they can start working right away with minimal installation time needed.”

The UBESS battery storage solution from Off Grid can perform other capabilities over and above the primary function of enabling the introduction and maintenance of the EVs.  For example, when the depot does not need the power, the unit has the ability to provide energy back to the grid for DSR (demand side response) which is a monetizable service for the electricity network operator.

“Battery storage and smart charging systems like UPS Camden are already being adopted in other industries such as bus companies, materials handling corporations, multiple occupancy buildings as well as the car rental sector. Rapidly deployable smart-charging and storage systems are an absolute necessity for cities to reap the benefits of EVs,” concluded Jones.

A crew of battle-tested cleantech veterans raised serious cash to solve the thorniest problem in clean energy.

As wind and solar power supply more and more of the grid’s electricity, seasonal swings in production become a bigger obstacle. A low- or no-carbon electricity system needs a way to dispatch clean energy on demand, even when wind and solar aren’t producing at their peaks.

Four-hour lithium-ion batteries can help on a given day, but energy storage for weeks or months has yet to arrive at scale.

Into the arena steps Form Energy, a new startup whose founders hope for commercialization not in a couple of years, but in the next decade.

More surprising, they’ve secured $9 million in Series A funding from investors who are happy to wait that long. The funders include both a major oil company and an international consortium dedicated to stopping climate change.

“Renewables have already gotten cheap,” said co-founder Ted Wiley, who worked at saltwater battery company Aquion prior to its bankruptcy. “They are cheaper than thermal generation. In order to foster a change, they need to be just as dependable and just as reliable as the alternative. Only long-duration storage can make that happen.”

It’s hard to overstate just how difficult it will be to deliver.

The members of Form will have to make up the playbook as they go along. The founders, though, have a clear-eyed view of the immense risks. They’ve systematically identified materials that they think can work, and they have a strategy for proving them out.

Wiley and Mateo Jaramillo, who built the energy storage business at Tesla, detailed their plans in an exclusive interview with Greentech Media, describing the pathway to weeks- and months-long energy storage and how it would reorient the entirety of the grid.

The team

Form Energy tackles its improbable mission with a team of founders who have already made their mark on the storage industry, and learned from its most notable failures.

There’s Jaramillo, the former theology student who built the world’s most recognizable stationary storage brand at Tesla before stepping away in late 2016. Soon after, he started work on the unsolved long-duration storage problem with a venture he called Verse Energy.

A small investor-owned utility in New Hampshire may be on the verge of regulatory approval for one of the most ambitious U.S. tests yet of utility-owned, customer-sited battery energy storage systems.

In the process, regulators and stakeholders of the DE 17-189 proceeding are wrestling with a question of vital interest to the rest of the 3,000-plus U.S. utilities: Should a utility own customer-sited storage or is it a distributed energy resource (DER) that should be left to private sector providers?

Utilities have already seen the benefits that large-scale battery energy storage offers in shaving peak demand, providing grid services, and making systems more flexible. There is a clear opportunity to use customer-sited battery storage in the same way. But the question of how far utilities can intrude into markets so far served by private sector vendors must first be answered.

Vermont goes first

The only major U.S. utility-owned, behind-the-meter (BTM) battery storage is the Green Mountain Power (GMP) pilot project, according to GTM Research Energy Storage Analyst Brett Simon. GMP, the dominant Vermont electricity provider, is installing 2,000 behind-the-meter Tesla Powerwalls that will provide dispatchable energy and other grid services to New England’s wholesale electricity markets. Customers pay a one-time $1,300 fee or a monthly $15 fee to participate.

New Hampshire’s Liberty Utilities wants state regulators to approve a pilot project of 1,000 utility-owned Tesla Powerwalls. They would be provided to customers for a one-time $1,000 fee or a monthly $10 fee.

Approximately 300 would be installed in homes along a circuit where Liberty wants to test the viability of a non-wires alternative to a distribution system infrastructure upgrade. The other 700 batteries would be available to customers who apply to participate in the pilot.

Like GMP, Liberty would use the BTM storage to reduce its customer base’s costs for power market peak demand charges and to provide other system services. Liberty would also use the pilot to introduce a new time-of-use (TOU) rate to support customer participation.

Private sector DER providers and the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission (NHPUC) Staff say the pilot should not be approved. Solar and storage providers Sunrun and ReVision Energy argue Liberty customers would benefit more by working through the private sector. Staff argues the proposal is too costly and not technically workable.

The US Army is behind a new research project at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory that aims to send lithium-ion batteries spinning into a new era of high capacity energy storage. Among other things, that means more wind and solar grid integration, and that’s kind of funny considering that right now DOE is making yet another stab at finding a way to save old coal and nuclear power plants from the dust bin of history. Good luck with that!

Energy storage really is the key to renewable energy grid integration, so let’s take a look at the new Brookhaven research and see what’s up.

High Capacity Energy Storage, With Iron

Earlier this week, CleanTechnica made the case that we are entering the Age of Nickel, but perhaps we spoke too soon. The new Brookhaven lithium-ion battery owes its superior performance thanks to the Age of Iron, or rather iron trifluoride.

Iron trifluoride doesn’t usually pop up when the topic turns to energy storage in general and increasing the capacity of lithium-ion batteries in particular, and for good reason. Here’s the lab with an explainer:

…the compound has not historically worked well in lithium-ion batteries due to three complications with its conversion reaction: poor energy efficiency (hysteresis), a slow reaction rate, and side reactions that can cause poor cycling life.

In other words, the battery is not particularly rechargeable. That sounds like a hopeless case, but on the other hand iron trifluoride is relatively inexpensive and it’s non-toxic, too. Brookhaven chemist and lead researcher Enyuan Hu offers another good reason to pursue the compound for more and better energy storage:

The materials normally used in lithium-ion batteries are based on intercalation chemistry. This type of chemical reaction is very efficient; however, it only transfers a single electron, so the cathode capacity is limited. Some compounds like FeF3 are capable of transferring multiple electrons through a more complex reaction mechanism, called a conversion reaction.