Technology transfer

In the past week, developer RES Group has just got a front-of-meter battery project underway for a utility company in northern Germany, while storage system provider Tesvolt has just signed a deal with another utility in the European country to distribute energy storage behind-the-meter for commercial customers.

The award of RES Deutschland’s 10MW project was announced following a competitive solicitation process from energy supplier Versorgungsbetriebe Bordesholm (VBB) in January. The project in the Schleswig-Holstein municipality of Bordesholm is funded by the EU and supported by the local state. One of the main aims of the system’s deployment is to provide backup to the local grid in the event of power outages.

At the time of the project’s award, RES Group said it will be “demanding” from a technical perspective to provide a closed network infrastructure, as well as the need to add features including synchronous coupling switches and a fibre-optic comms network. The system also joins Germany’s primary control power market. Traditionally and most commonly provided by gas turbines, the grid’s frequency is stabilised by matching generation and consumption on a network within seconds of a signal being received from the grid.

RES announced that a ground-breaking ceremony was held for the Bordesholm battery last Monday, attended by RES Deutschland and VBB executives. Funded as a pilot project by the European Union in supporting continental aims for decarbonisation, VBB hopes the system will help it reach 100% renewables by 2020 – its share is currently already at 75%.

At the beginning of this year, a report from Germany Trade and Invest (GTAI), effectively one of the country’s business development agencies, said around 1,250MW of primary control power was being traded in the coupled markets of Belgium, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and Switzerland out of around 3,000MW in total in Europe. About 144MW of that was being provided in Germany by batteries – mostly lithium-ion – by the end of 2017. Since then, Energy-Storage.news has reported on numerous primary control projects going online in Germany including Enel’s first project in the country and one from Bosch at the site of a coal plant, created in a JV with German utility company EnBW.

The world needs radical new energy technologies to fight climate change. In 2016, Quartz reported that a group of billionaires—including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson—launched Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) to invest at least $1 billion in creating those technologies.

Now, 18 months later, Quartz can reveal the first two startups that BEV will be investing in: Form Energy and Quidnet Energy. Both companies are developing new technologies to store energy, but taking completely different approaches to achieve that goal.

Why it matters

The way to reach the world’s climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That’s why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech.

The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is “patient capital,” to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.

That’s why many of the experts Quartz spoke to have been eager to find out what startups BEV backs. The choices BEV makes will likely shape how others think about energy innovation.

The missing piece

BEV’s first task was to assemble a group of experts, including academics, entrepreneurs, and industry specialists. In 2017, these experts announced a list of energy technologies they believe were both underfunded and extremely promising in emissions reduction: grid-scale energy storage, zero-carbon liquid fuels, micro grids, low-carbon building materials, and geothermal energy.

Quartz saw financial documents indicating BEV’s investment in two energy-storage startups. A BEV spokesperson confirmed the investments and said the company is actively looking to invest in other companies.

Energy storage can overcome the biggest limitation of modern renewable power: Solar panels and wind turbines can only generate energy when the sun is out or the wind is blowing. With better storage technology, that zero-carbon energy could be stored for cloudy or windless days.

A group of solar and energy storage companies, some international in scope, have joined forces to advocate for Puerto Rico as it rebuilds its electric grid.

New Energy, Pura Energía, SRInergy, Windmar, Sunrun, Tabuchi and Sonnen are among the founding members of the Solar and Energy Storage Association of Puerto Rico (SESA-PR).

“I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Our electric grid was broken when I was growing up and is obviously in even worse condition today,” said Alejandro Uriarte, director of SESA-PR and managing partner at New Energy Consultants. “Rebuilding after the hurricanes provides our island with a unique opportunity to upgrade our grid using better, more reliable technology like solar and battery storage that can make Puerto Rico an energy leader in the United States and across the world.”

The industry group is forming as Puerto Rico struggles to modernize its electric system following its total collapse from Hurricane Maria in September. A recent Harvard study estimated that the hurricane resulted in more than 4,000 deaths on the island, many during the weeks and months afterward when healthcare facilities still lacked electricity.

Puerto Rico also labors under power costs that are the second highest in the nation, a burden that SESA-PR attributes to the grid’s instability and reliance on fossil fuels.

Since the storm, several companies, aid groups and federal workers have been trying to quickly install microgrids and nanogrids to ensure electric service, especially for critical services or remote areas where grid repair is difficult.

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When Vaclav Smil writes about energy, the world pays attention. “I wait for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie,” Bill Gates once tweeted.

Smil is a professor at the University of Manitoba, and one of his key arguments is that the world is unlikely to transition away from fossil fuels fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. His observation is based on previous energy transitions, such as from wood to coal and from coal to oil, which moved very slowly.

But Smil says one technology could change the prevailing trends: energy storage. “Give me mass-scale storage and I don’t worry at all. With my wind and [solar] photovoltaics I can take care of everything,” he told Science. “But we are nowhere close to it.”

Better energy storage could overcome the biggest limitation of renewable power: Instead of using it only when the sun is out or the wind is blowing, electricity generated by renewable sources could be held for when it is most needed.

Mass-scale energy storage already exists, but there is only one mature technology: pumped hydro storage. When there is excess power on the grid, this technology is used to pump water to a dam. When the grid needs more power, the stored water is used to run turbines to generate it.

Other technologies feature electrochemical storage in the form of batteries, electro-mechanical storage in the form of compressed air or flywheels, and thermal storage in the form of hot or cold materials in insulated chambers. These comprise a tiny share of overall energy-storage capacity, according to a new report by policy group REN21.

A recent tour of Canada’s biggest battery allowed participants to get up close to an 8.8MW/40MWh lithium-ion array housed in an otherwise unremarkable looking shed in the Wright Industrial Park in Stratford, Ontario.

“This is a historical moment,” says Stefan Goertz, Director of Development of Energy Services for Saturn Power, the EPC contractor. “But in the future, we’re going to see a lot more of this.”

The $20 million Stratford Festival Hydro battery, manufactured (and 50 percent owned) by Powin Energy, was procured under the IESO’s Energy Storage Procurement framework. Saturn has since secured another contract for a 25 MWh/50 MW facility under a separate RFP for regulation services.

The Stratford facility will provide reactive power and voltage support to help with Stratford’s growing demand. But it is ultimately a testing facility, where IESO and other participants can learn how a massive dispatchable battery can help manage Ontario’s grid.

A small desktop setup with three screens is “the brains of the whole operation,” says Goertz. “Through this portal, IESO remotely controls the whole facility.” In fact there are no permanent personnel on site; most days it sits unoccupied, just a big battery beside a transformer station.

In the long run, though, this battery may be the seed of a local micro-grid.

“Can we put in solar there as well and have a true micro-grid operating in the heart of our industrial park?” asks Ysni Semsedini, CEO of the local distributor Festival Hydro. “It would be something very unique to Stratford.”

Indeed, as PV continues to grow and disrupt grids with duck-curve regularity, storage is increasingly seen as a prerequisite to further PV growth.

With the energy storage market set to double six times by 2030, industry experts from global brewer Carlsberg, energy solutions advisor Centrica Business Solutions and conservation charity the National Trust discussed the role of energy storage to optimise onsite renewables generation during edie’s Powering Ahead webinar last week.

During the webinar, Carlsberg’s director of environment and utilities, Adam Pawelas, noted that storage solutions are being explored by the brewer, but only as one part of the energy matrix.

“At the moment, we consider battery storage a supplementary solution. We are at the early stages and will not be focusing solely on batteries,” Pawelas said. “In some markets, power-load management is a feasible option to be an active player either by us or by a third party.

“We have some locations where we would like to grow our solar projects where our base load will not be able to consume the installed capacity of those solar PV systems, and there, we will consider the extension of battery storage.”

Carlsberg, which is one of only three major companies to have set and approved a science-based target to reach a 1.5C ambition in line with the Paris Agreement, currently sources 45% of its electricity onsite, but storage solutions aren’t as advanced as onsite renewables for the firm.

The company has vowed to source 100% renewable electricity and eliminate coal as a source of energy by 2022 and the timing couldn’t be better. The business community is in the midst of a renewables revolution, with a record amount of installations coming online in 2017. Tumbling installation costs, combined with a plethora of technology solutions, have created an optimal environment to invest in onsite generation.

In fact, more than 100 not-for-profit organisations, including the National Trust, RSPB and Oxfam, have collectively saved almost £7m on energy procurement costs, after generating more than 48GWh on renewable energy to power estates in 2017.

The National Trust has installed more than 100 renewables arrays on its estate in the past five years and currently generates 12% of its heat damned onsite.

During the webinar, the Trust’s lead project manager for renewable energy investment, Adrian Fox, noted the charity would look at alternative options such as sleeving and hydro-schemes before installing battery storage facilities at any of its sites.

“Our organisation is probably a little bit more risk-adverse, so we are waiting a little bit longer for [storage] developments in terms of cost and security to be established, but it is something we do and will continue to consider on a case-by-case basis,” Fox added.

Salt River Project has announced contract execution and the start of construction with The AES Corp. for SRP’s first standalone battery-based energy storage project. The 10-MW, four-hour duration energy storage solution, to be supplied by Fluence, will provide peaking capacity that will inject power into the grid during high peak demand periods for SRP customers.

The 10-MW project, to be built in Chandler, was procured as part of an SRP initiative to learn more about grid-scale battery storage so that SRP will be better prepared to implement battery storage technology at an even larger scale in the future.

Related: Energy Storage: Are We There Yet?

“Energy storage is already providing a wealth of services to central Arizona’s grid through other deployments, from supporting the growth of renewables to boosting reliability on transmission and distribution grids,” said Mike Hummel, SRP’s General Manager and Chief Executive Officer. “This latest investment will add needed much-needed efficiency and value for our more than 1 million electric consumers.”

Under the 20-year agreement, AES will provide SRP with the 10-megawatt, 40 megawatt-hour battery-based energy storage system that will be charged by an SRP distribution substation. Fluence’s Advancion energy storage technology platform was selected to meet SRP’s need for an industrial-strength solution with high dependability, reliability and the ability to evolve over long-term operations. The solution can deliver the energy equivalent to power about 2,400 homes in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area for up to four hours and will help SRP assess how best to scale up future energy storage projects across its 2,900-square-mile electric service area.

SRP’s new energy storage project marks the latest move to secure resources that enable the integration of more renewables for its electric service area. This comes at a time when Arizona is evaluating steps to transform its energy infrastructure, including proposals for both the largest energy storage target in the United States – 3 gigawatts by 2030 – and a “clean peak” standard.

“AES is committed to developing solutions which will accelerate a cleaner and greener energy future,” said Ken Zagzebski, President of AES Southland Energy. “This project will allow SRP to continue meeting customer demands while also supporting the ongoing integration of renewable power sources.”

As the largest provider of power to the greater Phoenix area, SRP is drawing on both AES’ experience developing energy storage projects across its platform and Fluence’s experience in designing and deploying energy storage solutions in 16 countries. Together, SRP, AES and Fluence will deliver a long-lasting, reliable energy storage solution for central Arizona’s power grid and SRP’s electric customers.